Hi.
I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.
And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.
Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long.
Term career goals.
We want you to get the most out of life.
Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura.
This episode is airing in late January of twenty twenty five. We are going to be talking all things repurposing in this episode, so how we reuse things, ideas, et cetera in our lives. But we wanted to open with a discussion that we are blatantly borrowing from the Girls next Door podcast that they recently had an epithos episode they called empties, which was things that they had completely used up and thus had to replace. So just a brief list, Sarah,
what has gone empty in your household recently? Because part of repurposing is also getting your money's worth, you know, using things up.
So what have you used up recently.
Yeah, So we're going to do this in categories, and our first category is going to be food items. So the empties that we buy constantly in replenished constantly include Dave's Killer Bread Cinnamon Raisin bagels. We all eat them. My husband is particularly addicted to them, eats one almost every single morning, Perfect Bars in various varieties, Amy's Cheddar burritos. It has to be the cheddar because a lot of the other ones have cilantro in them and therefore are
not good in my opinion. Pink Lady apples, that's really the only apple I prefer these days. And and on a similar vein the Go Go Squeeze apple sauce pouches my kids.
We buy a lot of those too, because apple sauce is about the only fruit that Alex will actually eat. Costco makes ones that have more sort of veggies in them, so sometimes we can get those for him to be eating as well.
But yeah, we buy a lot of this. Have you ever had honey crisp apples. They're very similar to Pink Lady.
I think they're pretty good.
Okay, all right, we'll have to have like an apple taste off sometimes, like all those wonderfully crisp red apples that are so good. But yeah, we have a couple items from Costco that we actually get through and have to go back to Costco to get because they wind up empty. One is their parmesan cheese, so they have these tubs of parmesan cheese. But several of my kids like to put these on pasta and they use a lot of them, so we go through several of those.
We also get through the giant peanut butter containers. Now this is an interesting thing because I thought we were incredibly brand loyal to Skippy and that is what Costco had, But then Costco must have changed their contract because now they have Jiffy. So we're like, okay, I guess we'll get Jiffy and it's fine. Everyone ate it, so I don't know that's how it goes. We also get these little balls of mozzarella cheese, so there's like snack size
mozzarella cheese balls. That's another thing that several of my kids will eat. And also Go Go Squeeze makes shelf stable.
Yogurt as well.
We go through a ton of those because they are obviously easier to pack for lunches. Or snacks or anything else, because they do not need to be refrigerated and the idea of room temperature yogurt sounds repulsive to me, but I'm not the one eating it, so there we go. How about cleaning, Sarah.
Yeah, so we use a lot of I feel like I'm gonna get like canceled, like this is not good enough. But windex with vinegar. Okay, I'm sure it's not the world's best environmental choice, but I love the slight vinegar smell. I think it works really well. So we do use a lot of that. We do have the Missus Meyers soap and dish deetergent kind of and the refills on Subscribe and Save, and then admittedly we also use the dishwasher pods that make it really really easy from Cascade.
I feel like listing this, I'm like, I'm sure we could do better from an environmental standpoint, so maybe that'll be a future thing to work out. Right now, those are definitely kind of rebought many times in our house.
Yeah, we use a lot of missus Meyer's hand soap, though I have one child who washes hands so frequently that I have wound up purchasing cheaper hand soap for said child, because my frugal self cannot stomach the idea of using nice hand soap for such profligate use. I'm a big fan of hand washing, by the way, but this is a little bit a lot of it. But the rest of us are using missus Meyer's hand soap. We are also using don spray dish detergent. So I
would do a shout out here. Some people get behind on dishes because they feel like each time they have to wash dishes it has to be this production. If that is the case, you might want to change your tools.
So we use spray dish detergent and then a scrubbing brush with a handle, so you can literally just spray one dish with your dish spray and scrub it with your scrub brush, and it's like a ten second process for one dish, and you put it over there on the side to dry, and so they'd never build up right. And I'm not saying like after dinner we don't have six or seven dishes to do, but during the course of the day they can get done individually.
So no one's ever supposed to be leaving dishes in the sink.
I've never tried a dish spray, but I think I would like it.
Yeah, it's one of these things you never really know how other people are structuring their lives, or like they're cleaning rites or their showering rituals or anything else like this.
And I've had people talk.
About how they get behind on dishes and then it takes so much time to get caught up, and I'm struggling to understand, like why, Like what's going on?
I don't even understand.
But it's because I think they don't think it's possible to do one dish at a time.
Yeah. I think with people that struggle with household stuff, it's actually pretty common. Because there was that book. Oh I forget what it's called right now, but it focused a lot on on dishes, so I know it must be a common thing for me that's like I kind of can't leave a dish there, like I can't do it. There's other stuff that piles up in my house like crazy, I can't do it with dishes. So yeah, thus far we've been okay because I'm too crazy.
Yeah, yeah, I would say we also go through a lot of draft laundry detergent, and people like what you don't have any newborns anymore, but for whatever reason, enough people had like sensitive skin, and then I started breaking some weird thing at one point, so I was like, well, I'll just wash my stuff and draft, and as we wind up going through a fair amount of.
That as well, we do all free and clear.
Okay, well that works, that works all right.
And then one last category is Sarah Beauty. What are your empties in the beauty category?
Yeah, so I have two mescaras that I use for different purposes that I rebuy again and again. My everyday work life mescaret is the lang Comb definiteiles I'm like obsessed. And then my party mascaret is the Thrive mascara because it makes your eyelashes pop in a way that the lang Comm does not. But the lang Com is just like it's like perfect for work. And then I have
bought many times over the Bare Minerals Complexion Rescue. It's like a tinted moisturizer with SPF and I feel like it really evens out skin tone and I feel really virtuous that I'm putting on SPF every single morning. So love it. And then my hair care is almost always mill Bond, which is the company that makes the Japanese training products that are used in my hair. So I'm pretty brand loyal there.
Yeah, so I use Ilia Concealer.
That's Ilia, I think that's how you say it, and I wind up rebuying tubes of that when I am scraping the bottom of the barrel.
As it were.
This Elements or Elements marine cream. I really got into that when they sent a sample in the Allure beauty box, and that turns out to be a rather expensive addiction, so I probably need to rethink that, but for now and then, I'm going to do a total shout out to the Thrive mascara as well. I would be having constant empties on that, but as an advertiser they it's been fortunate that they've sent me replenishments so I haven't had to replace them quite as frequently as I would otherwise.
So thank you to them for that because I'm using it every single day. Apparently I like to have my party eyes every day. So there we go. So this episode is about repurposing things that we reuse, sometimes in new ways in order to minimize effort or time or cost or clutter or environmental impact. So the first category though, we want to quick talk about, is reusing.
Your own intellectual property.
So it turns out I've had people tell me this in the past, and it took a while to get my head around it. It's like, you know, you create all this content, you can come up with ways that you can give it a new life. I mean not you never want to do the exact same thing for multiple places, because you know you've gotta be respectful to your readers, your listeners, et cetera. But there's often a German of an idea that you've used somewhere that you can then pivot in some way to make it work
in a different format. So Sarah, you have done this for sure in your creative work. I think you've figured out ways to reuse some of your ideas.
I have, and I don't think I even meant to do it, Like it's not like I set out to
be like let me repurpose. But funny story, so I'm working out a book, as we talked about during those Yearly Goals episodes, and initially like three years ago, more than three years ago, like twenty twenty two, I hired someone to help me turn my podcast episodes into the draft of a book, because somehow I thought like, oh, maybe i'll like ghost write a book or I don't know, like based on my content, based on the way I teach planning on Bestlaid Plans, and she did a great job.
But then when I read them, I'm like, oh god, no, I can't like put out a book that I didn't write like I need to put I write, I blog, I can write like I want my book to be in my voice. However, this stuff is awesome, hmm, what should I do with it? Let me try starting a course. So I edited them and tweaked them, but they that read was repurposed into the material that made up Best Laid Plans Academy. And then after teaching Bestlaid Plans Academy four or five times now, I was like, I'm going
to turn this into a book. So it's been like flipped around, repurpose. I feel like it's only improved, Like these are like iterations, but I've learned so much in each iteration, so it's not like I'm just redoing. But at the same time, it's like amazing that something it was really a set of ideas that has just been like refined over time and in some ways reused. So yeah, yeah, it's my repurposing story.
No, I mean doing that.
Yeah, well, let's take a quick ad break and then I'll talk about my repurposing when we come back. Yeah, so, I mean this was actually one of the upsides of college application season that Jasper and I just went through. I really love that there is the common app now, so that at least your basic essay can be reused
for every place. But then it turns out that you can also sort of have general ways that you're thinking about, like your activities or moments you've had in your life, and then you can tweak them according to the different questions that different places ask. So it's specific to the university, but like some of it could be gotten at it in the same way, and so it's a useful mindset for people to have some of my old before Breakfast episodes I am now tweaking to turn into Vanderhack's right,
that's a great way that I've been repurposing. If anyone ever read Juliette's School of Possibilities, that novel, it actually began its life as a National Novel Writing Month challenge. Novel that was in many ways very different, Like it had a totally different plot, but I kept the location and I kept several of the main characters.
So that was a repurposing there.
And you know, it's really struck me as I was doing the Bach project last year, So in twenty twenty four, I listened to all the works of Bach.
He was repurposing a lot like you.
He'd write a cantata for Sunday and then he'd need an alto.
Solo for something else, and it might get reused again.
And then when he did sort of his major works like the Christmas Oratorio or the Box B Minor Mass, he had a lot of work to pull from that he could then reuse a chorus from something developed a little bit differently, or do this as a baritone instead of a soprano solo.
And so it was really cool to hear that.
If Bach can repurpose, then there is no shame in it.
Yeah, I mean, although he wasn't being recorded right like I mean, it's the harder now with stuff like that, just because it's it's all searchable, it's existing longer term, Like when his people performing a cantata on Sunday morning did it. It was all gone then once they did it, versus just the written record of it, like that was all that was it, and that wasn't even going to be distributed broadly because there was very limited sort of printing going on.
But yeah, it's.
And be that as it may. We repurpose all sorts of other things beyond ips. So hand me downs, for instance, is the ultimate clothing repurposing. Sarah, what does your hand me down system look like?
These days?
We don't have the best system. I think we've been able to get away with a subpar system because of the spacing and ages of my kids. So really, the only passing on that's realistic is for either Annabel or Cameron to pass on to Genevieve at this point, because Annibal and Cameron are essentially the same size, they also have wildly different styles, like they're not passing things back and forth, but either of them could potentially pass some stuff to Genevieve. And so I just put it in
a bin and we periodically look inside the bin. And because there's a big enough gap, like there's almost six years between Genevieve and Annabel and like four between, I can like get away with not having great system, because it's not going to it's as long as I look at that bin, like every year or two, I'm going to catch stuff, is my point, because it's like a pretty long window before it's actually ready for her. And then the worst case is if I missed the boat, then I.
Can send it to my niece. So yeah, that someone can get it, someone can use it. So we actually we probably have more of a hand me down system than we even really use at this point. But we have bins for pretty much all kids sizes now in a closet in our house, and so they're labeled like size five T slash five or the size seven, size eight ten, And the goal is to be able to pull some of this stuff out of there for the little boys in particular as they are getting to those
individual sizes. And so it's been really fun to see some of the clothes that Jasper or Sam wore on Henry. Now, obviously all of it doesn't make it as one might imagine, there are many items of clothing that you cannot have four little boys wear and expect them to survive just the sheer passage of time. It also turns out that, for instance, little boy sweatpants do not last because the elastic in the waistband falls apart after about I don't know,
three four years. So in fact, we haven't even been able to use most of Alex's pants for Henry, which was kind of sad, but that is what it is.
They also cost like nine dollars to buys.
I'm not really you know, hoping for heirloom quality little boys sweatpants, but things like coats and boots, snow pants, sweatshirts, dressy sweaters, those can all be passed down.
And so it's really fun to be able to see that.
Yeah, I think the sentimental piece of that must be really really cool.
Yeah.
And there was like one remarkably resilient orange T shirt. It was like a sort of mesh orange T shirt that had shirks on it, and that like literally everyone has worn because it just it's indestructible. I don't know, like most T shirts won't last for seventeen years, but that did.
Yeah, So repurpose your clothes, repurpose your kid's clothes, and maybe be more systematic about it than me. It sounds like Laura's label. The size of system actually sounds extremely smart, so especially if you have more kids than I have, go for.
It, exactly.
But even if you are passing it back and forth to another family who live near you, you know, if you're like, Okay, here's the ban of size six clothes, take what you want.
Get rid of the rest or whatever. It's nice to have as sort of organized that way.
No, you're right, that's probably way more appealing even in a buy nothing group or in your neighborhood giveaway group, to be like, who wants all of these clothes in this size? Like that's actually usable?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
What about food, Sarah, let's get to leftovers repurposing food.
Oh, we're better at repurposing those, I got to say. We our leftover game is pretty narn strong. Most weeks we eat it one way or the other. So sometimes we have planned leftovers for a dinner. I know you guys don't do that a lot, but we'll be like Wednesday and Thursday we reading spaghetti and meatballs and salad and just make a lot of pasta and it works out. Otherwise,
I love taking leftovers for lunch. And I think I talked about how I'm working on better work, better planned out work lunches, So I'm trying to kind of like Earmark, Like, Okay, if I'm cooking on Sunday, I'm packaging some up right away, and like that's my lunch for Monday. And so when you're putting it away, putting it directly into containers that can be put in your lunch bag, I think is key. Or with my kids, they love heated leftovers in a
thermos that you heat that morning. It's like they love that. Yeah. So I think making extra as long as you plan to eat it can just be incredibly efficient and a great way to use things I'd say we're not as good about, like I don't know, just like accumulation of random ingredients or things that go into the freezer. Like I feel like I could systematically be better at like repurposing the nuts that we have lying around things like that.
Yeah. I mean, so we do sometimes make a second dinner out of stuff, but it's more like we will reuse the main protein of something as an ingredient in a second meal. So if we grilled a bunch of steaks on the weekend, it's just as easy to grill a few extras and then that can become steak fahetas eats some night during the week, so we have definitely
done that. So our house managers sometimes cooks on like Wednesdays, and if we haven't made it through all of that stuff, like sometimes if we have a night Thursday or Friday where people are in and out, the adults will mostly just eat that. It tends to be more the adults who are eating a lot of the leftovers in my house, unless there's leftover pasta or leftover mac and cheese, and
the kids will often have that as snacks. But yeah, I eat leftovers for lunch most days, so if there's anything leftover from the night before, I will have that as my lunch. I will say that if you are working from home, the leftover game for lunch can actually be a little bit different, or you don't have to heat it.
Up in the microwave.
And this was a key learning for me, like life hack here, which is that many things taste better when you saute them right because you're putting oil in the pan and so it's a little bit you know, it's warmed all the way through, and it's got that extra a little bit of the fat that it's cooking in, so that can make leftovers a lot better.
That it's not just whatever you had heat it up in the microwave.
It's that you throw it in a pan and saute it, and then you can add extra things to it, right, like you know, maybe throw in some frozen corn if you had that, or extra ved geez, or put some rice on it. Adding a new ingredient is another way to make repurpose food taste even different the next day or so.
So I like to add chipotle mayo to a lot of leftovers because.
That then makes it spicy, and I dip whatever I had the day before into the mayo and it's like an entirely different meal.
I also think put an egg on it could be a great home lunch hack where if everybody ate all the protein, which sometimes happens in our house, like I didn't buy enough chicken, but nap out a pile of rice and vegetables. I can use them by cracking an egg or two on there, and then all of a sudden, I've added back in the protein and also shout out to the toaster oven. Like frozen slices of pizza. Put in the toaster oven for three seventy five for about twenty minutes come out like you got them at the
pizza shop. I love it.
Yeah, like the bust.
Well, it's sort of a fun thing with hosting a party. I do like to buy a little extra. Obviously, you don't want to run out of food for your guests. But then I'm often having that for lunch for days afterwards, and it's like a very special lunch that you're having cocktail shrimp and party nuts and like the fancy veggies with dip and all that.
So it's like, you know.
A little bit better than you you would have probably been eating otherwise. I mean, I'm not saying that it's not wonderful to have a microwave burrito, but sometimes the party leftovers are a little bit more exciting.
Oh that's awesome. We don't take our quick break again and then get to some household items that we are repurposing these days. Well, we are back.
This episode is about all things repurposing. We've started off with a discussion of our empties, things we have had to replace because we have completely used them up. Talk about reusing your own ip, you know, having repurposing of clothes, repurposing of food. The next category, of course is household so what are some of the household items that you wind up repurposing, Sarah.
Yours are so much better than mine. I think you come up that many. I mean, we definitely the idea that you're going to like get rid of your legos once you've built the thing that's in the picture. Obviously we don't do that. We keep those, We mix them all together. The kids make various stuff. I also will say that when you have to buy a million poster boards for school, don't forget the back of the poster board, especially if you're the kind that are white on both sides.
There is no reason that can't be the next poster. And the rate at which our school seems to ask for poster boards, this is very important. And then well, the last one you do as well. But gift bags big time, I mean birthday party. You carefully fold all those up and then we put them in the closet and we have a whole collection of gift bags.
Yeah.
No, definitely do not throw out your gift bags. It's a little harder to repurpose like actual wrapping paper. I know some people do this. So if somebody was very careful, for instance, opening a birthday present or opening a Christmas present, then you might be able to fold it up and especially reuse it for smaller things. I tend not to have quite as good a system for that, but gift bags absolutely. I've noticed most people do not actually write the child's name on the gift bag itself, so that
means like it's fair game for anything. So we have at least two dozen gift bags in the closet, so anytime that a kid is invited to a birthday party, we can reuse one of those gift bags with some tissue paper in it, or for our own kids. Sometimes if it's an oddly shaped item, I will I will use a gift bag as well, So big shout out to that idea. We've actually reused some gift tags for I think I mentioned this in one of our holiday episodes.
But we buy these really nice gift tags and then every year there's gonna be a gift to Alex for Mommy and daddy. They'll be several So now I have gift tags'd say that, so I can reuse them.
But yeah, we have a bin of old old Halloween costumes.
So I know a lot of kids like to play dress up, especially you know, kids just sort of in the four to seven year old range. That's a big thing for creative play at that age. And the more stuff you have, the better. And if you've been buying Halloween costumes for lo these many years, you probably have all sorts of size four to eight superhero related stuff that they can then be spider Man and dance around the house as spider Man, Batman, iron Man.
Who else?
In our house we had every Disney princess, every Disney princess.
Well I only have one girl, so we have a limited number of the Disney princes. We have some we actually have. We have oh, Elsa. Everyone has Elsa, but that's at Elsa. We have bell M.
Trying to think who else?
We had an aerial Okay, yeah, actually we had.
We had an Anna too. That was the year with you. She really did both, I think.
But yeah, you can use all sorts of Holloween costumes for your dress up bin for later, or if you know you have your own random things that you aren't entirely sure you want to toss. If you had to have a top hat for some random work bonding event, like it just goes in there and you make the most of it. I would say, if you have a set of formal dishware that you don't actually use that often, like if it's only for parties or something like that, try to give it some sort of everyday life in
other ways. So maybe it's that you just put it as decorse somewhere, but it could also you could use a pitcher for flowers that you could reuse that. I use some of the plates to go under plants, and so then it's kind of more decorative than just whatever random plastic plate I happened to throw under a plant.
It's like, oh, it's a nice china looking thing that I'm using for that to maybe if it was my own heirloom china that I was except not wanting to have anything ever get on it, I wouldn't do that. But in my case, this this set kind of came with the house, so I'm trying to repurpose it.
You might as well use it, either sell it or use it. I don't know there's any reason to do just hoard it.
It's so funny. I mean, I think it's a beautiful pattern.
It's one of those lovely white and blue and I'm sure it was nice, you know when it was or something, right, Yeah, but what's so funny is that it's really old and so like the coffee cups, like for after dinner coffee are these tiny little things like I can't imagine when I like serving my guests like a four ounces of coffee and be like that's all you get.
The humans like used to drink less or something they must have all right, I guess the Americans drink a lot because it's after the coffee.
It must have been that you only were having a little like you don't want to be up all night then versus now as well. But it's almost humorous, like I could not see like serving this to somebody with a straight face.
It's almost like thimble list.
That's funny.
Last category Sarah templates and lists. So we know that some of our listeners have made an art form of this.
I mean I do a ton of template reusing at work. I've talked about that before. Those expanded phrases. You just type a few things and then you have a whole thing to fill out. Love it, love it, love it. I have a few phrases on my using apples keyboard shortcuts that do that as well. But I will say when I'm making a list, like a packing list or something. I Actually, I think both of us. I like to start fresh because it's almost like the act of making
a list is the act of like thinking through it. However, I'm going to give a shout out to a Before Breakfast episode that I listened to with Amanda, who I'm friends with, and you did a great job interviewing her, and one of her ideas was to have a packing list notebook in which she would create each list fresh, so she's not like reusing the whole list, but she can flip back and look at prior lists for ideas and inspiration, and perhaps if she forgot something, she would
like underline it so she'd see it. I kind of think that's like the sweet spot there because you're generating it fresh, but then you have like this reference to check yourself. And perhaps if I had done something like that, I would have brought bathing suits to Montana, and instead I had to go to Target. It was annoying. The line was super long.
Well totally because you know, like I'm skiing, Like the first thing you think is not swimsuit, Like obviously if you're going to a beach resort, you're thinking swimsuit, although even then, like reminding yourself to bring flip flops, you know, you don't necessarily think of that first thing.
And then going to like city vacations.
I don't know, if you're going to Paris or something, you might want to pack an umbrella if the forecast remotely seems like it might rain over the course of week. Now, obviously you don't need to drive yourself crazy with this. If you're going to somewhere that has civilization, you can buy an umbrella, right They use umbrellas most way everywhere the world that you would be traveling, and so you can, in fact purchase one, just as Sarah did in fact
purchase swimsuits at the Target in bos Montana. But given that a swimsuit takes zero space in a suitcase, that's, you know, the kind of thing that it's just as easy to throw in. So reusing a packing list, even if you are creating a new list, having the old
ones is helpful. I also I save all my holiday gift lists in one notebook, and this is helpful Partly, you know, I don't want to give the same relative a pair of shearling gloves two years in a row, even though it seems like they might like them, which
is why I gave them to a last year. I don't know, maybe they lost them, like maybe it actually would be a good gift, but just to try and make sure that I don't have that same thought of like, oh, yes, that is a brilliant gift for this person too many years in a row.
I love that because there's also a sentimental piece of that too, Like I love the idea of flipping back ten years and being like, oh, we got Jasper this little kid thing and now he's like in college, Like that's cool. Gift notebook, Yeah, I mean my list does.
I only started doing this a few years ago, so it doesn't go quite that far back. But it is like an actively managed list each time that you know, I'm creating and I have to cross many things out and then I have to add things because everyone has the same number of wrapped things under the tree.
But it is helpful to at least be able to reference that.
I've also seen people do something similar with like their holiday planning or like holiday meals and stuff, where they'll kind of keep everything in a binder and then just like reuse the same recipes and like add notes here after year, Okay, need more cranberry sauce and again. That way they're not reinventing the wheel. If they're holding the same kind of celebration, they can just refer.
Yeah, I probably should do that with Thanksgiving because I mean every year I'm like, well, where was my where was my gravy recipe? I mean it's somewhere, It's in the pile and I can find it, but it's you know, maybe it should be cralled a little bit.
Digital could be good too, Like Apple notes would be so easy to make just like Thanksgiving folder and then just throw everything there.
Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. So you know, lots of different ways we can repurpose things. So we would love to hear your lists as well. Like if you have this an amazing template that you use and repurpose all the time, I would love to hear about it.
You can let us know.
So this week's question, though, is related from maybe it's sent in by whoever is annoyed for me that they're getting that box of size six items. It says, what do you do if people give you hand me down such as clothes or toys or household items that you really don't want.
I mean, first of all, I hope I think it is when you are passing things down, you need to ask. It's not a I have these things for you, I'll drop them off on Thursday. It's like would you like this box of size six kids clothes? And then you get to say yes or no. And I'm the kind of person who if I don't need them, like and often I don't just say no, thank you. And honestly, I don't feel like anybody has tried to give me hand me downs for a while, just because I already
have kids that would be handy. I guess they could give to hand me down to like my tweens, but that just doesn't happen as often. So haven't been in this position for a while. Then again, once in a while, I might be asked to perhaps take a batch of stuff where I know some of the things might be useful, like my sister in law offers some ski clothes and we're like yes because ski stuff is super expensive, and like they live in Florida too, so it's not like
that stuff is heavily used. And then the key question to ask is is it okay? Or if I don't need everything, Do you want it back or should I donate it? And that way you are kind of set free. You can take one thing from the pile and donate the rest, or you can give it back if that's what they say they would prefer. So that's kind of my approach.
Yeah, I think some people. I mean, there are definitely times when hand medowns are very helpful. And again, yeah, things like snow pants and like it saves you a ton of money that you don't have to purchase it, especially if you're only going to use it twice a year. Like I mean, it's great get those hand me down
and then give those things a new life. I think sometimes people have some guilt about like having stuff that they haven't used or that maybe they spent more on than they wanted to or and they feel like if I give it to somebody else, that assuages my guilt of it, and so it's like very important to them that they get it to you, whether you're all that excited about it or not. So I mean, if you've got somebody like this, I think you can wave it off and be like, you know, like oh my gosh,
that's so generous of you. But we just had my daughter's birthday and she got so much new clothes we can't even fit it all in the closet right now, you know, or something like that, just to imply like recognizing the generosity but also waving it off as much as possible if you really think it's important to the person, I mean, maybe you could pull out one thing from it, donate the rest, and then like point to that thing all the time, right so if I'm trying to think
what it would be. But like, maybe they passed along some ridiculous vase that they were never going to use their house, and you find it's not terrible.
You can put it somewhere in your house.
Like every time you see that person, be like, oh, I have the most gorgeous lilies in that vase you gave me.
I love it, thank.
You so much, and just like keep hyping that one thing over and over again.
Yeah, but then they've pegged you as like this person likes my hammi.
Down But I don't know, yeah, maybe not. Hopefully there's not too much more stuff coming with that. But then yeah, I think you know, you can quietly donate a lot of stuff. But I like Sarah's language too, would you like it back? Or should I donate it and you know maybe or like, would you mind if I passed along anything I couldn't use and then you know, feel free to do what you want with it.
All right. Love of the Week Sarah Well.
I talked about the weather last week, and I have to say I'm enjoying wearing I have like the old school classic LLBean like they feel. I don't know if they're actual Swede, but they feel swedy on the outside and they have like sheeps getting the inside, and it's very rare when I get to use them legitimately. They're so comfortable. So shout out to just a really comfy pair of classic slippers that last year after year I've been not repurposing, but we're using them for probably more
than a decade now. They're awesome.
Awesome.
Well, in terms of repurposing, I love seeing a coat on Henry that has been used for all my other kids, or at least all my other boys, getting to see it used a fourth time.
For years.
We were using a snowsuit that I think my brother's kids had used, so it was even better, like had been used for twenty plus years. That's really great when something can be repurposed that often, but it's fun to haul out these little kid coats as the kids get big enough to use them. And this comes in handy too,
because it turns out that children lose coats. And so when a certain child had left a coat at school and it could not be found, could not be located in the lost and found, who knows where it went. Maybe it didn't get left school, Maybe I'll love somewhere else.
I don't know.
There was another coat of that size available from past children using coats, so nobody had to be coatless until we could figure out another solution.
Awesome.
Well, this has been best of both worlds. We have been talking repurposing. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.
Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.