I always thought that buying shoes had to involve hours spent traipsing around a shopping centre until my feet hurt so much that I could not try them on! A while ago I decide to see if I could buy shoes online – after all, I buy almost everything else that way. But how can you make the online shoe buying process faster? I used a site called shopwiki, where you can combine all the listings from hundreds of shops for your chosen category. Read more »

When you want to make any changes to your house or oubuildings, you need to have professional home plans prepared, to show the authorities that the work is going to be done properly and that it is going to meet all the regulations and standards.  This is completely compulsory, and anyone who tries to go ahead without submitting plans is going to have problems further down the line. Read more »

I love phones, in all shapes and sizes.  When I tried to help set up a telephone network at my partner’s office I soon realised that we need some outside help.  Buying a phone system is nothing like buying a handbag, I am afraid to say.  You cannot just buy it and plug it in if you need any kind of sophisticated performance. What we wanted was a fully wireless phone system, eliminating trailing wires,. The computers generate enough of that, so we wanted the phones to avoid any mess. Read more »

I take recycling very seriously, in fact I have just been in the garden organising my stuff for collection by the recycling guys.  The only things I put in the bin are those that can’t be used in their current form by anyone else.  Old clothes and bags go to the charity shop, leftover materials from Home Renovation and Building are offered to Freecycle, you get the picture. Read more »

Over here in the UK we have a tradition of letterboxes in our front doors, where the envelopes and parcels are pushed through a small slot into the hallway.  If you have an excitable dog this often means that the items are thoroughly chewed before you can get your hands on them.  If you are ordering designer goods this may not be very convenient.  Read more »

When you are writing blog posts or website material sooner or later you will need to choose a way of including images in your pages.  The internet is a place where we devour pictures and photos of the highest quality, and a site that looks shabby or amateur will not last very long.  There is a very good site that provides thousands of hours of images in subjects like people stock footage if you want to include human interest on your site. Read more »

Things I never thought I would be shopping for – well, Lockers are quite high up on the list.  When I was at school I do not recall taking much notice of them – for years I was using School Lockers to keep text books, notebooks and sweets in.  None of that was valuable so the lockers didn’t need to be very sophisticated. I have horrid memories of the heavy Wood Lockers that were installed at my secondary school.  They were dark, covered with graffiti and didn’t close very well.  I still had no valuables to put in them, so it didn’t matter too much. Read more »

In the teeth of a recession based around the housing market, you would think it would be simple to get a competitive moving quote, wouldn’t you? That is what I thought when I recently needed to move our possessions from London to Sussex.  I naively picked up the local yellow pages and rang around – the first company told me they could come round and quote in two weeks’ time.  Read more »