Want To Cut Down On Waste? Don't Buy A House!

Apparently, every year, an area of forest or jungle the size of Wales is cut down. Having driven through Wales a few times, this is a lot of trees. Unfortunately it's one of possibly squillions of issues that sit in my "I haven't done anything about it yet" box, alongside such other pressing issues as bullying, racism and getting to the bottom of who steals all of my erasers before I finish them. Honestly, I've never ever used up a whole one before someone definitely comes and adds it to their collection of my stolen stationary. It's very obvious that it's not just me losing them, because they also take those lip-balm stick thingys. Honestly, have you ever managed to finish one? Anyway, the point is that lots of trees come down every year for lots of reasons, mostly cow-related, but it's hard to tell if this includes those ones where they use the wood for paper, and then plant eleventy-ten new trees for every single time they step on a twig. This week, however, I feel just a teeny bit responsible for what I can only predict is the loss of every single tree in the world, purely down to how many stupid bits of paper I've had to sign just to get my amazing new house ready! So, apologies to the Lesser-Spotted No-Eyed Rainforest Fruit Bat for using your childhood home in pulped form to sign-off the stairs.


The first thing I will say about buying a new-build house is that after buying the damn place, you've got to practically spend the same again on everything else! By that, I mean things that you wouldn't think of or would get in an older house! I mean, I was pretty chuffed with myself for getting nearly £10k knocked off the price, but I've only gone and spent that kitting it out to a decent standard! First of all, it comes with floorboards and concrete to walk on, so carpets are now something that has gone from being as much a part of a house as the wall to something I've got to go and organise. Having never done this in my life, I was instantly to be found wondering over to the stuff that was £80 a square metre, which is like passing your driving test and casually walking to the Maserati garage with an overly-optimistic look on your face. Having been dragged away from the fluffiest softest carpet ever by Mrs Max, we had to pick sensible examples, which is not something I cope well with. Really, nothing in life is as boring as deciding that we need "fleck" to offset "dirt". Eventually, we settled on mostly boring stuff, with the uber-fluffy example in the living room, thanks to a massive discount, but you simply would not believe the amount of paperwork needed! We had to give our autographs for the fitting date, the fitting confirmation, the sizes, the underlay, the assurances and the purchase, not to mention the method of payment! I could almost see the disappointed faces of the now-homeless Pandas as I jotted my name and the date on the endless reams of paper.

Once the carpets had been ticked off, we had to go to Tesco's, which in case you've missed it, have been so kind as to offer a double clubcard voucher exchange thingy on their stuff. How nice of them, I think! However, as with most of the big things in life, someone's obviously decided to justify all that extra overtime they were charging for by making it so complicated, that you need an afternoon and an Accountant to figure it all out. Let me try and explain: you get these vouchers from Tesco's because you spend a quarter of your pay-cheque there on crisps and vine-ripened tomatoes. You can then go in and exchange these for double their face value i.e. a £10 voucher becomes £20. Easy, no? Apparently, a bit too easy. You can't just do a straight swap, instead you have to have the right value voucher for each department, so Food can take £5 vouchers but Home & Electrical can't? Also, if you want to buy stuff over the internet, you had to point that out as you cannot buy internetty stuff with shoppy vouchers, as you need to make them internetty vouchers in the first place? In the end, I got bored with the whole shooting-match and retired to the "Man-Creche" (also called the magazine aisle) until Mrs Max had sorted it out. The amount of paper we had at the end was hilarious: possibly the equivalent of hundreds of receipt rolls, a book explaining what we can buy with them, a book of references etc. Sadly, the Mexican Fruit Bats are looking for a small flat to rent now their home has been turned into a £20 voucher.

Thing is, we haven't even finished buying all the stuff we need yet. I'd like to buy a fancy-shmancy leather sofa, mostly because it takes no paper, but then I remembered that a subsistence farmer in Brazil will probably burn down the last habitat of the Big-Eyed South American Wolf-Spider in order to raise the cows to make the leather. I can't win! And this doesn't include things like a new mini-dishwasher, garden stuff, the forms to sign off the new garden stuff to confirm I'm not going to hurt myself, and I'm not a serial-killer, the endless cleaner I will need after the moving-in party and the wallpaper, yes more paper, that we can't even put up for a few weeks in case the whole house shifts about!

However, now that buying and kitting out the place has ensured the extinction of half the species on earth, I might as well continue for a little bit longer. For the gathering, it'll be lots of paper plates, and lots of paper towels. Hey, that's some expensive carpet in there!

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