you did great! I want one of those here!Quote:
Originally Posted by rosarugosa
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you did great! I want one of those here!Quote:
Originally Posted by rosarugosa
Bought some holiday wrap for next year at 50 cents a roll at 50% off at Dollar Store. 75% off holiday stuff at CVS. Picked up some holiday hand lotions for next year for office exchange and some candy gift boxes for some family visits this New Years Eve weekend. Holding off for grocery shopping as a grocery store near us does a big can-can sale in January where I stock up on olive oil, cooking oil, canned beans and detergent, but did stock up on some boneless chicken at $1.79 per pound as well as some store made sausage to have on New Years' Day with DS and DDIL. Have had a very spendy month. Stayed pretty much within budget for Christmas gifts, but due to not planning, did not have a lot of home made meals during week at home.
Nice scores, Cindy! Sounds like you'll be starting out the New Year with some good homemade meals.
I have a few for the month:
*My drying rack broke but I looked through my dad's old toolbox that he recently passed on to me and found a screw that was just the right size. Good as new!
*I couldn't get my seat belt to latch the other day. I took a flashlight and looked inside and realized that a tissue had somehow gotten squished down in there and torn to shreds. 30 minutes and some random thin pieces of metal from around the house and I got it out. I'm sure a mechanic would have charged me a ton.
*Went on some day trips with the family this month. Packed sandwiches, snacks and drinks so there were no food expenses.
*I've been trying to eat a few meatless dinners a week. Lentil tacos, homemade pizza and pasta/veggie combos have become family favorites and are definitely keeping grocery costs down.
*My phone's car charger also broke this month (this has been quite the month for things breaking!). I looked through my glove box and found an old charger with a USB port. I'm able to hook my new(er) phone into that but I just have to bring my wall charger back and forth from the car.
*Made cream of turkey soup tonight with leftover Thanksgiving turkey and homemade stock from the freezer and the last bit of some cream cheese in the fridge.
*I picked up a part time job every other Sunday. It's about a 45 minute drive from my house but I get paid $200 for 4 hours so it's worth it. Plus the job is right near a friend's house so my daughter goes to play with my friend's daughter while I'm working and I get in quick visits with my friend afterward.
*Made homemade granola for a few Christmas gifts this year. I've already had a call asking for more :)
*For my daughter's teacher's gift, my daughter made her a coaster during kid's craft time at our local Michael's ($2), I got a mug on clearance and a box of tea on sale/combined with a coupon. Much less expensive than previous years' teacher gifts.
*This one wasn't on purpose but we couldn't get our act together to do Christmas cards this year. I thought about doing New Year's cards but realized that by the time we pay for the cards and stamps we're spending close to $200. It's just not in the budget this year.
By the way, I LOVE Reny's. We're about 10 miles from one and we always get great bargains when we go. We did a little Christmas shopping there this year.
Gettingthere: We do a few meatless meals each week too, usually eggs, homemade pizza, quesadilla's, entree salad ( sometimes we include chicken or fish on the salad, but sometimes not). Good work with the repairs instead of hiring/replacing.
You are lucky to live near a Reny's, I think. I'll admit that I cannot resist shopping when I'm in Portland, but since Reny's opened, I can scratch that shopping itch affordably and pick up some practical things we really need for reasonable money. So Reny's actually turns out to be a frugal for me. I used to always pick up mustard at Stonewall Kitchen in Portland, but last year I discovered Raye's at Reny's, which is just as delicious for less than half the price. They seem to carry a fair number of locally-made products, and I like that. I've also read that they're a good employer with lots of loyal, long-term employees, so that's the kind of company we want to keep in business!
I got my wish for New Year's; we're staying home. :cool: Usually we visit friends of ours who host family and friends -- lots of people and babies and pets coming and going. It's kind of a zoo, really, and it calls for shopping for and preparing a dish to share with the group and getting by with a lot of other carb-y processed food that we're better off not eating. The hosts like to make an afternoon and a night and a morning of it (more carb-y processed food and a long lingering goodbye). It may sound as if I don't like these people; I do, for the most part (we don't discuss politics and now I can discuss babies). But a solid 24 hours of being cooped up in their house... DW wasn't up for that much partying this year, either.
So instead we're staying home. On NYE I'm cooking a steak, sweet potatoes (as steak fries), and broccoli, all of which was on sale at the local market. On NY Day I'm cooking a soup called ozōni, traditionally served in Japan for New Year's. I had to buy a few ingredients, but I had most of them in the house already. So it will be a low-cost low-energy low-drama New Year's.
Lots of no-drive days lately. Still cooking lots of meals out of a freezer stocked with sale items. My mom is emptying her basement freezer and is giving it to us because she just doesn't get to the food in it fast enough. I think we will, so we're happy to take it and it comes at the best price (it's also new enough to not be an energy hog). And it will help with my goal of reducing our food expenses 10% next year.
Last year we started replacing the 40-plus-year-old windows in our house. The first window came with a bit of sticker shock, but we chalked that up to it being by far the biggest window in the house. But even with two estimates for the next windows to be replaced, sticker shock is setting in. The payback on these windows will be far longer than we ever anticipate being in this house. And most of the windows are still in decent shape. Taking cost out of these new windows will leave us with windows that aren't be appreciably better than the ones we have. So I think we're putting the brakes on a purchase that would have cost us around $10 grand over the next few years and just will replace the windows that fail.
On to a more frugal 2016!
Been a mostly frugal week over here. Sure, I splurged on a few items at the grocery store for my SIL and BIL's visit earlier this week, but it's all food that will get eaten so it's not a huge deal. Been doing lots of home cooking as a result. Made a huge pot of carrot-lentil soup with carrots I picked for free from the rooftop farm in NYC on Christmas Eve day. Then made a crockpot full of black beans from dry beans. Now we've got plenty of freezer meals or elements of freezer meals ready to go. I also baked mint chocolate cupcakes and realized that although they are good, I much prefer the denser nature of muffins to cupcakes. So in the future muffins will be on the agenda when the urge to bake something chocolate-y presents itself. Last but not least, I tried my hand at making sot suppe (sweet soup), a Norwegian holiday favorite AKA fruit soup. It is essentially dried fruit made into a soup-like concoction. It came out pretty good, but nobody else was all that excited about eating it, so I won't be making that on a regular basis.
We had our first snowstorm of the season and cleared the snow ourselves. Can't believe we used to pay someone to do that job. Although, the sheet of ice that covered the snow made it a real nightmare to clear so maybe it would have been worth it to pay someone else just this once!
Did splurge a bit this week and joined the YMCA so that I can swim with the Masters swim team. Fortunately, this particular Y is very close to work and practice is 6:30am-7:30am MWF and I teach at 8:00am. So there's real additional driving involved during the semester, just a need to get up earlier and be super organized. I've been to two practices already and am very happy to be back in the water so the expense will be well worth it!
Tallied our grocery/household goods expenses for 2015. Sheesh. Need to do better in 2016. But at least now I know the numbers and can make decisions and changes based on that information. We'll be eating a lot more beans and rice this next year; I'll be baking loaves of English muffin bread for toasting instead of buying pre-made bagels; and we'll be making more of an effort to grow and preserve our own food. I'd like to get the annual number down by 20%, but I'd be happy with a 15% reduction. I would have said 10%, but that just seems too easy and is a goal that allows a high degree of laziness on my part.
This is a very wise decision. I investigated this thoroughly after buying that SC house with mid century modern metal windows. Here is a great article about the wisdom of your decision:Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveinMN
http://thecraftsmanblog.com/replacem...he-real-story/
I thought this idea intriguing, for the Northern climates:
http://www.indowwindows.com/storm-wi...aign=Affiliate
A great example of placing variable value on advice depending on the obvious bias of the source. Frugality is making people earn your money instead of just throwing it away. Nice website for an alternative to sending off perfectly good technology to the dump.Quote:
Originally Posted by rodeosweetheart
My husband made indoor storms for the living room, dining room and 2 kitchen windows. I like to have the ability to open a window or two in the winter so none in the bedroom and bath. However, they have worked very well. He made a simple pine frame of 1 x 2s and I covered them with the hair dryer plastic. We screwed them in and they make a huge difference in our comfort level. They are hardly noticeable, easy to install and easy to remove in the spring. They are in addition to the outdoor aluminum storm windows. Our hand person keeps pushing replacement, but I just can't see doing that. We did get replacement windows in the basement as those two were rotten clear through. They look fine.
I'll have to try that mustard. We live down the street from the Stonewall flagship store and I try very hard to avoid going in there because I always want to spend big. I can usually avoid the food but I do like a good spicy mustard. What I have a hard time saying no to is all the beautiful dishes and bakeware.Quote:
Originally Posted by rosarugosa
NYE will be mostly frugal for us too. We're going to visit my SIL in the White Mountains. It's a bit of a drive (about an hour and a half) but my MIL is bringing pizza, I'm bringing homemade Chex mix and we'll play cards and laugh a lot. I always enjoy our cards nights so I'm looking forward to it.
Agreed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Williamsmith
I will say, however, that Sidler (The Craftsman Blog) has his own obvious bias in that he makes replacement windows and window components. There are far better manufacturers -- and warranties -- out there than Jeld-Wen's and Pella's, but he's chosen those companies to set the bar his company clears. It's his blog, it's his choice. But it's a little like claiming that there is no fried chicken in the world better than mine because KFC and Popeye's chicken is what people buy the most. It may be great fried chicken but there's stiffer competition out there if one cares to look.
Our situation is different in that we don't have one of those charming beautifuldrafty amateur-builtold houses. There are dozens of our model of house in and around St. Paul, and many dozens more, by the same builder, built from similar floorplans. They're all "machines for living", as Corbusier put it, but without Corbusier's styling touch. There are no hardwood floors or built-ins or charming architectural details. I'm fine with that. But it makes the replacement of non-kiln-dried-wood mass-produced builder-grade windows a very different equation than the one Sidler presents. At least these were double-pane to start with (this is Minnesota).
So we'll stay the course. I'd already added a bunch of insulation to the attic and had a blower test energy audit (got good marks from that). We’ve wanted to put an egress window into the basement for some time, so some window money will be directed to that. I'm sure we can find places to spend that kind of money. ;)
We did replace all the windows in our 1830 upstate New York farmhouse. But none of them were the originals--they were horrible 1970 Pellas that had once contained gas and now leaked and contained water condensation. When we replaced them, we did realize energy savings. But they weren't the originals and had no endearing or enduring features.
We bought them one by one at the weird overstock window/door store and my husband put them all in himself, which was good because there was a lot of carpentry involved with the old jams.(sills? --basically, retrofitting the holes since nothing on an old house is standard.)
My sister-in-law in Corning DID have original window and opted to up her storm game and I think might have added some of the interior storms. Those intrigue me greatly.
I have read many articles in the past year, though, that come to the same conclusion that you did, Steve, that replacing windows is not automatically a good idea, even though all the realtors we talk to seem to think it is.
He also replaced all the windows in our South Carolina house and I think that one was a mistake, my mistake, although again, we did save on air conditioning afterwards.
As far as the windows go ...... in the house I sold....a brick ranch custom built by the original owner in 1959..the Windows were the type that you wind out and condensation caused water damage on the sills and some of the hardware was inoperable. So it seemed to make sense.
I purchased vinyl replacement windows through a friend and had them delivered to the house. The brand was Certainteed . I had hired the friend to I install but he died unexpectedly so I installed them myself with the help of my father in law. Did at least a dozen Windows. In the basement, I had an Amish man install those because it meant cutting out the metal frames and dealing with the concrete block. I didn't have time for that.
I planned on living in the house for at least 20 more years, which I did so with some of the insulation issues plus the energy efficiency tax deductions, I think it was the right choice for the right time. Also, myself and my father in law for the first ten years or so of living there did all the work. That saved tons of money on labor.
On another frugal note, I went to a nearby Dairy Queen and walked out with an 8" circular ice cream cake for my sons birthday.....no charge. I had a punch card....buy four get the fifth one free. that's a savings of $23. Good way to finish the year out.