Frugal Fridays #4

Successes:

1. Both our coffee maker and toaster oven died recently and we decided not to replace them. (Don’t worry. I have a french press coffee maker, as well as one of these things). I also have our camping percolator. Lots of coffee back-up.  I realized that I can toast things faster and in larger quantities under the broiler, and I prefer the counter space anyway.
2. My grocery budget ran low about the same time we ran out of paper napkins, so I cut cloth napkins out of an old sheet (pictured above). I’ve been meaning to make a switch over to cloth napkins for a while anyway, but didn’t have the opportunity to purchase fabric or pre-made cloth napkins. Being in a situation where I needed to make do with what I had led me to my linen closet. I have a box of misfit sheets that was given to me a couple of years ago….perfect solution and didn’t cost a dime! I just cut them into 9inx9in squares, sewed right sides together, flipped right side out, and then top stitched.
3. I was able to find turkey on sale for .48 cents per pound with no minimum purchase. I bought two for the freezer and hope to go back to buy a couple more depending on the budget situation.
4. Our furnace has been off the last 3 days even though the temps have been in the 20’s. Our new pellet stove keeps us gloriously warm with the pellets we purchased on sale over the summer.
5. We were given 2 gallons of milk. Our church Thanksgiving feast was earlier this week and they had an excess of milk. They offered them to all of the families with young children rather than letting it spoil.
6. I processed 4 more of my pie pumpkins. There are still 4 or 5 more that I need to get to.
7. We were given some baby items by a family friend. We’ll go through and see what we already have and donate duplicates to the crisis pregnancy center.
8. I noticed some of our produce was going bad faster than expected, so I moved around the monthly meal plan to accommodate using them up before it was too late.
9. We put up window plastic to insulate from the cold.

Fumbles:

1. That homemade yogurt from powdered milk that I mentioned last week? FAIL. I’m not sure what went wrong, but I don’t think I’ll be trying that again any time soon. It was gross. That was a waste of about 6 cups of powdered milk, so I wasn’t too happy about it.

Goals:

1. I’d like to get a couple more turkeys in the freezer before the Thanksgiving sales are over. I’ll need to talk to the husband about that.
2. I’m going to go through some of our books and post some on paperbackswap.com and hopefully earn some credits to use toward books that I’d like for our home school.
3. We need to organize children’s clothes. It’s bad. I’m looking into large family solutions for clothing storage and organization. I’ll likely end up buying some sort of shelving. I like what this mom has for her 5 boys. Since baby #5 is a boy, we’re going to have 4 boys in one bedroom….that’s a lot of dressers. We have sufficient space, if the space is utilized efficiently. Hopefully I can find good deals on the shelving (or whatever we decided on).
4. Continue working on the handmade Christmas gifts.

So, how did you save money this week?

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