Which is where the baking day puttery treat comes in... a list of teeny little jobs we can squeeze in while the dishwasher dances and our precious oven hums...

* Create a pretty collage on the fridge. (It really doesn't have to be covered with take out menus, shopping lists and kids scrawls all year round you know!) Use vintage buttons glued to magnets to arrange a little collection of postcards and vintage ephemera...

*Open up the pantry door and make it your mission to get rid of as much cardboard packaging as you possibly can. Flour will keep better in wide necked jars. Sugar in tightly lidded jars (Add a few marshmallows to brow sugar stores to prevent it going hard) and herbs and spices in small tins. Choose a really pretty tin for biscuits and another for crackers.

* Print a quirky little domestic vintage image on to tracing paper, then glue to glass jars using sticky back plastic, for a scrumptiously pretty take on wipe clean labels...

*Rub grubby rusty vintage tins with half an onion. Then rinse and buff with a soft cloth.

* Toast a mixture of seeds and flavour with garlic, curry powder, dried herbs, icing sugar, sea salt or flavoured tea leaves. Stir your chosen flavour in to the white of an egg. Add your seed mix then toss well before toasting on a baking tray and storing in a big glass jar .   
* Spend a meditative half hour cleaning up a collection of rusty old cutlery by rubbing it softly with fine grade steel wool dipped in vegetable oil.

* Freeze the leftovers! Dig out all the ice cube trays you own and use them to freeze scraps you would normally throw away. Chop fresh herbs and freeze them in a little water. Pour the last of the wine into ice cube bags. Freeze a job-lot of eggs, celery or finely chopped vegetables for use in soups.  Clean out the fridge and freeze whatever you can. Waste not want not!

* Scrub wooden chopping boards with lemon and sea salt.

* Nip into the garden and cut a branch to force in warm water in a milk bottle on the kitchen window ledge.

* Put stale/leftover  biscuits in a plastic bag and roll over with a rolling pin, then store in a screw top jar for use in fridge cakes and crumbles.

* Grate household soap for laundry use with a cheese grater then store in a screw top jar.
 
* Bring some milk to the boil then submerge a cracked china plate in the hot liquid for forty five minutes, after which you will find that the protein in the milk has has made the cracks invisble to the naked eye. Milky magic!

* Wipe down the inside of the bread bin with vinegar to prevent your bread turning green.

* Wait till the dishwasher is empty, then pour four heaped tablespoons of bicarbonate of soda through the bottom rack and let the dishwasher run through one whole cycle to clean and banish stinky smells.

* Decant dishwasher/washing machine tabs into a pretty crystal lidded dish and washing up liquid into an olive oil pourer.

* Group your most ornate silverware in place settings, then tie each one with a sliver of  velvet ribbon and display in a pretty jar.