For years I threw away food scraps with low-grade guilt and no alternative. Composting felt like something that required a garden, ideally a large one, and possibly a certain kind of personality that enjoyed turning piles of organic matter in the rain. Then I discovered that composting in a small apartment is not only possible …
The first cutting I propagated in water was a pothos stem I snipped off impulsively while repotting. I put it in a glass of water on the kitchen windowsill, forgot about it for two weeks, and came back to find a tangle of white roots growing from the node. That was three years ago. I …
The floor in my current rental apartment is a laminate that was fashionable approximately fifteen years ago and has aged poorly. I cannot replace it. My lease is clear on the subject of structural changes, and flooring absolutely qualifies. What I discovered over two years of living with it is that you can transform the …
The kitchen is the room I had the hardest time making sustainable. The bathroom was straightforward, the bedroom manageable, but the kitchen felt like a tangle of plastics, synthetic sponges, disposable wraps, and products with ingredient lists I could not begin to parse. The shift happened gradually, one replacement at a time, until I looked …
The wrist pain started gradually, the way these things always do. A slight ache at the end of long typing sessions, which I attributed to stress, then to my chair, then to everything except the keyboard and mouse I was using eight hours a day. By the time I acknowledged the obvious, I had been …
I bought a sit-stand desk converter with the full intention of standing for half my working day. For the first week, I stood for perhaps twenty minutes before my back ached and my feet complained and I lowered the desk back down with a sense of defeat. The converter sat at its lowest setting for …
My bedroom has one window that faces a narrow internal courtyard. Opening it in summer means street noise and warm air from the building below. Keeping it closed means waking up with that particular stuffiness that comes from sleeping in a room that hasn’t breathed properly overnight. I started adding plants not primarily for aesthetics …
The summer I decided to grow tomatoes on my small sunny balcony, a neighbour looked at my two small pots with polite scepticism. By August, I was sharing tomatoes with her. Not many, but real ones, warm from the sun, with that particular depth of flavour that supermarket tomatoes have spent decades trying to approximate. …
I spent a long time buying home decor the wrong way, cheap, fast, disposable, replaced when it looked dated. The problem wasn’t just the environmental impact, though that mattered. It was that nothing I bought felt permanent enough to care about. Objects I’d replace in a year didn’t deserve the attention I gave them when …
The reading nook in my current apartment occupies a space that was previously used for nothing at all, a corner between a bookcase and the window, wide enough for a chair and not much else. It took one secondhand armchair, a floor lamp from a charity shop, and a weekend afternoon to create the spot …