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. My first purchase was quite specialised – I need to buy silver wedding shoes for my recent nuptials. It would normally take ages to find shoes like this, as most shops only stock a couple of pairs.  By checking online I found a nice pair inside five minutes and three days later they arrived. Like Cinderella, I tried them on and they fitted like a glove!

Encouraged by this experience, I intend to look for some new hiking boots next.  My old ones are worn out after the honeymoon so I am going to buy these online as well.

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.

We had to do this last year, even though the changes we wanted to make were all internal and quite minimal.  But we were obliged to pay a lot of money to an architect just to show the council where we were going to knock a wall down.  It really annoyed us that it costs us so much for our small cottage home plans.

When I do any remodelling work on the house in future, I am going to check out HousePlansandMore.com, a company that can save you a bundle in professional fees.  You can choose a design from their library and there are hundreds of variations – everything from bungalows to luxury home plans if you are lucky enough. The plans you get are really comprehensive, with a list of the materials needed as well.  This makes budgeting much easier.  It is a boon for self builders and developers, check it out.

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.

The good news is that we managed to find help from the professionals who could be seen as telephone stylists.  The guys at Market Communications made it particularly simple and painless, leaving us more time for other priorities.  They freed us up to run the business, not sink into it.

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. We cannot simply throw things away and forget about them, as they have realised in Australia.  They have a system of skip bins Melbourne that allow residents to have a major clearout responsibly.  It is a big country but one that lies a long way from its neighbours, so the solutions must mainly be homegrown.  A lot of research and development goes into waste management services australia to make sure that urban dwellers and country residents alike can dispose of surplus and redundant items without unnecessary damage to their surroundings.

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.  I rather like the American system of having a stand alone mailbox outside the house where the deliveries are placed and you can just unlock the box when you are ready. Of course we are familiar with  Commercial Mailboxes, but I am keen to start a trend of using them for residential mailboxes as well.

The designs are quite kitschy sometimes, but there are also some very nice cool black stove metal versions that could look good outside my front door.  They keep the post dry and there is plenty of room inside if you are expecting some interesting parcels.