Archive for the ‘Mum's Home Office’ Category
« Older Entries |Mum’s Home Office: Feeling the Chill?
Monday, February 1st, 2010
I’ve just been sent some interesting ideas on how to cut the chill factor in your home or office. I’ve just been and bought something similar to the Ecoflap (£19.99) which, stop winds whistling through your letter box. I have yet to install mine, so it’s not helping much yet – but at least I’m thinking about it.
Chimney pillow
What I need next is a Chimney Pillow (£18.99) a hardwearing and tear resistant inflatable bag that you place up the chimney to stop cold draughts. We opened up our chimney which the previous occupiers had behind their cooker, but I suspect alot of our heat is disappearing up the gap that’s there until we find a woodburing stove.
The final idea is a Radiator Booster (£19.99)– as seen on Dragons Den – which sits on top of radiators, and uses a small fan to capture the heat that comes out the back of your radiator, circulating it better into your room. It heats the room faster, retrieves lost energy, and reduce your heating bills. It could save an average household between £70 and £140 per year.
Have you got any heat saving tips to help mums working from home stay warm?
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Mum’s Home Office: Staying on Top of the Recycling
Monday, December 28th, 2009
I have a friend who says she seems to spend far too much of her life in the kitchen sorting out the recycling. Admittedly she has five children but I think we can all find that piles of paper and bags of bottles can begin to take over. I’ve recently tried out a handy storage bin to make things easier. (more…)
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Mum’s Home Eco-Office:10 More Ways to Green Your Home Office
Monday, December 14th, 2009
I subscribe to Freelance Folder which has regular articles and tips for anyone working for themselves. I particularly liked this recent post on 10 Ways to Green Your Home Office:
If you’re a freelancer who works at home full time or most of the time, give yourself a pat on the back. You’re doing the planet a great service. By working at home you’re reducing the use of fuels and limiting the amount of pollution generated by modern means of transportation. (more…)
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Mum’s Home Office: Getting There
Monday, November 16th, 2009
How do you transport the kids to and from all their activities? Until we moved to Sussex I stuck firmly to walking and public transport: where we lived in London a car was more of a liability than an asset. In a complete turnaround, I have driven four different cars in the last year and now need to use a car daily.
Because of this, I was glad to trial the new Skoda Yeti. They’ve been targetting bloggers to write about the launch of the new car and wanted to get some views from mums.
The Yeti worked well as a family car. It coped with J’s 4th birthday party when we had to fit all the food in the car on the way to the hall AND all the gifts on the way back. It was spacious enough for car seats in most combinations and had a handy and highly visible button to turn the front passenger airbag off so you could fit a read facing car seat in the front. I found it very easy to get K in and out because the car is high off the ground and has pplenty of head space.
Although high, the Yeti is not over-wide. I couldn’t persuade D to see if we could get 3 car seats across the back as she really only wanted to ride oin the front on the way home from school. It looked as if it would be possible if not comfortable. And, surprisingly, the boot only just fitted the buggies – I tried it with a MacLaren Volo as well as the big Phil and Teds. There seems to be more boot space in our Renault Grand Scenic, which dh usually drives. My Renault Megane boot is of a similar width, but of course is not as high. Earlier this year I also used a Matiz for a couple of weeks: now that has a tiny boot.
The version I was trialling had all the gadgets including a built in sat-nav which was nice. To be honest, it would have taken longer than the week’s trial for any busy mum to find all the features and work out how to use them. I loved driving it: it is smoother and more responsive than either of our usual cars. It costs around £13-22k and I’d certainly consider it as a main family car for driving in town and in the countryside.
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Mum’s Home Office: Cleaning Up
Monday, November 9th, 2009
Do you spend much time wiping up? I always seem to be wiping up the kitchen and the children. I try to find more eco-friendly ways to do this so I’m not always throwing away kitchen paper. I’ve been sent some new eco designer cleaning cloths from www.jangneus-design.com to try out. The cloths claim to combine design with environmental responsibility. They are made of cellulose (a by-product from paper making) and recycled cotton. They are 100% biodegradable and are printed with eco-friendly ink, which all seems good and green.
Design-wise, the three cloths I was sent were lovely. There are much more attractive than what you normally get from the supermarket. The cloths come in six different colours – blue, green, purple, black, yellow and red – and ten different designs: a heart; flowers; leaves; flower doodle; stars, stripes, spots, fish and a bird. You can choose your own combination of designs: prices range from £1.75 – £2.50 depending on the number of cloths ordered: 1-3 cloths – £2.50 each 4-9 cloths – £2.00 each 10 cloths or over – £1.75 each.
I’ve been using the cloths to clean K, 8m. He’s at a messy stage and the nice things about the different designs is that it is easy to see which cloths you’ve used for wiping the baby and which for cleaning the kitchen. The press release suggests that you, “colour code your cleaning routines … for example blue for bathroom, red for kitchen, green for general cleaning and black for the cat”. I’m not that organised but the cloths work well whether I’m wiping K, or his high chair. I’ve put the cloths through the washing machine several times and they seem to be holding up as well as regular j-cloths. Because of their all natural composition, when they’ve finally worn out, you can just put them on your compost heap or in your compost bin.
If you like the sound of them you can order them from www.jangneus-design.com
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Mum’s Home Office: MyTime Relaxation Review
Monday, October 26th, 2009
If half term is getting to you already, if it is raining with no signs of stopping and your lovely children are bouncing off the walls, you may be thinking of ways to relax. With this in mind, mum to one Lisa has been checking out MyTime Relaxation Volume 1. She writes:
The 30 minutes of the My Time relaxation CD start straight off with music. The music is rather odd; retro Dr Who meets Steve Hillage in a student party where you have had a dodgy flapjack and too much cheap wine. All a bit spinny, new age and somewhat disorientating. It has the same lack of respect for time signatures and volume that my 6 year old does when he plays the piano, but strangely it works well.
The actual guided relaxation is just lovely, it takes you to a secret garden (more…)
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How ‘Green’ is Your Office?
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
It is Energy Saving Week right now, so check out this article from Sadie Knight of Glassraven Web Design about easy ways to make your office more environmentally friendly.
Many of us have already adopted a greener lifestyle at home, but we can easily extend this by going green at work too.
Whether your business is home based, in your own premesis or part of a corporate complex there are many ways you can reduce your business’ impact on the environment. Here we look at 4 areas that can be tackled by any business.
Use the off switch
The printer doesn’t need to be on all day if you only use it once or twice. (more…)
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Mum’s Home Office: More Ways to Destress
Monday, October 19th, 2009
Stress is one of the big problems of being a working mum. I’ve asked Lisa of Lactivist to review a few destressing products over the next weeks and give us her verdict. Lisa says, “Life is particularly stressful for me at the moment, I’m a single mum and I run my business from home, my son has been out of school a lot, and it is pretty foul in the middle of the city where we live right now, lots of shouting neighbours and fights in the street. I really need to destress!”
This week, Lisa is looking at Ultimate Unwind hypnotherapy CD from Space To Be. She writes,
“It is very difficult to review something that sends you to sleep every time you listen to it.
“Georgia Foster the hypnotherapist has a slightly antipodean lilt to her voice, so I immediately imagine Germaine Greer telling me to be somewhere warm and safe so I can drift away. Georgia also has a bit of a robot tinge to her accent so by the time she is telling me consult my doctor if I suffer from epilepsy, I have a bizarre picture of a Borg Queen/Feminist hybrid in my mind. It is about then that the birds start tweeting, and piano music starts. I am incredibly intolerant of background music so the fact that I actually do find this relaxing is a big deal. So, there I am closing my eyes, listing to an Ozzie robot, who I suspect has wings by now and is floating around the forest and I am wondering how far the beach is, I think I can hear waves and all is well.
“I like this CD, it does not expect you to do anything, it does not ask you to concentrate on anything in particular but just reassures you that because you have chosen this time to relax, that is all that is important.
“Something happens with a leaf floating to the ground and then that is pretty much all I can remember until I either wake up, or drift off to sleep. That is another good thing about this CD, it does not wake you up sharply ready to seize the day in a horribly motivated fashion, it gives you the choice, wake up gently, or drift off to sleep and ignore the count up to wakefulness.”
Lisa’s verdict: “I’ve been using Ultimate Unwind most nights to help me get to sleep and after a week I do feel a bit calmer and my sleep is defiantly deeper and contented. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who needs a bit of space and ‘me time’ in their lives.”
Five out of Five
You can hear a sample of Ultimate Unwind on the Space To Be website. www.spacetobe.co.uk £13.99 + £1.50 P&P
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Mum’s Home Office: Well, You Have to Clean Sometimes
Monday, October 12th, 2009
This is the second post about cleaning in less than a week. A worrying trend as I’m not the queen of clean and prefer to train the family to look after themselves. However, sometimes a girl just has to clean and the PR people promoting Ecover
I received through the post a big green trug with a cleaning products trial inside. For each of Ecover’s new, green cleaning products there was a chemical counterpart. Together with a pair of washing up gloves and a eco cleaning cloth I was all set up for a Which?-style user trial.
I started off with the gentle option, the Multi Surface Cleaner, where Ecover’s product was matched against Flash One for All. With the sink nice and dirty I covered half at a time and gave each side a spray. Sadly I saw little difference between the performace of the two products … or perhaps that was the point of the trial. Anyway, neither seemed to sweep away grease and grime like in the adverts so I took things up a notch. Ecover ecological Power Cleaner went up against Cillit Bang. What did I find….?
Well, J, 3, can say ‘Bang and the dirt is gone’ at the sight of a Cillit Bang bottle, so I must have the TV on too much. And again, it doesn’t seem to matter which product you spray on my sink. The best cleaning results seem to come from old fashioned and eco-friendly elbow grease.
If you’ve been holding back from using eco-friendly products, from my (moderately independent and slightly scientific) trial they seem to do just as well as their chemical counterparts.
This is supposed to be the Mum’s Home Office Monday review… I suspect all this cleaning is just a distraction and will go back to posting on forums instead now.
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Mum’s Home Office: The Search for the Ideal Baby Seat
Monday, October 5th, 2009
If you’ve been reading this blog over the last few months you will know that I have reviewed several places to put your baby in my search for the perfect place to put your baby while you work. You’ve read about baby wearing, the Cushi Tush and the Content and Calm Cot Canopy. Now, it is the turn of the Baby Bjorn babysitter.
Not, sadly, a nanny in a box, this is a comfortably bouncy chair. K had a bouncy chair which we bought for him for £14.99 a few weeks after birth. It worked fine, but only suited babies up to 20lb. Kit had passed 22lb at 6 months so we needed a new option. The BabyBjorn Babysitter Balance Bouncer (Black/Silver)
As usual, the family have been putting it through its paces. K has taken to leaning right forward and grabbing the safety labels in from of his feet. We’re glad to say that it seems impossible for him to tip himself out! J, 3, is not a big child fortunately as he loves the seat to relax and bounce in at the end of the day.
So, it is a great chair, but is it really worth £99? Possibly not … but if you have the money to spend it is certainly an investment that will give you more use than a cheaper baby chair. It is beautifully bouncy and keeps K very happy whether I’m typing or hanging out the washing. The chair packs flat too so it more portable than some bouncy chairs.
The BabyBjorn Babysitter Balance Bouncer costs from £79-99 and is available from Amazon and baby stores.
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Mum’s Home Office: Can You Get Your Toddler to Stay Asleep?
Monday, September 28th, 2009
One of the biggest barriers to a busy working day is lack of sleep. At the moment I’m struggling with a 3 year old who won’t go to sleep at night until I’m ready to drop and a 6month old who thinks 5am is morning. So, I was pleased to try out the Gro Clock.
However I did hesitate before writing this review, because I just don’t think I can get it to work properly, and I can’t see what I’ve done wrong. Nevertheless, it is doing a great job with the three year old.
The way it works is that you programe sleep and wake times, press a little button at bedtime and the sun turns into a moon. The moon stays there until it is time for your child to get up as a reminder that, if they wake, they need to go back to sleep or at least stay quietly in their room! I can get it to turn from sun to moon at night, but somewhere I must have set it incorrectly as it continues to display ‘moon’ well into the next day. i suspect I’m just too sleep deprived to get it! However J is sleeping well in the mornings and if only I could get K, 6m, to understand what the moon means we’d be fine!
The Gro Clock also has a setting for day time naps. It costs £35-40, is attractively designed and comes with a bed time story book too.
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Mum’s Home Office: Save on Stationery
Monday, September 21st, 2009
Do you shop around for stationery? I’m often to be found browsing the net
for offers. The internet makes it so much easier to find good deals, and a good prices make your business more profitable, but it is also time consuming hunting down cost effective ways to stock up on everything from envelopes to office furniture.
Anyway, I think I have found a way to cut the stress AND cut down my time shopping around. Euroffice is the largest online supplier in the UK, and they have a price promise where they monitor other stationery prices so you don’t have to. What’s more, new customers get 20% off, plus they have a Greener Office section.
So, next time you need to restock with home office supplies give them a go. Let me know if you get good deals on your purchases. After a busy September sending out copies of The Mumpreneur Guide I’m off to order some more printing paper, ink cartridges, padded envelopes … I may be some time.
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