A little shopping last week -- frugal-style

With one daughter home most of last week (before her summer job began), we took some time to do a little shopping.

There are a couple of areas nearby with a selection of thrift stores. So, on Thursday, the two of us went thrifting. We hit 5 stores, and bought a total of 4 items between us, 2 of which were mine.

Here's what I bought:

A really great condition bath mat for the upstairs bathroom, to replace the fraying 15 year old mat. ($1.99) A good deal, considering it was in great condition.

And a butter warmer, by Farberware. Butter warmers are small saucepans, with a pour spout. Not just for warming butter, these are great for heating a cup of milk, cocoa, making fudge sauce for ice cream sundaes, or making small batches of gravy. A while ago, I had been looking at one of these by All-Clad, but priced at about $100, I nixed that thought. So I was delighted to find this one, by Farberware, for just $2.99. This model retails for about $20, and can be found on sale, or at Amazon, for about $10. It just needed a good scrub on the bottom, and good as new. For $2.99, I think I got a good deal.

I suppose I'm a rather particular shopper. In 5 stores, I only found 2 items (and spent just $5) that I wanted to buy. But we did have a great time shopping together.

Then on Friday, I had another $10 Kohl's coupon to use before the end of the weekend. I first hit the accessory department, where I found these sunglasses on clearance for $6 (originally $30). I've been needing sunglasses for a long time. And with summer just beginning, these will come in handy.

Next, I went up to the home decor department. The last time I was at Kohl's, I saw Christmas season door mats that I liked. But they were only marked down to $5 on that last shopping trip, so I had passed them up. Well, on Friday, they'd been marked down, again, to $2.49 (originally $24.99). "Pretty cheap" seems to be my price, so I picked up one of those.

That put me at $8.49. Needing to spend $10, before tax, I checked out the clearance candles and found a box of ivory tapers (6 tapers). I use tapers on the dining table for special occasions, so I knew these would be useful. The box was 70% off, at $2.99.

After tax and coupon, my out of pocket cost at Kohl's, for these 3 items, was $1.63. Not bad. What I love is how the receipts read. It assigns a portion of the $10 coupon to each item. So, the Christmas door mat cost 32 cents, the candles cost 38 cents, and the sunglasses cost 78 cents!


And finally, on Sunday. My daughter needed to return a purchase at Value Village. So I offered to drive her, and while there, we also went into St Vincent de Paul.

At Value Village, I found this linen pillowcase. I'd been pricing linen this past week, and one of the things I'd been looking for, while thrifting, was a linen table cloth, to use for the yardage, for a project for Christmas. Well, this linen pillowcase about jumped out at me. At 20 inches wide by 33 inches long, it's the perfect size to make 2 good-sized linen tea towels. I'll show you more about that project as I work on them. Anyways, $1.99 at Value Village, at not quite 1 yard of fabric. Plus the front hem is already done for me, with nice hem-stitch detailing.

And at St Vincent de Paul's, I found a cloth napkin to replace the one which went missing, months ago. Somehow, one of our burgundy cloth napkins has disappeared. 30 years ago, I bought 8 of these. They are a good color to go with the Toile de Jouy table cloth that I bought this winter. Twice now, I've used that new tablecloth with 8 at the table, only I've been short one cloth napkin. So, now I have a replacement and am back up to 8 in the set. To show you how close a match my find was, the napkin on the left is from the old set, and the one on the right is the "new" napkin. 49 cents plus tax. And if the lost one ever shows up, we have a spare to use in a basket for bread at the table.

A week's worth of shopping, and I spent less than $10, out of pocket.

Cheap & Cheerful Suppers for the first week of summer break

Friday

Black bean tacos
Carrot sticks
Fresh strawberries and sliced bananas

Saturday

Scrambled eggs
Fresh-baked bread and butter
Fresh strawberries

Sunday

Herb-crusted roast pork
Potato salad
Roasted vegetable medley
Strawberry, almond and mixed green salad
Dinner rolls
Watermelon pickles
Rhubarb-blackberry pie

Monday

Leftovers from Sunday

Tuesday

Egg Foo Yung with brown sauce
Brown rice
Oven-roasted carrots
Homemade English toffee

Wednesday

Garbanzo bean and vegetable soup, pureed
Dinner rolls (from last of refrigerator roll dough)
Fresh strawberries
English toffee

Thursday

Tomato-Florentine soup
Deviled eggs
Homemade bread
Fresh strawberries
Scratch cornstarch pudding (chocolate)


It's strawberry season in our garden. It looks like I have enough strawberries to pick, daily, for about 10 days, then the harvest will slow down. We're spoiled, I know. Our guests were delighted to have garden-fresh strawberries, last Sunday. I'm also using a lot of spinach this week, in salads, in the egg Foo Yung, and again last night in the tomato-Florentine soup. I have enough spinach in the garden for one more large picking, then we'll move onto something else.

I made a large batch of scratch cornstarch pudding yesterday afternoon -- 8 1/2-cup portions. We managed to fall behind in milk consumption. And with one freezer unplugged, we're low on freezer space for freezing surplus milk. Pudding it is! Two of my kids were home when I made it, and 2 servings were gobbled up before it even cooled. If you use a box for pudding, you really should give scratch pudding a try. The ingredients list is simply sugar, salt, cornstarch, flavoring (cocoa powder or vanilla extract) and milk. And for me, yesterday, I was able to make a quart of pudding for about 75 cents, including the milk.

Eggs are even lower priced this week, $6.98 for 15 dozen, at Cash & Carry. That's 47 cents per dozen.  I am tempted! I have about 9 dozen in the fridge right now. We're using eggs in place of meat or cheese many nights per week. At 47 cents per dozen, egg salad sandwiches for lunches is a bargain. Hmmmm. (Can you see the wheels turning in my head?)

So tell me, what was on your menu this past week?

What does a couple of years of my frugality look like?

In addition to saving for repairs and replacements of appliances, vehicles, emergencies, etc, we also have a savings kitty for upgrades to the house. We have money transferred every month, out of our bank account into an investment, for the non-necessary, but lovely-to-have improvements to our home and vacations. This account could be tapped for an emergency, or it can add to our retirement funds, down the road. But every so often, we use this money for something nice to use or have, like capital improvements, which could add to the salability of our home, if need be.

We don't do a lot of DIY with these improvements, instead only doing, ourselves, those things we are most familiar and comfortable with. We have a contractor friend from church, who has done a good deal of our installation. So, we save in the extreme sense, for a couple of years, to afford a project like what we had done this spring.

In the last two years, what I DIDN'T spend money on, so we could save to cover this:

• mani-pedis
• professional hair cuts and color
• new shoes, new handbags
• lunches in restaurants with friends
• fast food meals 
• dinners in local restaurants (except one birthday dinner, last November)
• new car
• extravagant travel
• convenience/packaged foods
• air conditioning for the house in summer
• winter heat enough to wear a t-shirt, indoors, in December, January, February
• knick-knacks, chotchkes, trinkets, novelties or thingamajigs
• department store cosmetics
• new books, new cds
• expensive hobbies and collections
• theater movies
• dvd rentals
• bouquets of flowers
• expensive birthday gifts or Christmas gifts for myself & husband
• new linens, just because I wanted a new color (I did replace the torn sheets for my bed)
• expensive new clothing
• brand-loyalty for products like laundry detergent, bathroom tissue, foods, toothpaste, soap, coffee, OTC meds
• coffeehouse coffee AKA Starbuck's (except with gift cards) 
• pets
• candy bars or other treats at the check-out of most stores (even Ace Hardware has candy bars at the check-out!)
• smartphone
• car wash places (I wash the car, myself with the hose)
• gardening services
• newspaper delivery
• new toys, gadgets, gizmos
• temporary indulgences, to be enjoyed only fleetingly

So, that about sums up where our money didn't go. Here's where all that I could have spent, but didn't, went instead. Our living room makeover. (I didn't take any before pictures. I rarely do. If it's bad enough for me to want to redo it, the last thing I want to do is take pictures of that ugly.)

the living room as you enter from the entry hall

the fireplace surround was dark brick,
the contractor over-layed Home Depot marble tile
the mirror over the fp is from Kohl's, on sale 50% off,
then $10 off coupon, I paid $39 (orig. $99)
the electric fireplace is new, puts out heat, too.
stuff on mantel gathered from other parts of the house

built-in bookcases, contractor built with paint-grade plywood,
for less $$$ than Home Depot cabinetry/bookcases
the small writing desk is a family piece, repurposed from another room,
it folds up and stands against the wall in the background, when not in use

a spot for my great grandmother's tea set,
on top of a garage sale cabinet (paid $40) that once housed
a Victrola phonograph (1920s) -- needs refinishing/painting

this chair is a new purchase

that's a fitted slipcover, so I can change it out/launder it

the paisley "throw" is a pashmina from my closet,
the needlepoint cushion is from another room

this table is a new purchase, it fits the space better than the hand-me-down,
1970's-era, over-sized Parson's table from my parents' home.
used some of the "stuff" I had in cupboards, some family pieces of silver-plate
 that I love, and candle sticks that never seemed to get used

the view of the room from the French doors, to the entry hall

We rarely ever used this room before. It had some lay-out problems. The seal on the old double-paned windows had broken, and so were permanently fogged on the inside. The wood-burning fireplace meant that we were dragging dirty logs into the house, across white carpeting, and making a mess, if ever it were used. (Plus most of the heat just went up the chimney, when we burned wood.) This room is far from the furnace, and would feel the chill more than the family room, kitchen or dining room.

It's now bright, warm and serves multiple purposes. There's a conversation area with seating for 6, plus 2 additional chairs in the room, to seat up to 8 comfortably. The loveseat with the blue cushions is about 30 years old, and will "go" with the first kid to move out. I'd like to replace it with a single chair (similar to the one we just bought). It's really too big for the space. I reupholstered it 20 years ago, and the upholstery is still in decent shape. The larger sofa is from my parents' home, and is about 35 years old (also reupholstered once).


So, when I'm making all kinds of sacrifices in the grocery department and not buying convenience foods, or, you read that we don't eat in restaurants, not even fast food, or, that we eat beans for dinner 3 to 4 nights per week, or, we don't go to the movies, or, that I cut my own hair, etc -- this is where the money that is saved, goes. It took us a couple of years of extreme saving for this. We have no debts, no mortgage, no car loans, no credit card debt. And our retirement is still being funded, monthly. We save, in advance, for home improvements and repairs, so there will be no future debts. This is what my "extreme" frugality gives to us.