Hi all – long time! I have been working full time over the past two months to pay for some home renovations which has meant time has been in short supply. We are trying to do a lot of the manual labour ourselves so every waking moment has involved either working or pulling up slate, painting windows and thinking about kitchen plans – hardly a simple life!

But for me the opportunity is in really thinking about each living space and how we can enjoy it as a family. Our kitchen renovations will enable more food preparation space, to work with the increased volume that will come through the veggie patch that we have expanded. It will mean better organisation of kitchen items and another opportunity to purge as we pack up the old kitchen before it gets knocked down. It will mean more outside family dinners in summer as we open up our living space onto the entertaining area outside. Summer this year will be filled with beautiful family times.

In the meantime, we will be enjoying the fun of doing hard manual labour together and planning living spaces to suit our lifestyle.

I just thought I would update you on my empties that I posted about six months ago. I had this horrible obsession of responding to every gift with purchase opportunity that arrived through David Jones in my letter box and I had a horrendous amount of small cosmetics, umpteen lipsticks and many makeup items that was never going to use.

So I sorted them into things that I would use, things that I would give my teenage daughters and things to recycle/discard.

The things that remained, I committed to using. Slowly but surely over the last six or so months I have used them. I have barely anything left, except for about ten lipsticks which I will continue to work my way through. And I have committed to replacing my cosmetics and skin care products with only things ethically produced or largely natural – only when the run out.

Above is the evidence of the last six months. I’d recommend it. You don’t need to buy doubles and triples of things, or items that come with a gift. Most of the stuff you don’t wind up using and if you are like me, you forget you even purchased them in the first place!