IKEA, Live LAGOM, My New Sustainable Lifestyle – The Intro

Live LAGOM – Ikea’s Sustainable Living Project

LAGOM comes from the Swedish phrase ‘Lagom är bäst’ which means the right amount is best. Delira and excira is Irish slang for ‘Delighted and Excited’. Put it all together and I’m delira and excira to be living LAGOM with Ikea! Go Live LAGOM!

First Things First

The following are the definite posts you’ll be reading from me here on The Life of Stuff about my Live LAGOM story over the next six months:

IKEA, Live LAGOM, my New Sustainable Lifestyle – The Intro (this post) – January
IKEA, Live LAGOM, my New Sustainable Lifestyle – The Start – January
IKEA, Live LAGOM, my New Sustainable Lifestyle – The Progress – April
IKEA, Live LAGOM, my New Sustainable Lifestyle – The End? – June

I’m going to use this post ‘The Intro’ as a point of reference for you as a reader and follower of my Live LAGOM, sustainable lifestyle story.

As my posts are published, this Intro post will be updated with links to the other post pages.

As this is a story following my new sustainable lifestyle, and because The Life of Stuff is a personal blog, there may be additional posts to the ones above about my journey – As they are published so too will their page titles and links be added here ↓ … So do return!

What is Sustainability?

Sustainability
noun
1. the ability to be sustained, supported, upheld, or confirmed.
2. Environmental Science. the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance:
The committee is developing sustainability standards for products that use energy. 
(dictionary.com)

The Live LAGOM Low Down

In 2014 Ikea embarked on a ‘Sustainable Living Project’ where it gave 250 of its employees £500 each to invest in sustainable living and asked them to record their journey. The results of saving more, wasting less and living healthier were not only fascinating but inspiring. For this reason, Ikea decided to run the project again. However this time they wanted to include both employees and customers from the UK and Ireland, and with support from Hubbub and the University of Surrey, Live LAGOM was born.

LAGOM comes from the Swedish phrase “Lagom är bäst” (the right amount is best), which we believe is the secret to sustainable living. Not denying yourself what you love, while not taking from the planet more than you need.

(Ikea/hubbub)

The Life of Stuff and Live LAGOM – September 2015

Last September 2015, I received an invite to become a Live LAGOM Ambassador and partake in this unique sustainable lifestyle initiative. I was all ears from the beginning as sustainability has always been of interest to me, but actions speak louder than words and my husband Patrick’s and my sustainability actions were, I have to admit, barely touching on potential.

Living LAGOM means saving money, energy and water, reducing waste and living healthier

(Ikea/hubbub)

Although reading the stories and watching the videos of real people who were involved in the initiative last year, did make an impact on me. It was actually one person who made accepting the invitation an extremely easy decision to make, and one I did so whole heartedly on behalf of our household. His name is Smith, he was six months old at the time and he is Patrick and my first-born bundle of life.

You see our sustainable lifestyle was full of ‘mostly’ … We did recycle, mostly … We did keep electronics off standby, mostly … We didn’t use the tumble-dryer, mostly … We did eat yesterdays dinner as today’s lunch, mostly … our electricity bills were high and heating higher, we were, at the time, living in rented accommodation and using that as an excuse to not giving our sustainability footprint its full potential.

We didn’t change our light bulbs to LED, or buy new AAA+ appliances. We had an attitude of refusing to ‘put down roots’ so to speak when it came to growing our own, because in our mind we didn’t own the house so what was the point. A big excuse, it was after all our home … and then it wasn’t … because as I was emailing to agree to Live LAGOM, we were also agreeing to buy our first home, and we did.

We moved into our ‘forever’ home in November, a week before the Live LAGOM workshop in Ikea Dublin. Our lackadaisy attitudes to sustainability and the world we are living in, the world we will one day leave to our son Smith and all the other little bundles of life was about to change. Like our son Smith, our LAGOM was about to take its first step.