This post is a combination of March and April, since I missed it last month. Is there any better time to focus on frugality than in a pandemic?!
+ I borrowed and read six books from the library.
+ I recently had a winter coat and a pair of dress pants dry-cleaned and I forgot how expensive that is! To avoid that cost for awhile, I invested in an at-home dry cleaning “kit” (affiliate link). Hopefully it will work!
+ We had a bunch of old Jenga blocks strewn around the house – I’m not sure how they got all over the place and if we even had enough for a game! Inspired by this blog post, I gave two of the kids the blocks and our tempera paints and off they went! The blocks turned out beautifully and have been played with daily ever since. So fun to give a cast off toy a new life!
+ I gave Sophie and three of the boys haircuts.
+ One of our sinks was clogged and would not drain at all. I tried my handy declogger recipe with no luck, so off to the Internet I went. I learned that the issue might be the P-trap, so after watching a Youtube video, I got to work. I removed the P-trap with a wrench, sprayed everything out well with the hose and reattached the pieces back together. Definitely my favorite frugal accomplishment of the month.
+ I unsubscribed from almost a dozen email lists. Less temptation for things that aren’t on the priority list right now.
+ I used the paper created from shredding our junk mail for our compost pile.
+ We turned the heat off on March 12 and barring any random snow storms, we should be able to last awhile before we need to turn on the AC!
+ The big boys and I took out the remaining boxwood shrubs from our front flower beds and transplanted them in the backyard.
+ We’re saving tons of gas money by not going anywhere!
+ The rolling wheel part of the top rack of our dishwasher broke. Since we can’t really have any repairmen in the house right now, Mark did a little research, ordered the parts online and was able to fix it himself.
+ We’re making a garden! This is not exactly a cheap endeavor, but doing all of the work ourselves is saving us quite a bit of money. For example, Mark built all of the beds from untreated lumber, which was significantly cheaper than buying pre-made kits.
+ J and I made some garden markers for our veggies out of Sculpey clay and alphabet stamps (affiliate link). They are so perfectly imperfect and I love how they turned out!
+ Did you know that you can reuse parchment paper up to three times before throwing it away? This has been especially helpful right now when I can’t get to the grocery store often.
Your turn! What did you do to save a little money this month?
P.S. I’ve been pinning frugal ideas to this Pinterest board if you need some inspiration too!
Finding tutorials on how to fix things on Youtube is my favorite part of home owning — it feels SO rewarding. And those clay labels are darling!!
YES. It's so empowering!