The Travel Jar

 Welcome to week 8 of the 24/24 Challenge ! Acquisitions I acquired some cloth drawstring bags from my local Buy Nothing Group in Kansas City South that I will use for bulk shopping, as we slowly become more and more Zero-Waste with our groceries (or, more realistically, Less Waste, for now... It is nigh impossible to find totally plastic-free food. Even the glass jar of peanut butter with the metal lid that I purchased has a plastic ring around the jar opening... Ug.) I popped into Soap Refill Station to refill an empty honey bottle with conditioner, plus grab a new kitchen scrub brush, a sisal soap saver (say that 5 times fast) and a Japanese konjac face sponge (the black item). I learned that sisal is derived from the agave plant, and the konjac sponge is from a porous root vegetable native to Asia. The sisal and konjac items are 100% compostable! So is the scrub brush, minus the metal. I simply added our last wooden scrub brush to our fire pit earlier this week since it's clean...

 Hello from week 7 of the 24/24 Challenge ! I only had a handful acquisitions this week... Items Acquired One of our organizing clients is moving to Florida, so we did a massive purge in her garage earlier this week. She gifted me with some of her cast-offs, including a hummingbird feeder, a peanut feeder (holds peanuts-in-the-shell) for squirrels, 2 bottles of partially used eco-friendly dishwasher gel and some lavender essential oil. All secondhand, weee! I love my clients. Yesterday at Scraps KC , our local creative re-use center, while dropping off client donations, I bought my first (secondhand) china pen for $1- I'm going to see if it's a good item to write on the bottom of jars while I do my Zero-Waste/bulk grocery shopping! I was gifted flowers, cards and Journal 29: Oblivion (third book in a series of EXCELLENT puzzles... Here's the first one . You're welcome.) for Valentines Day from my loves! (Flowers will be composted, card can be recycled but I keep cards, ...

 This was a fun week for the 24/24 Challenge ! I created an instagram account for this- @2424challenge. Follow along! Acquisitions Deck screws! This spring we are rebuilding our back deck, and while I let myself off the hook when I created this challenge when it comes to the deck project, I still wanted to make an effort to get a few supplies secondhand. Success! I found 25 lbs of donated (but never opened!) deck screws at our local ReStore (where Habitat for Humanity sells donated home improvement items). Total cost with tax = $75. New at Home Depot, these would have cost $170. Achievement unlocked, lesson learned the happy way : When planning a house project, shop weeks/months beforehand at ReStore to get better deals on as much of the hardware as possible. Derrick was skeptical but now he's appreciative, and I think he will be glad to have me scour ReStore again for other items we need for the deck, or other future home improvements. 2 days ago I was reviewing our utility bills...

 I made it to February! All of January, I only bought 1.5 new items that count toward my 24/24 Eco-Challenge, which is detailed here . Items I acquired this week: Secondhand lightbulbs from my local BNG (the Buy Nothing Group). One of the bulbs in our living room track lighting fixture went out, so I snapped a photo of it and asked my group- turns out somebody who lives 13 minutes from us had 5 of the exact type we needed! He was thrilled to be rid of them, and gave us all five: 4 of them used (but still working), 1 still in the package. Derrick installed one of the used ones and we put the rest into our Lightbulb bin in the basement. These should last us many years! Best of all, I recycled the old/dead bulb in our  TerraCycle box . Weird little lightbulb A chapstick from the dentist when I went to get my Invisalign. Normally this would count toward the 24, however I needed it for medical reasons- my lips were about to tear and bleed from the expanders. They gave me a compleme...