Five Frugal Things we did when we moved house….

We bought a project house. 

It’s live-able but it definitely needs work and we have so many plans to turn it into our home. We plan to do most of the work ourselves gradually so we know we can stick to a tight budget – and it needs to be a tight budget based on the amount of work that we need to do and the plans we have.  😁

So, life’s going to be very busy for the foreseeable. 

It’s actually been a month since we moved in but I’ve not been well so haven’t really updated you since then which means now that I’ve had my operation and am starting to feel better, I have SO much to share. 

Now that I’m on the mend, I want to bring you along with us as we transform our house and today is the start of that as I’m going to share a few things that we did when we first moved house to save us some money. 

The first one is possibly the most important. 

1) We accepted that we could not and would not be in a position to make this house perfect in any kind of a hurry. 

We have so many plans and ideas for this house but we want to take the time to enjoy life and we’ll gradually make the changes when time and money allows us to. 

Saying that though, it’s still been a super busy month since we moved in as we had lots of jobs that were what we considered ‘essential’ that we’ve tried to get done as well as lots of smaller jobs that we’ve done as they were quick wins for us but now we’re at the point where most of these jobs are done so it’s slow down time. 

We now have a master list of jobs that we need to do in each room and we’ll work through that together slowly.

Doing it this way means that we can save money too as we’re in no rush to do the rest of the jobs so we can look out for bargains. For example, one job on the list is to replace our front door but rather than just buy the first one we see that we like, we have time to search on Marketplace and eBay as well as our local reclamation yards. 

Similarly, we have a light on our upstairs landing that we wanted something special for but rather than rush in, we lived with just a plain bulb dangling for the first month until we found the most perfect chandelier style light that we picked up for less than a fiver. It’s exactly what we wanted and was such a bargain. 

2) This is the ‘after’ picture of our fireplace. 

It’s painted in Farrow and Ball’s ‘Dimity’ colour and the walls of our dining room are painted in their ‘Dead Salmon’ colour. 

We loved the colours and they are perfect for our room but Farrow and Ball is pretty expensive so we took the colour tester cards to the paint mixing counter in B&Q and asked them to colour match the samples in their Valspar paint so we got the colours we wanted but for half the price. 

3) The curtains that were up in our new living room has seen better days and were a bit yellowed but actually, they were a really good quality fabric so we decided to have a go at dying them before we bought new ones to replace them. 

I used one Dylon Machine Dye Pod for each curtain and I went for the plum red colour which I thought would give me a deep plum colour but because of the amount of fabric for each curtain, the colour is more muted than I thought it would be. 

Even though they’re not as deep as I was expecting, I was still over the moon with the way they turned out as they are such a lovely fabric and the windows are so big that it would have cost a fortune to get similar new. The colour also matches the accents in the carpet in our living room which is staying put until we have the time, energy and funds to take it up and restore the floorboards that are currently hidden under it. 

4) We’ve used Marketplace to source things we’ve needed and also to sell the things we no longer needed. 

We weren’t keen on the wall lights on our fireplace wall as they were a bit too shiny so we sold them for £10 and bought ones that we loved for £15. 

The new matt black lights look so much better than the shiny gold ones that we took down in our room but the people who picked up the gold ones said how they would look perfect in their living room so it was a win, win situation.

5) Before Christmas, we bought the most amazing dining table and matching sideboard with the intention of making the dining room in our new house a lovely room for everyone to gather in. We wanted a table that everyone could sit around comfortably and the room is such a big room that we knew it could easily take a big table. 

We spotted the perfect table in a local vintage shop and knew it was exactly what we wanted so we bought it straight away which was a bit of a risk as it was much too big for the dining room we had at the time so if the move had fallen through, it would have been a bit of a squeeze. 

It fits perfectly in the room we have no though and we’re able to have it fully extended even though we don’t have all the chairs around it as that would be overkill for day to day. 😁

Not long after we moved in, there was a table related incident. 😁

Someone (not us) stood on our lovely table to reach the ceiling and they lost their balance which tipped the table and snapped the legs beyond repair. 

We were gutted but determined that we would save the table but replacement legs online similar to the ones we needed were upwards 0f £180 each which was a lot. To try and save some money, we spent time looking on Marketplace and in local charity shops for tables with similar legs that we could use for our table but we had no luck so we started to explore other options including cast iron style legs which in our desperation, we thought would do us rather than getting rid of the table. 

We gave ourselves time to find what we needed though rather than rush it which turned out to be the best decision as when we’d first started looking, I’d saved the search on Marketplace so I’d get a notification if anything new was listed. We were over the moon to get a notification that someone had listed exactly what we needed, for the brilliant price of £30.

We collected them the next day and fit them to our table and we now have our lovely table again. 

It’s my favourite place in  the house to sit. 

I’d love you follow me on Twitter and it would be amazing to see you over on my Facebook page and on Instagram. If you’re interested, you can find out more about me here and while I’ve got your attention, if you’re wondering why some of my posts lately are a little bit less frugal then have a read of this post. 😉

Do your future self a favour – Pin this post for later.