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 …
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 third-floor balcony in Valencia, my neighbour looked at my two small pots with polite scepticism. By August, I was bringing her tomatoes. 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 …
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 …