Modern household management

I’ve been toying lately with the concept of modern household management. I like the idea of Mrs Beetons book covering all necessary areas of life with instruction on how to do things.

The reason for my interest in this topic is that I have spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out just what I want from life. The things I enjoy are for a large part out of fashion. Sure, some of these things are very much in vogue though. Tv shows on everything DIY and the recent explosion on the love of vintage and second hand. Yet gardening and true home design seem less important, the realm of the eccentric and fuddyduddys. People talk about going green or growing their own, but if truth be told I think I have only one friend who shows any interest in growing anything but chilli plants. I walk around my local area and I see maybe one in twenty gardens that look like they’ve been tended in the last year. The people I know who have managed to move away from their parents often show little flair with the interiors of their houses. I don’t know a soul who actually has any true interest in having livestock of any sort.

I think there are certainly many explanations for this:

• People are too busy
• Work is by far the highest priority
• People are too poor to spend time and money on their immediate environment
• Education about these issues is awful
• The decline of the housewife & the need for two incomes
• Lack of space, inability to get on the housing market, next to no outside area in many homes

All of these problems and many more seem to remove the desire and knowledge of how to start up, improve and run a household.

Maybe rather than the title of modern household management, which does sound like I am extolling the virtues of doing the washing up after every meal, I should call this concept something like the modern good life.

For some reason I can clean, I can cook, I can sew, I can knit. I can design outfits and draft patterns, I can design spaces both inside and out. I can dig, plant, sow, prune, use a chainsaw and an axe. I can actually use a band-saw, circular-saw, soldering iron and pillar drill too. I can mend bikes, and help cut down trees. I can cut glass, I can decorate rooms and redesign furniture. I can do accounts and budget. I can build dry stone walls, and build amazing bonfires. I can make jewellery and do make-up very well. I'm about to brew my own beer and make my own wine. I've helped mix and lay concrete. I can skim walls with plaster and point stonework (admittedly only once on those last two.) There are probably a lot more random things I can do too.

For the most part these skills are all but pointless in most jobs that you can apply to with out taking the skills to the next level and having a degree in the use of them. And, I want to do all of these things day in day out. Hence thinking so much about the concept of modern house hold management. Is there a place in modern life for taking order of your domestic spaces, running your household, without becoming a housewife?

I believe there must be, I also believe that other people should be able to aspire to "the good life" with out giving up modern existence and moving to your own farm in the country.

So, I want to design and decorate my home so that it functions well and looks stunning. I want to design my garden so that it is beautiful, relaxing, attractive to wildlife and also productive in terms of food. I want to rear some livestock, chickens and pygmy goats (no reason other than they're cute) for instance. I want to cook great fresh and healthy food sourced locally. I want to be as 'green' as reasonable, and I want to look and feel good wearing nice clothes and make-up while I do it all. I don't want to spend a fortune, I don't want to move house, but I do want to fundamentally change the way my life is run.

Furthermore, I want to help open the eyes of other people to the possibility of doing such things, I want to encourage people to care about their surroundings and the way they run their lives. I would love to be able to earn a living helping people to love their lives.

I have an end goal  for my self I am working towards in order to achieve this way of life. Unfortunately this goal requires a certain amount (read scarily hugely massive amount) of cash to get going. 

How do I get started working towards my goal, and towards interesting other people in this lifestyle, in the short to medium term?

The first solution I have come up with is to use this blog more fully. Initially I want to write about and give hints and tips on having your own piece of the good life, without giving up every aspect of modern living. After all I live in a city, and I have restricted time, space and funds like most people. I believe this does not have to be a limiting factor.

This is where the idea of Mrs Beeton comes back in. Her book isn't just a guide to cooking (although that is the greater part of it), it is a guide to running your home. From bringing up children to firing servants. Can I provide the same concept but in an up-to-date setting? 

I think I can. In my list of reasons that people don't even think about the way they run their lives, I mentioned education. When I was newly in secondary school fifteen or so years ago, we were not taught the basic running of a house like women were in my mothers time in the sixties. 'Home Economics' no longer existed. I was taught a very limited amount of cooking, I certainly wasn't  taught how to clean a house properly. I was taught how to use a sewing machine though. I made a cushion. It was made incorrectly, you couldn't remove the pad. It seems odd to me that that was pretty much the limit of the sewing skills we were taught. In design technology we made a basic automata. We used, even at the time, embarrassingly out of date computer design programs in IT. 

Why weren't we taught how to make basic stews and bread? I admit I learnt to make white sauce - a useful piece of knowledge, but other than that beans on toast and swiss-roll won't really help many people develop their cooking skills. Why weren't we taught to put in zips, sew on buttons and hem trousers. These are the basic skills that everyone will need at some point. Why did we do no design in design technology? Why didn't we get shown computer design in a useful way? We should have used the computer to design our automata! Gardening, growing fruit & veg and maintaining your house were not brought up once that I remember. Money management was also never mentioned, an enormous and unforgivable failure by school, college and university. 

We were taught a lot of academic skills but next to nothing that is applicable in normal day to day life. I think that I can provide an education in all the ways that schools fail. I'm not criticising schools as much as I sound here, people of all ages should absolutely be taught to aim high. 'Become a scientist!' - yes! Do! But schools forgot that in the mean time, living in a bedsit in a dodgy end of the city is a high possibility, and that you will need to cook for yourself on a budget, clean your surroundings, and budget your own finances as a bare minimum. I think that schools, colleges and universities do a great job of career preparation, but not of life preparation.

Of course there is a certain amount of coverage for all these topics I am talking of, as I mentioned earlier DIY and vintage are very fashionable. Kirstie's handmade home for instance, there are enough baking programmes out there to never need a cook book again, sort your life out guides have had an airing, as has interior design and gardening. But they are always treated as separate entities. I feel that gardening naturally leads on to growing food, which leads to cooking, which leads to spending time in the house, which leads to home interiors, and I want to look great while I do all that.  Everything is intertwined! How can you consider doing one of these things without doing something involved in another?

Would you be interested in learning more of modern day Home Economics or how to create your own Good Life? Is this something communities want for themselves or for their kids? Can it be made sufficiently interesting?!

Is this something viable that I should start working towards and incorporating in to my own business? Chloe and the Chimera was never supposed to just be a shop. It was always meant to embrace an entire concept. Interior design and property development have always been on the list from the outset of ways to evolve the business. But can I also develop it in to a whole life eduction and improvement occupation?

All images and content is © Chloe Cooter 2013 unless image links to another website. All images that are not © Chloe Cooter will be linked to the source (if possible) and credited in that way.

Slate and antique silver.

My pincredible from these last two weeks was really inspiring to me, and as I mentioned at the end, I felt that the colour scheme would be really great for my bedroom. 

My boyfriend and I share this space, although due to a recent re-shuffle only I use the room to store clothes. Not enough storage (or badly designed) and too many clothes. We both tend to leave a lot of mess around, my mess is mostly worn clothes that aren't dirty enough to wash yet, and my boyfriends mess is similar, but with more random rubbish thrown in. I hate it but there we are.

I have a nifty solution to the clothes part of the problem. I came up with this as an idea, but was going to make my own bag, and use something like a wire coat hanger bent in to shape. This is a much quicker way, probably looks neater too.

So on to the colour scheme.

(images are either mine or sourced from pinterest)

Deep slatey green-blue-grey and antique silver. Isn't it luxurious and sexy?

So this is my deeply un-sexy and tired looking bedroom as it is today (apologies for the dodgy panoramic view and mess!)

This is how it might look with all slatey walls (and tidy.) Beautiful matte walls. (I loathe satin finishes since living in this house!)

I tried a few other combos, just one or two walls painted, but I didn't like how they looked. Here is an attempt with silvery paint affect or wallpapered walls, so reversed from above essentially. I don't think it retains any of that den-like quality that the dark walls in the mood board above put across.

Here I considered changing the lay out and furniture. I have a wooden bed frame, so thought about replacing the Ikea monstrosity we currently use, and moving the bed around. Not sure how this would work in terms of using the space, I'd have to plot it out to scale to see for sure, but I think it'll be fine since measuring it roughly. I like how it looks that way around in the sketch. I realised if I did that then I'd have two almost matching pieces of dark wooden furniture, So figured I could get some cheap side tables in a similar colour which would then start to tie the dark wood in to the rest of the room.

Add lots of fresh plants in terracotta and silvery pots, a couple of mirrors and/or paintings in antique frames, a little texture in the form of bedding, full length curtains and rug. Get the right pendant light. Some nice mismatched vintage bedside lamps. Lots of little details using the inspiration from the mood board. I'd like to incorporate the old pearls, the tarnished threads, ribbons and trims. I love the look of tarnished mirror too.

What do you think? Workable and beautiful? Or dark and dingy?

All images are © Chloe Cooter 2013 unless image links to another website. All images that are not © Chloe Cooter will be linked to the source (if possible) and credited in that way.

The Resolution

I am a little unsure about calling my plans for 2013 resolutions to be honest with you. New Years Resolution, almost by default, means something you try and then fail at. Dreadful as it is to say, I suspect that almost no one keeps to their resolutions for more than a month, some times an awful lot less. I know I never have. But then again, I have always tried to do something that appears to be huge, that I don't particularly want to do, such as losing 4 stone, which then naturally means eating no cake. Losing 4 stone is a scarily big amount! And I really like cake.

This year I have a scarily huge list of pretty small things, almost all of which I actually want to do, and if I don't want to do them as such, then I really want the result. I am hoping that many small achievable things will be an easier goal to achieve than one massive unrealistic thing to strive for.

I'm not going to share the entire list with you, but I will sketch out the main areas.

Home

Primarily organizing, tidying, cleaning and then decorating.

Garden

My garden isn't quite a blank canvas, but it has no design to it, and it's mostly empty of plants. Going to remedy this. Also going to grow some more fruit and veg this year too.

Chloe and the Chimera

Going to be approaching selling my products in a different way this year, and also develop other areas of the business.

Money

Sorting out my finances. Streamlining and saving.

Other Business

My partner and I are going to be developing some ideas together for things that we can turn in to 'our future'.

Body & Soul

The aim here is fitness and health. Although I have a final weight in mind, I am currently focusing on getting fitter, improving muscle tone, eating seasonally and fresh, cutting out as much processed and refined foods as possible. I also want to improve myself mentally in a variety of ways, from learning new things to sorting out my perception of myself and my life.

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I made a start on many of these areas when I did a post on 4 simple goals to do before 2013. I mostly set my brain in the right direction rather than physically achieving these though, and although that doesn't sound like much, it's a huge leap in a way. I'm proud of how far I managed to go with these goals; I did all the ground work essentially for this list I'm working on now. I'm not proud of my lack of updates here though which is something I plan to address (see below.)

But I have begun on this enormous list. I have done a tonne of work in the garden; I've done a plan, and quite a bit of hard landscaping in preparation. I have attacked piles of paperwork that have been sitting about waiting to be dealt with for a year or more: this I think is good for both the house and my mind. I have organised my garage (workshop) in order to get back to work out there for Chloe and the Chimera. And, I have begun eating more healthily, and I've been exercising daily (oh and how I ache.)

I don't think I have ever been so proactive!

As hinted at, also on the list (under the Chloe and the Chimera heading) is so sort out this blog. As I mentioned when I first started it, I don't feel too confidant about my blogging abilities. I worry constantly about the lack of imagery I put in to posts, and when I do put my own images in, I worry about the quality. I worry about the tone, the quality of writing, the readership and blah de blah de blah. Which is all totally stupid isn't it? Blogs are supposed to be a personal expression aren't they? But I don't think a little structure will hurt. I am going to try to start regular posts, nothing too mental, seeing as I am addicted to pinterest (along with half the world) I might post my favourite pins of the week here (again, along with half of the world), I think I am also going to do regular updates of my resolutions list under the above headings. I going to put some effort in to planning another couple of regular posts to do to keep me on track too!

So there we have it. It looks like this is going to be one hell of a year for me!

New Year! New Beginning!

Wow!

Well, it has been an absolute age since I could write a post, or do anything properly for Chloe and the Chimera. This is of course a cardinal sin when starting up a business isn't it? It's a novelty being able to type at a sensible speed (phone typing just isn't as quick no matter how good you think you are is it?) Ahh, a keyboard, a monitor, all my links, (my accounts!) the ability to upload photos, to edit, to update. How have I managed without?

Well, in the last few months I have been a very busy bee. Not only starting my part-time job in a bar in Bristol city centre but I have attended 3 different fairs with Chloe and the Chimera. This might not have been the highest amount of fairs I could have been at but I have learnt a lot from them. They were not the most profitable exercises. This doesn't mean I'm ditching the Chimera, I'm just going to find another outlet to let the right people see my goods. That's the next phase of the plan. And, now I have my computer back in action I can start getting the ball rolling again! I'm so pleased.

I know it's only January 3rd, but I feel like I have achieved a lot already. PC sorted, health kick begun, operation house and operation garden started too (more on those later.) My intention is to end 2013 in a far better position than I have 2012. In terms of business, money, family life, the way my home looks (operation house), the way the gardens look (operation garden), other business avenues, friends, health, weight and probably a few more things. I have begun "The List" which is already looking ominous and covers in detail exactly what I want to achieve this year, but as I've said, I have already crossed off things, and begun others.

Anywhoo, this is just a quick update to celebrate my return to the world of the internet and Chloe and the Chimera.

I hope you'll all join me here for a wonderful 2013.

Happy New Year!