Right, nappies!
In terms of trials, you'll need to do some searching. Purple originally gave me a website to look at, but I can't find it. However, lots of local authorities give away samples/trials (or do for a low cost) so you can look at and experiment with the different types of nappies. Mine, from Essex, cost £10, and for that you got three reusable nappies to try. We bought them long before Iz was born and played with them - to assess which DH liked most he tested them all out on a teddy bear!
Fill Your Pants is a great resource (and a good place to buy them, or at least scope out your needs!). Somewhere on there there's a nappy questionnaire, where you can fill in your details and what you think you'd prefer and they'll recommend nappy types for you.
The nappies we have are the Itti Bitti Bitti Tuttos. From an asthetics point of view I love them - they look so cute! Practically, they're pretty easy to use - they are an outer bit (soft, waterproof, adjusts to the various sizes), and then they come with three soakers inside. You can clip them together to create different absorpencies - I tend to use one big one folded over or a small and a medium one together during the day (two levels of absorption), then put a third in at night. We deliberately went for one size ones as we wanted them to last! We also use the flushable liners, which is so much nicer poo-wise (though for the particularly explosive nappies they sometimes need some washing as well!). Washing wise, we tend to put ours through a rinse cycle, then a 1 hour quick wash at 60 degrees. A single normal wash would probably be enough, we're just used to using our 1 hour wash for everything!
At the moment we're using these nearly all the time, with the occasional disposable when we run out and don't notice, and sometimes when we go out for extended periods of time. Washing wise, we only have 12, and so are washing roughly every couple of days - sometimes more if we have a particularly nappy heavy day. I'm looking to buy more as soon as they're next on offer, or as soon as there's an offer on something similar we like the look of.
As Whims said, you can easily switch between disposables and reusables whenever you feel the need, which is what we've been doing. There's not much difference in performance as far as we've seen - we've had occasional leaks with both types of nappies.
As I said, the cost was a huge factor for us. Nappies like these are often on sale to encourage people to invest - we bought our set of 12 when they were, and I think we spent around £130. Considering you spend over £1000 on nappies over a baby's life time, that's a huge saving! Even with using some disposables, we'll still have saved money as well as saving on nappies going to landfill. We'll probably augment our stash a little bit, but I can't imagine we'll have spent more than £200 by the end of it. The liners we get are about £3 a roll for 100 (though you can get them cheaper), and then it's just the cost of detergent and the washing machine - which can be very little if you have a nice economic machine like we do :) Storage wise, we have a plastic bin in her bedroom lined with a mesh bag that we simply chuck in the wash when the time comes, meaning no need to handle dirty nappies! We haven't had any problems with it smelling Fluffy, though I've heard about tea tree - need to buy some just in case!
Of course, there's nothing wrong with disposables either. I know my mother feels a bit confused by the reusables, and if she doesn't catch on, Iz will wear disposables when she's staying there. We weighed up all the positives and negatives and decided they were the right decision for us - and so far so good!
Ramble over...