The Story of the Green Cottage
The Green Cottage is a 130 year old farmhouse that has no front door or doorbell. I imagine the side door off the kitchen to the brick patio, was once the front of the original tiny box home. There were additions to the cottage through the years, but it is still a modest, chippy, quirky home with a wisteria arbor and echos of past inhabitants. There are pottery fragments in the ground and finger prints in the handmade clay floors that speak of the potters who once lived here with their handmade bathroom tiles and painted porcelain backsplash.
The cottage is personal to me.
It’s a dream my husband and I had for our life and family. It’s a slow life in open country with fresh air and nature all around us. It’s the summers spent by the campfire watching movies on the back of the garage. It’s the hand painted ‘pork chops and gravy’ repurposed window from song that a band sang when we were first dating paired with the chicken paintings from my sister and collected bits from the yard. It’s the hand dug field fence my husband painstakingly built to keep our dogs and chickens safe. It’s all of our memories with friends and family. Playing flashlight tag, ping pong in the garage, the Rottweiler rodeo (our annual event). It’s a place of rest and retreat. It’s also a place for collected antiquities and repurposing the old, well worn and solid bits of past just like the cottage itself.
The Green Cottage is not the color green (though maybe one day…) but it’s about green living that we once all lived by.
It’s clean living without toxins. The Green Cottage inspired me to clean up, reduce unnecessary and harmful products, simplify life and live like people used to exist. When we see the beauty, we choose to take care of it more kindly. We respect the earth, our history, our future inhabitants. It’s not about money and owning more things and speeding through the process. The Green Cottage has inspired me to live sustainably and reduce my landfill footprint, to choose to bypass plastics that live on forever and pollute through it’s whole production chain and to compost for soil enrichment rather than bringing in store bought. The Green Cottage has taught me to appreciate handmade and well made items for longevity and artistry and to support others who have that same dream.
“simple nature based ingredients are all you really need.”
In this space, my ‘makery’, I use basic essentials (the raw, organic, and as original of nature based form) to make everyday home and body care. No preservatives, no fillers, no artificial fragrances that cause allergies, respiratory problems, cancers, skin conditions, etc. What started as making simple household cleaners from vinegar and rubbing alcohol just like our Grandmas made, shows us that simple nature based ingredients we already have on hand are truly the best and all you really need.
