Friday, August 19, 2011

Day 215- Let it Begin

In honor of the recent events, I changed up the look of the blog. What do you think?

We have big news. BIG news. Approximately 3400 square feet of news. Can you guess? It rhymes with mouse.... Yes, the Hubbs and I bought a house! There will be updates on this house as time progresses, as it's a fine specimen of 1970s styling, but I will try to focus for the remainder of the year on the ability to be plastic free in both the move and the renovations.

Let's talk about packing first. As my mom likes to say, collecting china is a long a winding road to nowhere; so naturally I picked up that trait. If I had my druthers, I would wrap everything in bubble wrap, box it up, and call it a day. Well, we can't really do that now, so it's paper to the rescue. The Hubbs has been riding the DC metro to and from work recently, and on the metro, individuals are inclined to leave their newspapers. Score! Packing material. Really, we've been using the newspaper to fill the gaps in the boxes and purchasing paper from Home Depot to actually wrap the dishes. This way they are clean and not covered in metro cooties. We've also been buying individual boxes instead of a wrapped pack of boxes. But Carrie, you say, why don't you free cycle boxes from a grocery store? Well,  our last move as done by professional movers and they used standard size boxes, it was so much easier to pack the truck. So we now spend the $100 on boxes instead of $100 on gas tooling around to find the boxes. Thus far this is what the guest bedroom looks like:

Ok, I lied. There is another stack in there too. But you get the idea. Soon we'll be moving into the house, but for right now we've been working on it constantly. Let me just say that this:
Beautiful carpet, yes? 

The Hubbs and his glory work:



And this is what is underneath:


There is a special place in hell for those that carpet over hardwood. I say this as someone who's spent 6 hours this week pulling out carpet staples and tack strips by hand. 


Oh, and I've already bled my own blood and gotten a tetanus booster. Thanks carpeters. Thanks. 



Saturday, August 13, 2011

Day 209- Review of LUSH products

So waaaaaay back in February I hit Lush to find some plastic free bath supplies. In all my wisdom, I chose to go to the mall (for those of you who aren't giggling inside) the Friday before Valentine's Day. This was not my brightest shining moment of intelligence, but I digress. I finally just went through the last little bit of the lush shampoo bar. So 6 months later, here is my timely Lush product review:

First the shampoo:   
Yes, I know; it looks like a white hockey puck, it's pretty creepy up close too. It looks like little worms. This is what took me forever to use up. I got the ylang ylang shampoo and it made my hair nice and soft and shiny. My hair was also dyed brunette for about 4 months of that time, and it helped the dye stay really really well. On the downside, I hate it when the bars break in half then you wind up with little slivers of soap. Overall I would give this a 6, it was nice to have, but I wouldn't buy it again. 

This is the Mange Too Massage bar. I really liked this, especially in the wintertime when it was so dry. It's far too heavy for the summer, and might give you a oiled look which isn't particularly my thing. Also, this bar has a very..... strong scent. When you are all covered because it's 8 degrees outside that fine, when it's 110 outside, I found that I smelled a bit like a dirty hippy. Well, a clean hippy, but patchouli isn't my favorite. All that being said, I would buy the lotion again especially in the winter. I give this one a 8.5

This the porridge soap bar, you get to choose how much soap you would like to buy off this huge wheel 'o soap. I used soap a lot in that last sentence. Soap soap soap. Anyway, this soap is fine, it smells pretty good, I didn't break out when using it and it meant I could word play on two breakfasts. The Hubbs got pretty tired of my Lord of the Rings impression "What about second breakfast?". I like the $2.00 soap from Trader Joe's way better and as you may have guessed, it's much less expensive. If I could only get it in a non-plastic wrapper. This one gets a 4. 

So there you are, the long overdue LUSH product review. Has anyone else tried LUSH products? What is your favorite? Why do I keep capitalizing LUSH?