About Home Time Goodness
Hi, I’m Zach Sawe, the creator of Home Time Goodness.
I built this site around a simple idea: home should be more than the place where life happens in between everything else. It should provide shelter, comfort and a little goodness too.
That is why Home Time Goodness is not limited to one tiny corner of home life. Here you will find practical recipes, cleaning solutions, gardening ideas, DIY projects and the occasional experiment that started with me wondering, “I wonder if this will actually work?”
Sometimes it works beautifully.
Sometimes I learn something.
Usually, both happen.
I Believe in Actually Doing the Thing
There is enough information on the internet written by people who have never actually done the thing they are explaining.
I don’t want Home Time Goodness to become that kind of website.
Whenever possible, the things you see here come from real projects, real ingredients, real messes, real plants, real tools and real results. If I am showing how something cleaned up, I want you to see what it looked like. If I baked something, I want you to see the crumb when I cut into it. If I worked on a project, I want the photographs to help tell that story.
And yes, that means sometimes you are going to see things that aren’t absolutely perfect.
That’s fine with me.
A useful result is more valuable than a manufactured one.
Before Home Time Goodness, There Were a Few Other Chapters
My path here has not exactly been a straight line.
Before I became a full-time online publisher, I trained as a chef and spent seven years working professionally in food. Later, I left that career and spent another seven years working as a police officer.
Those are two very different worlds.
One taught me a great deal about food, preparation, timing and working with what is available. The other was an entirely different chapter of my life and taught lessons of its own.
Eventually, I changed direction again.
Blogging changed my life for the better.
What began as a way of publishing useful information online gradually showed me that it was possible to build something of my own. It gave me a different kind of freedom and eventually became much more than something I did on the side.
Today, that journey continues with Home Time Goodness.
And if you take a look at the walkway photograph below, that is probably a pretty good picture of how I see this stage of my life: still moving forward, still learning, and very interested in where the path leads next.
Yes, a Former Chef Is Behind Some of These Recipes
Food has a special place on Home Time Goodness because it has been part of my life for a very long time.
As a former chef, I probably approach the kitchen a little differently. I like understanding why something works, but I also believe food has to survive the realities of an ordinary home kitchen.
Ingredients run out. The eggs are smaller than expected. A recipe says 30 minutes and the bread clearly needs longer. Sometimes the flour you planned to use is not the flour sitting in the cupboard.
That doesn’t mean dinner is cancelled.
It means you cook.
That professional background still influences the way I think about recipes, but Home Time Goodness is not a restaurant kitchen. The recipes here are made at home, photographed at home and written for people cooking at home.
Some experiments have surprised even me. A soft loaf of bread mixed with little more than a rubber spatula, a blender bread that needed only one short rise, or a chocolate cake covered in a glaze so rich and glossy that I knew I had to show you what happened.
If you look at the food photograph below, you’ll understand why some recipes simply refuse to leave the kitchen without having their picture taken first.
I Also Like Building Things With My Hands
My interest in home doesn’t stop at cooking or cleaning.
I build furniture too.
There is something deeply satisfying about starting with timber, an idea and a collection of separate pieces, then gradually watching them become something useful enough to earn a permanent place inside a home.
I enjoy the problem-solving as much as the finished piece. Measuring, cutting, fitting, correcting mistakes, finishing the wood and figuring out how to make the idea in my head actually stand up in the real world are all part of it.
If you look at the photograph below, you can see one of those projects while it was still being worked on. At that stage it was timber, carved details, separate components and a lot of work still to be done.
The photograph that follows tells the better half of the story.
That same piece eventually made its way inside and became part of the room. That transformation—from something being worked on to something actually being lived with—is one of my favorite things about DIY.
My Education Is Extremely Prestigious
Of course, not all of my education has been quite so formal.
When it comes to DIY and the countless things I have taught myself over the years, I am also a proud honors graduate of the highly prestigious and notoriously complex institution known as YouTube University.
The admission requirements were brutal.
Apparently, all I needed was an internet connection and enough stubbornness to keep watching until I figured out what I was doing.
Jokes aside, I genuinely believe that learning how to teach yourself is one of the most useful skills a person can develop.
I don’t expect to know how to do everything. If I don’t know something, I research it. I look at how experienced people approach it. I ask questions. I try it. Sometimes I make mistakes. Then I adjust and try again.
That philosophy is a big part of Home Time Goodness.
You don’t have to know everything about gardening to grow something. You don’t need a workshop full of expensive equipment to attempt a useful DIY project. And you certainly don’t need to be a professional chef to make good food at home.
Sometimes you just need somebody to show you where to begin.
I know that because some of the things I enjoy doing today started exactly that way.
Years ago, my wife and I decided to invite family over for a barbecue. There was one small problem: we didn’t have enough seating.
So on the same day everyone was coming over, I went to the hardware store, bought some lumber and turned to what I jokingly call YouTube University for a few ideas. By the time our guests arrived, I had built the benches we needed.
My wife took one look at them and apparently reached a much bigger conclusion than I had.
She decided I should build the furniture for our house.
And that’s pretty much what happened.
Over time, she would come up with ideas for pieces she wanted, and I would figure out how to bring them to life. Beds and headboards, bedside tables, desks, dining tables, coffee tables and other pieces followed. What started because we simply needed somewhere for family to sit became a skill I never knew I had.
That’s one of the reasons I believe so strongly in trying things.
You don’t always need to know how the whole journey is going to work before you begin. Sometimes you need a problem worth solving, a willingness to learn and somewhere useful to start.
That’s a large part of what I want Home Time Goodness to be for the people who find it.
And since my wife has already made her way into this story, I might as well introduce her properly.
Home Time Goodness may have my name on the articles, but the life behind it has never been a one-person story. She’s been there through the ideas, experiments, projects, changes in direction and more than a few occasions when one of my little ideas became something much bigger than either of us expected.
The photo above is one of those moments when we put everything else aside and simply enjoyed the life we’re building together.
Home Time Goodness Is About a Home That Gets Used
The homes I find interesting aren’t museum pieces.
Things spill. Faucets develop limescale. Cabinets collect grease. Furniture gets scratched. Gardens acquire pests that apparently did not receive an invitation. Bread dough behaves differently when the weather is warm. And every now and then, something growing outside decides it would also like to live inside.
That is home life.
So when I write about cleaning, gardening, food or DIY, I want the information to be practical enough to use in an actual home.
Home Time Goodness is where I document what works, what I learn and what might make the next person’s job a little easier.
That is also why you will see so many original photographs throughout this site. They aren’t decoration added after an article is finished. In many cases, the photographs are part of the evidence.
Building Something Bigger Than a Blog
Home Time Goodness is still growing, but my ambition for it is much larger than simply publishing another collection of articles.
I want to build a household brand.
I want Home Time Goodness to become a place people remember when they need help with something around the house—a cleaning problem, a garden question, a recipe worth trying or a project they finally decided to tackle themselves.
The name matters to me because it leaves room for all of those things.
Home. Time. Goodness.
A good home isn’t created by one enormous gesture. It is built gradually through the meals, repairs, projects, routines, experiments and little improvements that happen over time.
That is the world this site belongs to.
And Then There Is George Stiebel
There is another side to this story too.
I am an entrepreneur at heart, and I am fascinated by people who built something substantial from what they had available to them.
That is one reason my visits to Devon House in Kingston have stayed with me. The story behind the place makes it more than beautiful architecture and somewhere to spend an afternoon.
And yes, if you look at the photograph below, you may notice that I appear particularly comfortable there.
There is a reason for that.
I’m after some of that George Stiebel energy.
The line makes me laugh, but the idea behind it is serious.
I want to build things that last.
Not just furniture. Not just articles. Not just traffic statistics on a screen.
Something with an identity. Something useful. Something capable of growing beyond the person who started it.
Home Time Goodness is part of that ambition.
Welcome to Home Time Goodness
So that is a little about me and a lot about why this website exists.
I’m Zach Sawe—former chef, former police officer, publisher, furniture builder, enthusiastic experimenter and distinguished graduate of YouTube University.
But Home Time Goodness isn’t supposed to be about collecting titles.
It is about putting useful knowledge to work.
If something here helps you make a better meal, rescue a stubborn surface, solve a garden problem, build something with your hands or simply make your home feel a little better than it did yesterday, then the site is doing exactly what I built it to do.
Welcome to Home Time Goodness.
Shelter. Comfort. Goodness.