Change in your pocket

As previously mentioned we are expecting a baby at the end of the summer and in preparation for this we are clearing out our little "junk" room to convert to a nursery. This involves throwing out a lot of stuff we no longer need or find important (hoarding comic books is hardly a priority when compared to housing your first born!) and selling on a lot of the useful stuff to get a little extra cash whilst making room for baby.

Now I was intending to ebay a lot of this buuuuut as I now have a job for a few months I have decided to save time instead we will spend a whole day slogging at a car boot :) I am hoping we can get a few hundred quid for our collection, which will pay for decorating the room. We have plenty of nearly new and working electronics, games and DVDs as well as art supplies, books and a collectors items. I also have 3 bin bags of good clothes which if they don't sell will go to the charity shop and several complete costumes but I want a good price so will hold onto them for longer if necessary.

But my reason for this post is to share the easiest £100 I have ever made! Whilst clearing our our little room we found several old mobiles stashed away. I logged onto a comparison website to see how much money I could get recycling them and was pleasantly surprised! I was offered £70 for the newest phone and £50 for another, the last 3 were old but still working so I got £2-£8 for each of them. Interestingly the companies I have seen advertised on telly were not the best prices offered. I went with weeebuy as they had the best average prices (I didn't want 5 different companies) and sent the newest (a Nokia 5800 express music) to the post offices' SimplyDrop recycling centre.

It was so easy, fill in a few details, register on their site and they give you an estimate for your mobiles. I decided to opted for vouchers with weeebuy as you get 10% more, but cash from the post office. I have only just sent my phones off and haven't received the full price yet, from what I have heard these trade ins can sometimes use misleading quotes to reel you in, so Ill keep you informed :)

My mummy is a Hippy

I often thought I would use cloth nappies instead of modern disposables not just to be cost effective but also for the impact it has on our planet. I'm not the only one, many parents choose cloth nappies because they're worried about the environment.

But it's not clear whether reusable nappies are the most ecological choice so I did a little research. Using cloth nappies means that much less waste is sent to landfill sites. Around 8 million nappies are thrown away every day in the UK and it is thought they could take hundreds of years to decompose. Cloth nappies, on the other hand, need to be washed and dried which uses a lot of energy.

A report for the Environment Agency published in 2008 compared the environmental impact of using disposable and cloth nappies over a period of two-and-a-half years. The Environment Agency worked out that using disposables would create approximately 550kg of carbon emissions.

For cloth nappies, the calculations are more complicated because so much depends on the way you wash and dry them. Assuming that you wash your nappies at 60 degrees C (the minimum temperature recommended by the Department of Health) and dry three out of four loads on a washing line, the rest being tumble dried, you would produce around 570kg of carbon emissions. Using the tumble dryer more often would push your carbon emissions even higher.

However, if you wash your nappies on a fuller load, use an energy efficient washing machine and always hang them out to dry you can reduce this figure considerably. And if you use your nappies on a second child, the carbon emissions associated with using cloth nappies fall even further – by as much as 40 per cent.

So cloth nappies can be more environmentally friendly than disposables but you have to think carefully about how you wash and dry them.

Love fruit

It took three years for Japanese farmer Hiroichi Kimura and his wife to cultivate heart-shaped watermelons. This year, they shipped 20 of the fruits, which "symbolize their passion for farming and their affection for each other." They sell for 15,750 yen (£100) apiece! A store in Fukuoka is selling heart-shaped watermelons:

There are also these super kawaii tangerines which are apparently a super sweet variety of the fruit:
They would be a fabulous valentines gift for those with a big budget but seeing as this story broke in May 2009 Im not sure the availability of this fruit this early in the year, here hoping eh? ^_^

And for those with no budget here are some more home made treats, DH better grab them before they all go
*om nom!* : D