I killed three succulents in a row. Three. Succulents, widely described as the houseplant you cannot kill. After the third one, I stopped blaming myself and started looking at the actual problem: I was watering inconsistently, either too much or too little, with no reliable way to know which. Self-watering pots solved this so completely …
When I moved into my current apartment, the previous tenant had left a desk behind. It was a nice desk, solid wood, good size, attractive in the room. I used it for six months before a physiotherapist looked at my setup and immediately identified the desk as too high for my height. Six months of …
The first time I properly organised my desk, I spent less than 40 euros. I’d been working from a cluttered surface for months, telling myself I’d sort it properly ‘when things calmed down.’ Things didn’t calm down, they never do. So I spent a Saturday afternoon and a modest amount of money, and came back …
The first time I read the ingredients list on a commercial air freshener, I put it back on the shelf and didn’t buy another one. The list was long, largely unpronounceable, and included several compounds I’d seen flagged in indoor air quality research. In a small apartment where you’re breathing recirculated air, what you spray …
When I repainted my home office last spring, I chose a paint specifically for its low VOC content, and honestly, it was as much about comfort as principle. Standard paint fumes in a small, poorly ventilated room are unpleasant at best and genuinely harmful at worst. The low-VOC option dried with almost no smell, the …
Working from home in a shared apartment is one of those situations that sounds straightforward until you try it. My flatmate worked variable shifts, which meant some mornings I had the place to myself and other mornings I was trying to take a client call while someone made breakfast loudly three metres away. It took …
In a studio apartment, every surface does multiple jobs. The desk is also the dining table. The sofa is also the reading chair. The bedroom is also the living room. Creating a plant corner in this context isn’t just about adding greenery, it’s about carving out one small part of the room that feels intentional, …
There’s a specific kind of low-level stress that comes from sitting down to work at a cluttered desk. It’s not dramatic, you don’t notice it in the way you’d notice a headache. But it’s there, quietly competing for attention, making everything feel slightly harder than it needs to be. I discovered this by accident when …
My first apartment had one north-facing window in the main room. I placed a fiddle leaf fig there because it looked beautiful in the shop and the label said ‘bright indirect light.’ Within six weeks it had dropped every leaf it owned and stood bare and accusatory in the corner. I tried again with a …
I calculated once how many rolls of paper towel I used in a year. The number was embarrassing. And that was just the paper towels, not the cling film, not the zip-lock bags, not the disposable sponges that I replaced every few weeks. Switching to reusable alternatives took about three months to complete and about …