We joined the library!

This may sound completely obvious, but I highly recommend joining your local library!

When I was a kid we all belonged to the local library and borrowed books regularly.  When my now 6.5 year old was a baby, we used to go to Newtown library for Reading Time, but since we moved 5 years ago, we haven't actually visited the library at all.  Considering we're trying to reduce the purchases we make, it's crazy that we haven't been borrowing books from the library!

Day three of Winter school holidays, and one of my daughter's school friends had just been to the library and was showing her the books he borrowed this morning.  We had no firm plans today, so headed up to the library and joined.  We found five books she was excited to read, joined up and headed home.

Turns out there's also a whole online Library that comes with the membership too, where you can read online, or order books to be collected from your local library.  If you're in the 'Inner West Council', which used to be Marrickville Council, here's the link.

Now we have all the books we can possibly want to read, and don't have to waste money buying them all, or waste space storing them all in our house.

Quarterly Clear Out

Some people have a yearly "Spring Clean".  Others, like the people on the TV show Hoarders, never clear out.

Personally I like to clear out at least one area of my house quarterly.  The change of the season always makes me feel like culling and reorganising.

The crisp Autumn air has just arrived and already I've started clearing out the vintage dresser in our kitchen, all the kitchen cupboards, sorted through the kids clothes, and all my maternity clothes.

When I clear out, I always like to ensure that I sell, reuse, recycle, re-home as much as possible to reduce landfill and give items a new life.

There are a lot of great options I utilize to clear out my house, and I thought you might appreciate me listing them in case there are one or two you haven't come across.  I've included the obvious as well.


Places to sell your goods:
eBay
Gumtree
KID size Living Community Garage Sale
Tempe Buy Swap Sell
Tempe Yard Sale Trail - annual event happening again in September this year.

Donate your goods:
Salvation Army
Marrickville Council Collection
Little Wonder - donate your baby clothes and equipment her to help premature babies at RPA
Reverse Garbage - donate excess materials, stage props, paper, fabric etc
The Bower - donate windows, doors, furniture etc.
Local Nursing Home - donate your unwanted magazines and books to your local aged care facility

If you don't know about the Tempe Yard Sale Trail, I'll be publishing a post about it on here soon, or visit the Facebook page for more info.


And of course a lot of these places are also fantastic for buying as well, just try not to fill the space you've just created from clearing out!

I hope I've inspired you to clear out your own home, and at the same time give as many of your items as possible a second life.

Renovation / Life Balance

Sometimes it takes a moment of reflection to see the path you've been heading down recently.  And while breastfeeding, I'm forced to sit and reflect on things a lot!

This week I realised that while we succeed at maintaining a healthy work / life balance (most of the time!), it's trying to establish a more sustainable renovation / life balance that we need to work on.

And last weekend is the perfect example.  For a while we had wanted to replace the guttering at the front of the house to match the new roofing on the porch.  During the week I had a spare moment to ring around for quotes, and when we discovered how affordable it was, we decided to do it.  Mark measured up, I ordered it and Mark picked it up before work on Friday morning.  We had our neighbour booked in to help and we were all ready to go.

Then our TV antenna stopped working.  Another trip to Bunnings, and Mark's time spent researching.  I spent most child-free moments on Saturday painting the front door jam, and filling any gaps between the jam and the architrave.

Mark then spent Sunday morning up the ladder taking down the old antenna and replacing it with a shiny new one. I love shiny new things!

Then we all went to Ava's swimming lesson together as a family, before Mark spent the rest of the afternoon replacing the front guttering.


That was the weekend gone. And while the kids spent patches of time with their Daddy on Saturday and Sunday, had a nice time with me, saw their grandparents and had an afternoon in the park with friends, they didn't get big chunks of quality time with their Daddy and we didn't get much family time.





We all felt the effects of not spending time relaxing together, and have promised ourselves to try not to let the house take over again.

It's so easy to focus on the end result we want to achieve with the house, and loose focus of the time we need to spend together as a family along the way!

Welcome to Life in Tempe

I've been working on the new layout of this blog in secret for a while now, and gave myself the end of March deadline to make sure I didn't keep it secret indefinitely!

I had our web developer put a message on the Innocent Catering website saying that the new blog would be up at the end of March with a slightly different concept.  So here it is.

Originally, we had the Innocent Catering blog and I had my personal blog as two separate entities.  But I found it much easier to update and write posts for my personal blog, while the Innocent Catering blog ended up being a little boring to be honest.

So far, we've re-designed the Innocent Catering page and kept all the previous posts, and I'll gradually re-write the posts from my personal blog over here.

So why "Life in Tempe"?
I've spent the last 2 years being immersed in the building our Tempe based business, adding to our family, renovating our new house and becoming part of the Tempe community.  All activities seemed to be centred around this little close-knit suburb of the Inner West, so "Life in Tempe" seemed a natural fit.

Have a look around, I hope you like what you see so far, and please come back again to read more about what we've been up to.