We survived the Sydney flash flood

No I haven’t died and no I haven’t lost my green journey passion but it has been awhile since I have shared a personal GreenerMe post.  Thank you to my faithful readers who emailed me to check if I was ok.

In fact I was ok, just needing to focus in getting through a very interesting time.

Our home was one of the inner Sydney houses that had the flash flood come through a number of weeks ago.  We needed to pack up everything and vacate until repairs had been carried out.  Two weeks ago we were allowed back and hence we had to pack up again and move back everything we owned.

Thought I would share with you, Mother Nature’s welcome home gifts.

Though this has been a very stressful time, I decided to use the situation to have a huge clean out of unused stuff that my family and I have accumulated.

Check out our hallway of all the boxes full of stuff that we are going to give away.  We will use FreeCycle again to do this.  We will advertise a FREE garage sale i.e. everything will be free.

It is good to be home again.

Office is Ready for Wedding Season

It is spring again!  Spring can mean different things to different people and to me it is always the start of the busiest time of the year in my business calender.  This is because the wedding season has started and just around the corner is Christmas.

To prepare for this Spring, regular readers might recall my huge office clean out.  I felt it was time to do a massive clean up of everything we simply didn’t need any more and hence was ‘hogging’ space.  Being a passionate Ebay hater, I again turned to Freecycle.org to give everything away instead of using up my valuable energy and time trying to sell it (i.e. Ebay).

The really cool thing about Freecycle is as the giver, you can select who gets your stuff.  I had a young photography student claim most of the photography equipment.  An Aborigine artist claimed many of my large studio picture frames.  The clean up of my books went to a single dad with two teenage children. 

All in all I gave away items that I could of got perhaps $800 – $1500 on Ebay.  However by giving away on Freecycle I got so much more!  Also I noticed that my personal ‘energy bank’ was not empty after the exercise like it often was from participating in Ebay auctions.  Not only did I feel good for having given everything away but also I have noticed the energy in the office has been more relaxed and positive.

Now that everything was gone I was inspired to rearrange the office (as I had not wasted my time or energy on Ebay).  The really cool thing about this story is after finishing moving the office furiture around we noticed that we were now able to open the windows and let more nature light into the front room office.  So now on a bright day, we no longer even need to turn the down lights on – now we simply open the blinds and let the sunshine in.

Looking at our wireless energy meter we had installed thanks to Sydney City Council we discovered that we are saving approx 1.11 Kwh each day by not turning on our office down lights (this is an estimation as on some days we still need to turn lights on i.e. overcast days and when we need brighter light for retouching photographic work etc).

Ironically my personal energy was not the only energy saved in giving away everything.

Food for thought.

 

Down lights in my office, turned off as the window lets in sunlight now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mini my dog sitting on me while I try to take the photograph of the office down lights.