I found another article here on decluttering.

These are always worth a read, especially at this time of year when you suddenly get the urge to throw everything out. 

I'm not sure that it really has anything dramatically new to say, butit has some advice that is worth repeating, such as: "You don't have to be ruthless, but you do need to be dispassionate. Don't feel guilty about getting rid of something just because somebody gave it to you, or you spent a lot of money on it."

Harder said than done when you're a tightwad, of course. And the DH just a couple of weeks ago found a use for some things I sold two years ago - oops. 

More important perhaps is the link to Terence Conran's page on decluttering (I like the pictures here - it's how I fondly imagine I would live if I actually had some organisation and no cats). Although, again, the advice is familiar, one phrase did strike me:

"Anything that you are keeping on the off chance that it might either come in useful or become valuable one day. What is more useful and more valuable is the space that it is occupying"

Aha. Space is indeed useful and valuable, especially in Britain, where people live in the smallest houses in Europe, on the smallest plots of land. For instance, few people can really afford luxuries like a spare bedroom any more - far better to put a clic-clack in the dining room and turn the spare room into an ensuite - at least that way you get to actually use it. 

Maybe what we all need is gigantic lockups to put all our junk in, then when we're dead, all our rellies can come round and exclaim at the crap - or, as I did last night - cry out in wonder at the rackds of vintage clothing batty-as-a-fruitcake Cornelia Bailey had managed to amass in her Jacobean pile in Country House Rescue. I would have given my eye teeth to trawl through those two rooms, I tell you what...

New research conducted for the Prudential shows that more than 4.6 million adults in the UK have their former bedrooms preserved by parents who can't quite let go of their memories. 

A staggering 42% of UK adults whose parents still live in the family home say their former bedroom is still decorated as it was when they were a child, with 44% sleeping in their childhood bedroom when they return to see their parents. Many of them still have their childhood trophies and toys stored 'at home' and regard their childhood bedroom as still 'theirs'. 

Well how weird is that? Talk about arrested development. 

One of the virtues of coming from a dysfunctional family, I guess, is that it makes you grow up a bit quicker than that.

When I left for university, my dad converted my room into a clock-mending workshop practically before you could say knife.

It pissed me off somewhat, as I did technically own the furniture - they'd made me pay for it after a family snit. Remember the scene in 'Friends' where Ross's room has been kept like a shrine while Monica's has been turned into a gym? Sentimentality wasn't one of the Devine family faults, I'll say that for my father. 

The upshot, of course, was that I went back a few times, but since I never really felt like I had a 'home' to go to (and they also charged me rent), I soon knocked it off and stayed in town and worked.

This - to tell the truth - was probably exactly my Dad's intention. I'd hung on the longest, after all, in living at home to the age of 18, whereas my sister married at 17 and the two boys left at 16 and 15. When I went, I think he was glad that his parental responsibilities were finally done with and he could get on with the real love of his life - making clocks and hiding from my mum in the garage.

Late on parade with this blog today.

The reason is, I'm trying to buy a new woodburner.

I recently had a small windfall when my pensions company demutualised and I found myself with shares I didn't know I had. Since it was money I wasn't expecting, spending it on a new woodburner seemed like a good idea. I don't know how we'd ever afford one otherwise, and I want to do something to help my asthma. 

Our current woodburner is 11 years old, and it's the wrong type. So naive were we when we bought this house that we didn't know the difference between a freestanding stove and an 'insert', so we simply bought the latter because it was the most powerful we could find.

For those who don't know, inserts are designed to fit inside a closed fireplace. Only the front of them is visible, so the top, sides and back are all insulated to keep the heat in, and you drive the heat out of vents in the front by using fans.

However, we have an open fireplace, so what we should have bought was a freestanding stove, where the heat radiates from all sides. These generally don't have fans, though some of the newer varieties use turbo chargers that redirect the hot air so that it comes out of the bottom of the stove, reducing the ceiling temperature and increasing the floor temperature (see drawing at right).

This is the type we've opted for - the Alsace Turbo 2 from a firm called Supra. The Alsace without turbo is the best-selling stove in France and several of our friends have it, and the result is houses that are far warmer and cosier than ours. It is also double combustion and a third more efficient than our current stove, which will mean should pay for itself over the course of two to four years. 

Another mistake I made was that back when we bought this house, there wasn't really an Internet, and I had a lot of trouble calculating how much kilowattage we would need (it was the kind of information heating engineers used to keep to themselves). Eventually Country Living magazine furnished some calculations, and I came up with a requirement of 12kw, so we bought a 12kw stove.

It's never been anywhere near enough. Running both fans full pelt, we could just about cope, but our living room is 70sqm - the whole ground floor of the house - and it has quite a high ceiling. Recalculating recently on one of the many websites that now tell you how to do it comes up with a figure of 16kw - even more if you have an open staircase (which we do).  

The room is also not insulated - none of these stone houses are. Instead, it relies on something called thermal mass to stay warm. You basically heat up the stone, which radiates heat back out, and the best bet is to do it slowly and gradually. We usually light our first fire on September 1st, well before we really need it, and stoke up the house a bit at a time. This summer's been so rubbish, though that we actually lit one a day or two ago, more for psychological reasons than anything else.  

Just to complicate matters, though possibly in a good way, the French are keen to push wood heating, so you're entitled to a tax credit of 50 per cent of the cost of the stove if you install one of these whizzy new clean-burn jobs, which the Alsace Turbo is. The trouble is, we have no idea how to claim the tax credit, and I don't know anyone who's done it successfully. The criteria for obtaining it seem to vary wherever you look. One government site tells you that it doesn't matter where you buy the stove, as long as you have it installed professionally. Another says you can only claim if both the supplier and the installer are professionals. Yet another tells you that the supplier and installer have to be the same person.

It is enough to make you tear your hair out, even if it wasn't all in a foreign language. Though clearly, French people have no more of a clue than I do, as there are questions about it all over the French forums.  

I am very nervous about getting this thing wrong, because, you see, I don't know if we will ever have this kind of money to spend again in one hit, and there are plenty of other things that we need. For instance, I could easily buy a second-hand, more basic version of this stove for half the price and we could install it ourselves. No tax credit, but it would work out about the same in terms of money - a temptation when I'm not absolutely sure we're going to get this money back. And for the same cost as a new stove, I could refit the bathroom or buy a new floor for this office, plus replace both of our office windows with double-glazed ones. It is a decision I don't want to get wrong.  

Oh la. Back to the drawing board. At least I've phoned the plumber already, and he will giving me a quote on installation. A lot depends on what he says, so wish me luck.  

The DH and I were having another one of those discussions over the weekend - how to reduce our bills and at the same time go more eco-friendly.

We are all for being green, as I'm sure most people are, but the primary push is probably going to be forced on all of us. For instance, we stopped using our tumble dryer a year ago in order to reduce our electricity bill, and for the same reason, we now wash up by hand rather than using the dishwasher. (In any case, it broke, and the part was a fortune, and we can't afford a new machine.) So back we are (or rather, the DH is) washing up with a bowl and soapy water. It is not so bad, really, and at least enables us to use our nice raku dinnerware, which was too delicate for the machine.

A bunch of us girlfriends also wanted to try soap nuts, so we split a 20-euro bag between four of us (giving each of us enough nuts for six months). The verdict so far is pretty positive - the soap nuts seem to get your clothes as clean as old-style washing powders or liquids, and leave no residue in your clothes to irritate sensitive skin. The only drawback is that the clothes don't smell fresh. They don't smell dirty either, of course, they just don't smell at all. Perhaps this is something we'll all get used to - you can put a few drops of essential oil in the dispenser if you want, but I don't like to do it too often because we have a septic tank. 

Another thing that's on our minds is lighting, because the old-style incandescent lightbulbs are being phased out now, and that will mean switching over to energy-saving bulbs, like it or not. Which is fine, even though they're three times the price, because they last virtually forever and they use, say, 11 watts of electricity instead of 60, which will mean a massive reduction in consumption. But in our case, it also remains replacing all our light fittings, because our current ones won't take eco-friendly bulbs.

We have a dimmer switch for the main lights, and that's a no-no for energy-saving bulbs, so it will have to come out. This house is also French but the people who restored it from a ruin were British and they brought over British fixtures with them - crucially, these take bayonet-fitting bulbs. Try getting those in France. It's hard enough to get incandescent ones, but in long-life, it's virtually impossible. So every British light fitting in the house will have to come out and be replaced with a French one - that's 14 fittings.

Oh la. It can't be helped. It is what we call the Montcocher effect - we try to do the simplest thing, like put up a shelf, and it entails some massive palaver with drills and rawlplugs and special screws and I know not what. But once again, when it's done, it will be done, and I'm sure we'll be glad of it.