It's not a concept I had heard of prior to the email inviting Ikea friends and family members to apply to be part of the live lagom project landed in my inbox, but reading about it I realised that it is something that is already important to me and it's something I try to be mindful of, I just didn't have the word to describe it.
It is important to us that our children grow up knowing that whilst them doing or not doing something seems like a tiny drop in a very large ocean, when added to the changes other people are making to make their own lives more lagom, it can have a huge impact. We recycle everything that can be recycled, we walk instead of taking the car when we're going somewhere nearby, we're mindful of packaging when we're buying something, we don't own a dryer, we make sure not to leave the tap running and we've been working our way around the house replacing all the old light bulbs with energy-efficient LED light bulbs.
We try to do what we can to live in a sustainable way, but I'm aware there are changes we can make that would make us even more so. I also hadn't considered whether there were areas of our lives where the scales weren't tipped in the direction of us taking more than we need, but in the direction of us taking less than we need.
We live in a Victorian terraced house, as with most terraced housing from this era, it's not very well insulated and prone to damp issues, so we need to leave windows open to ventilate the house. Our thermostat is set at 21º, we wear extra layers of clothes to keep us warm, yet we still regularly find ourselves having to turn the heating up a couple of extra degrees to make the house a comfortable temperature. We'd accepted that this was part and parcel of living in a poorly insulated house, but whilst reading through the Ikea Lagom information and looking at the products available in the Ikea hidden gems book, we realised that actually our choice in window blinds and curtains is compounding the issue.
Through sheer ignorance, we've gone for the easy option. What do you need blinds and curtains for? To stop people walking past the house looking in, to cool the house down a little during summer, to make the bedrooms darker on summer mornings in the vague hope that the early-rising child in the house may sleep a little longer without the sun streaming through, It works with the first two, the latter is a lost cause and we'd given no consideration to the fact that around 20% of the heat in your house is lost to poorly dressed windows and doors.
Another area we can improve on is our use of standard batteries. With two small children and lots of toys in the house, clocks, remote controls and all the other things that need a battery and we use a lot of batteries. We've tried rechargeable batteries in the past, but we found that only being able to charge 2-4 batteries at a time wasn't adequate and needing to remove the batteries from the charger once they were charged meant they would disappear before we actually needed them.
A third is our food storage. We do what we can to combat the damp, but it means that things such as rice, pasta, cereal, etc, all need to be used within a couple of weeks of opening them or the damp makes them unusable. Better storage, jars with lids, tubs that seal properly, etc, would not only mean we can keep things for longer, but we'd be able to bulk buy some things to save money.
Our plans for 2017 are:
- To be more comfortable.
- To use the knowledge of the Ikea Lagom leaders and other Ikea staff members to replace the blinds and curtains on all of our windows. In some rooms it will mean simply putting a blind on the currently bare windows, in others rooms we'll look at layering up blinds and curtains.
- To draught-proof the doors at the rear of our house. Both not only allow a lot of cold air in, but also let the heat straight out.
- To not buy a non-rechargeable AA or AAA battery for the duration of the live lagom project. We will purchase and use a Storhögen battery charger and Ladda batteries.
- To reassess our food storage system.
