Our "green" kitchen

This was one of our family's little "projects" to work on last year after we decided that we would not do the Project 365 (take a picture a day) for a second year in a row.  Instead we took a "green" approach to our family project.

Well I have a new project for our little humble abode..... we (I) are attempting to have a paperless kitchen.  What does that mean... no more paper towels, paper plates or paper napkins.  Our first step has been pretty easy, we ditched the paper napkins and just started using the cloth ones.  The kids have gotten a kick out of having a napkin ring with their name on it.

Thanks to Goodwill and my serger we have about 6 days worth of cloth napkins, and at the rate we do laundry around here, I don't see us running out anytime soon.  Next up in our paperless process--- paper plates!  I do however refuse to give up the Kleenex, handkerchiefs just gross me out!  Stay tuned for more of the paperless saga!

And I am happy to report that a year later we are still paper free in our kitchen!  We now have LOTS of cloth napkins, lots as in I think I could change out the napkins everyday for 14 days!  The kids no longer take paper napkins in their lunch boxes, they take a cloth one!  As far as paper plates, we don't have any at our house! Thanks to my gramma donating a whole bunch of white medium sized plastic plates we don't even miss the paper ones! And thanks to the donation of a microwave food cover from my mom we now have a very clean microwave without the use of paper!

Now I will say giving up the bleach wipes that I like to wipe off the counters with at the end of the evening in the kitchen and each morning in the bathroom, those have been a little harder to change over. In the kitchen, since it's usually just me that uses the bleach, I have my squirt bottle with bleach and water and my white cloth that I use and I just spray and wipe.  In the kids bathroom, well with a 4 yr old boy who likes to torment his sisters I've decided that they can still keep the bleach wipes :).  When he gets a little older then we'll work on the spray bottle concept!

All in all, everyone has enjoyed making the paperless change and it really went quite smoothly!

What do you do to keep a "green" kitchen? 

Do you have any little family "projects" lined up for this year? I'd love to hear about them!

Happy New Year!

Hope your 2011 is amazing!

Around here we're starting Project Life.  What's that.... we're going to take a picture a day in 2011 and then of course scrapbook it!  So the goal is that by this time next year we'll have 365 pictures of our year.      We did this in 2009 and turned out really cool! So here's to another round in 2011!

P.S - I'm so happy the previous owners left these frogs!  Yeah it's a little corny, okay it's a lot corny, but the kids get a kick out of changing out their tags each month.  I'm thinking the frogs will make their way into PL (project life) at least once a month!