Small money saving habits...petty even

[Buddy80]

Hi,

I was just thinking of some of the small habits i've gotten into from habit and though i'd share...

I know some of them have probably been mentioned before

Always break a dishwasher tab in half
Water down fabric conditioner to get 2 bottles instead of 1
Freeze unwanted bananas for cakes
Chop up apple cores for the birds
Save pumkin seeds for planting
Save envelopes for seeds from old calendars
Use old envelopes for shopping lists if not reused
This one is stingy [embarrassed]...intead of buying a calendar, I just print off monthly from on-line planner. It gets amended anyhow and easier just to put on pinboard
Save old flyers to make paper chains.
Add handful of porridge oats to make crumble go further

Every supermkt. sells white vinegar caughtin I sometimes add a drop or two of lavender essential oil (the cheapest place to buy it is Boots) to my vinegar spray and or the washing machine. Not always though 'cos as Booy says the smell goes quickly .

That's how I clean floors ppeat! Well, occasionally...

Now this is going to sound daft - but if you're nipping in to the supermarket for something (yes I know 'nipping in' is to be avoided, but....) always use a basket and not a trolley. Even if you're tired. It's amazing how the ease of pushing a trolley round can make you fill up with more goods than you really need. A basket keeps you alert, especially when it starts getting heavy.

Rarely I'm lucky in that the downstairs of the house is all quite dark tiles that don't show the dirt at all!! I have to remind myself to wash them they're cold though!

Im thirding the cut the boys hair thing. I only have a DH, and it can cost £8 every 4 weeks or so because he hates being scruffy. We recently bought a cutter from Boots (got my points) and we have used it twice so far. I am new to it, and he fortunately is happy with a no 2 all over, but I am getting quite good. Vidal Sassoon eat your heart out!
Ours came with the combs, and ear combs too so you can get a neat cut round the ear. (came with scissors and comb and all sorts) cost us £14.99. So it has already paid for itself. Hub is happy cos now he can have it cut whenever he wants, rather than having to wait for a day off or until we have cash. He moans like buggery is a dream when I do it, but he soon gets over it. I do make him strip off thought before I do it, and in our living room (with wooden floors) then he goes straight in the shower. Then it just sweeps up.
I am also interested in this insulating the bath thing. I have been known (after a nice bath bomb) to resuse the water in my cistern to flush the loo-smells nice.

I buy frozen raspberries, cheaper than fresh and they get mushy anyway...
After defrosting the fruit I save the juice and mix it with lots of icing sugar to form a thick paste, then use it to decorate cupcakes, muffins or tray bakes - colour looks lovely and it tastes gorgeous!
I keep leftover mix in the fridge,it lasts for weeks!
Same with frozen blueberries.

I use a permanent marker for school clothes, shoes, bags and write our surname only. I only use name tags if there's no obvious place to write or it won't show (on dark colours).

I soak the empty but dirty bin & lid or dirty plastic boxes in the kids' bath water (AFTER they finished having a bath, I'm not a monster!), then scrub and rinse everything including bath, still saving loads of water...

I also use the bathwater to soak off very muddy clothes, before washing.

Hubby packs kids lunches in takeaway boxes, better than bags or clingfilm, plus they have a "plate" to eat from.

I save up the oval shaped paper bits from tissue boxes (the bit you take out to get the tissues) and use them for shopping lists.

Socks - I tend to buy packs of 5 identical pairs, so if one goes missing and then another brakes you can match them up again.
To save time I put all clean socks in the sock box and get the kids to pair up and put away what they can about twice a week - it saves my time! If they don't do it, they have to rummage in a hurry as I refuse to deal with socks for 8 people!!!!

I also cut away the foot part of socks, the remaining tubes are great for: keeping cold compress on arms & legs, quick hairband, wrap ice packs in, keep in shopping bag and pull on glass jars to stop them from breaking, etc

Any left over bread goes on a tray in the warm oven - I use the residual heat after cooking to dry them out, then make breadcrumbs.

That's not daft cozytosie that's brilliant 'cos the supermkts make their profits from people filling up their wheelies with stuff they don't really need!!

Crushed cornflakes/rice crispies make great coatings for homemade fishfingers/chicken nuggets etc. Inspired by my 4 year old I've started saving all the bits at the bottom of the bags in the freezer so I'm not crushing up perfectly good cereal.

amazingmum you must have VERY strong arms from all that washing out of the bath. You could use my hot vinegar idea for the bath!!

My favourite sort of thread: 'cos I'm as tight as a gnat's chuff, me!

I buy almost everything from charity shops and car boot sales; clothes, kitchen stuff, furniture, the lot. My new dining room curtains are Laura Ashley, really thick and very good quality - lined AND insulated. They cost me £4 (and about half an hours worth of alterations on the sewing machine.) Seriously, find a local car boot - you would not believe what people are almost giving away. My bread machine is a Kenwood, had never really been used and it cost me £4..!

Our living room suite cost £75 from a charity shop - it was immaculate and people often ask us where we got it. XD

The living room also has M&S chenille throws over the sofas (£1, car boot) and Laura Ashley prints on the walls (£2 each, naice frames included!) There are wooden hand-turned lamps that cost me a quid each in a PDSA charity shop (OK I had to rewire them but the lamp holders and wires / plugs cost less than £3 from Wilkos.)

All my furniture is from junk shops, more or less: it's all art deco or art nouveau stuff which I've stripped of old dark varnish, it's much better quality than chipboard crap and will always look good.

My double bed is a white wrought iron one I got off ebay for £60...delivered!

I made wool duvets for us out of old blankets from charity shops after reading about them being better for allergy sufferers (I have rhinitis.) They cost £75 each if you buy them in a shop - or about a fiver each if you buy old wool blankets from charity shops and sew a cotton cover to them.

But my major money saving tip is: be practical. I can wallpaper and paint, strip wood, tile floors and walls, do carpentry and minor plumbing stuff, put up curtain rails and blinds, rewire and add in new plugs and lights and do about a million other DIY jobs. The money this saves you is phenomenal.

I recently converted our cellar into a storeroom myself - it was very dry and was just wasted space before, as there was just a dirty brick floor and crumbling paint everywhere which made storing things in it impractical. So I dry lined the walls, damp-proofed the floor, added better lighting, laid a new concrete floor, laid new lino and painted: total cost of materials about £500, result, one large, usable storage room.

Yes, all on me own!

Then I did the same in the outhouse: lined the walls, added a shelf made of an offcut of worktop and stuck the washer and dryer in there.

Also, get a sewing machine and learn to alter stuff. I can do clothes as well as basic stuff like curtains, and it means you can always adapt your bargains to fit.

Now...don't get me started on batch cooking...!

ppeatfruit I wish! do try the raspberry icing though it's divine!

Blimey cailleach That's incredible Congratulations!!

Great post cailleach

love car boots and the bargains are incredible. There is Freecycle too. My dining table and chairs, king bed base, clothes, suite...all from there.

Ah, if only I had been like this when I was 25

Are you self-taught with the DIY cailleach ?

Cailleach

Very impressed! How did you pick up your DIY skills? Did anyone teach you or was it a matter of rolling up your sleeved and getting stuck in?

I've read some of this thread and just wanted to add that Staples are really expensive for ink cartridges and you can only redeem one voucher per cartridge (I tried giving them 5 vouchers only to be told no) I find Amazon much much cheaper for Lexmark and HP cartridges Inc P&P

Booyhoo - we have this night light - cheap, and claims to be low energy, and actually really bright

I use clippers on DH and DS1, but I tried a grade 8 clipper on DS2 and he looked really shorn. Think his hair is much thinner than DS1's.

Would love to get you started on batch cooking cailleach
Your post was great
How did you learn to alter clothes?

I use a comb and scissors on my boys. Never had any training but think I do a good job. No one has ever commented negatively

cailleach means witch in Irish. i'm thinking she brews up some sort of DIY spell in her cauldron. i'm right, aren't I Cailleach?

but yes, how did you learn? my dad is very talented at all things DIY and is a tiler and previously a joiner and site labourer but there's no way he'd have the patience to teach me so i just ask him to do things for me as he'd be very offended if i asked someone else to show me how.

thanks cornflakegirl i think that has to be the winner. very good price!

ds1's hair is really thick (like mine) so hopefully it wont look too bad. another question, his hair hasn't been cut since the end of september and is quite long and floppy now, would i need to cut it with scissors first (scary) or would it be ok just to use the clippers with a high grade?

Actually it really means "old hag" which is why I picked it as my tag, but it did get used as a word for witch sometimes as well. ;)

No cauldrons here either: I really am a shite cook, generally 'tis The Bloke that cooks round ours (he can't do yorky puds though - so I do 'em!) But I do insist that all his cooking is done in bloody big pots and saved in recycled chinese takeaway cartons ( the plastic ones) then frozen. Saves us loads of time that way.

I'm self taught with the DIY, but my mum was the practical one in our house when I was growing up so I guess I get it from her. My parents only call in builders / plumbers for the big jobs - my mum handles almost everything else. She fitted their kitchen, laid their wooden floors...tiled the bathrooms...etc etc. All the power tools in the garage are actually hers - not my dads!

Same in our house: I have table saws, drills, tile cutters, chisels, jigsaws, fretsaws, the lot down in the cellar but they aren't The Blokes - they're mine!

My mum taught me and my sister to use a sewing machine - she used to make our clothes when we were small (that was more common then I think) and we were allowed to help out. I remember shopping for patterns and fabric with her as a child...

My sister is an amazing knitter and makes fabulous things like lacy mohair shawls that look like they cost a mint from some swanky boutique. My gran taught us both to knit and crochet, but unlike my sis I don't really have the patience for it.

I wonder how many kids learn this stuff from Mum and Gran today? Mind you , today we have Youtube and about a million crafting blogs to show us how, I guess.

that'll teach me to let my son teach me Irish!

another tip i learnt on MSE and try to do is to have No Spend Days. days where i dont spend any money. so you could decide to have 20 NSDs a months which gives you about 10 days in the month where you have to do all your spending and means you think more about what routes you need to travel to get everything you need and how to do it most efficiently. i have mad mondays my grocery day as i take ds1 to scouts on monday night, nip over to asda, get petrol, then back over to get ds1. the scout hall is really near to asda so it's not adding much to my journey and as i rarely use the car anyway it saves me having to make a car journey just to get the shopping in.

made mondays. although i do have mad mondays too!

Nightlights: my two youngest have those heart shaped wall lights from Ikea with an Eco bulb in which have lasted ages.