Every week I share five frugal things that I’ve done during the previous week just to show you that the small things you do all add up to a great frugal lifestyle where you can learn to live a fabulously frugal life.
Hey!
1) This first one is one of those where I feel obliged to say (again) that saving money isn’t about being ‘tight’ or about not buying the things you want to buy – it’s simply about saving money where you can so you have more money to spend on the things you want to spend money on. Unfortunately, the ‘Diary of a family who spend intentionally as they like to have fun and buy nice stuff’ wasn’t available when I set this blog up all those years ago. 😁
Anyway, I’ve been looking for a large tote bag for a little while that I can take out when I have my daily wander into our village or around the boot sale or farmers market.
I spotted a Lulu Guinness tote that I loved which was £20 + £4.95 P&P on the Lulu Guinness website and although I know it’s not everyone’s taste, I did love it and it was the perfect size and style for what I wanted so I was about to buy it but I just thought I’d check and see if I could get it any cheaper before I did.
I literally just searched the bag name and hit the shopping tab on Google and I found it for sale on Brand Alley for £9.99 with free P&P so that’s a saving of £15 in less than 15 seconds.
That’s £15 saved so I can spend it on filling the bag – if that’s not spending intentionally then I don’t know what is. 😁 🛍
2) I’ve been looking for a second pair of sunglasses to leave in my car as we have two cars (actually four but that’s a whole other story) and I always seem to leave mine in one car and then need them when I’m out in the other car.
I didn’t want to spend much as I just wanted them as a back up for when I take the other car out and forget to grab my sunglasses. But then I saw these in a charity shop and loved them…
At £12, they were pricier than I’d expect for a pair of used sunglasses but then I realised they were actually vintage Emanuel Ungaro and a quick check of their value on Google told me they were worth a lot more than £12. 💸
I bought them and I do love them so I decided to keep them but I’ve seen the exact same pair (without the original case that I got with mine) selling for upwards of £175 so I’m very tempted to put them up for sale for that price and just use them until someone comes along and wants to spend silly money on a pair of sunglasses.
3) I popped to Asda the other night to return a parcel and I spotted these bits in the yellow sticker section…
It looks like the big bags that the pizza counter use as pizza toppings so I got a big bag of chopped red onion and a big bag of sliced mushrooms which are both things I use regularly when cooking. They’ll see me through the next couple of week’s worth of omelettes and cauliflower fried rice dishes which are my diabetic staples when it comes to quick and easy meals.
4) It’s been a good while since I’ve been able to go bowling and do anything other than watch but a couple of weeks ago my surgeon said he was pleased with my progress and I could start to do things again so I’ve been building up gradually and this week, we decided to try bowling.
Rather than just turn up and book, I looked on the website on the drive over to see if they had any deals on and we got 2 games and a drink for £10 each which is only about £1.50 more than just one game would have cost if we’d just booked when we got there.
I’m all about doing the fun stuff but getting the best deal possible and the time it took to book in the car (which saved us time booking when we got there anywhere) got us a much better deal which included a drink we would have obviously bought when we were there anyway.
You can see from the scores that I didn’t do amazingly well but I was a bit nervous so I didn’t put much effort in to my throws although let’s be honest, I probably wouldn’t have scored much more even if I had. 🎳
We had a lovely night and the money saved is money we can spend on something else.
5) When we moved in, there was a pair of really good quality curtains hanging in our living room. I think I’ve shared before that they were a yellow cream colour which I hated but we’d decided that we weren’t going to redecorate the living room for a little while so I didn’t want to spend a fortune on curtains when they could need replacing when we decorated later in the year. I ended up dying them with a Dylon washing machine pod.
They didn’t come out as deep as I’d hoped as there was just so much fabric to be dyed but I do love the colour they turned out so I’m OK with it. For now. 😁
They are a lovely heavy fabric and clearly great quality but they’re definitely old vintage and we realised when we were re-hanging them that some of the curtain tape where you attach the curtain hooks was starting to fray to the point where the hooks have nothing to be attached to.
We managed to work with it and just about got all the hooks in but some were literally attached by a couple of threads so it was no surprise when we cleaned the windows last weekend and disturbed the curtains that some of the last threads snapped causing them to pull away from the rail at points.
This caused big gaping gaps in the curtains and caused them not to hang right which I couldn’t cope with and despite several attempts at poor humour from my partner telling me to pull myself together and get over it, I decided now was the time to get some new curtains.
Because of the size of our windows, we’re pretty much looking at the largest sizes you can buy at 90 inches width and 108 inches drop so you can imagine the prices for a new pair of curtains, can’t you? It was also going to have to be a neutral colour as we don’t know what we’re going to do with the room when we do end up decorating and they were so expensive for something so meh so we decided that we’d rather wait to buy curtains that match our room when we decorate and that we’d do a DIY job on these curtains.
We bought some curtain tape from Amazon for about £6 and in no time at all, we had the curtains down, old curtain tape out, new curtain tape sewn in and had them back up again.
Look! No gaps at the top now. 😁
The photo doesn’t show the colour up very nicely – I promise they’re nicer in real life haha.
There you go, hope you enjoyed seeing what I’ve been getting up to this week!
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