Keeping our Fru Year Resolutions! Frugal January thread two (already) - all welcome!

[Cagliostro]

Eeek so the other thread filled up fast. January 10th must be some kind of record!

I'm wearing a fleece right now that I've had for ten years, and it's great. I have another that I have had for 21 years, which mysteriously still looks new but is really most suitable for someone 21 years younger than I am. I'm starting to wonder if some fleeces will be worn by more than one generation as they last so well.

Catface houses are the same here. It's a bit dispiriting to think of spending a huge whack of cash like that on a house that's still not great.

Poor DH is up with DD again - she’s having very bad evenings at the moment. Might be her teeth, and if it is acute teething we might need to put off the sleep training this week. I hope not as I’m feeling quite focussed now. But it’s likely to be imminent - she’s 7 months old today and still has no teeth. It’s not stopping her eating proper food though - she’s really lost interest in milk during the day and is holding out for the solids. She’ll mug me for anything and everything that I’m trying to eat

I am thinking of being a bit unfrugal and buying some really nice white pure cotton bedding from JL. They have a design I really like and we still have quite a lot (at least £300?) JL vouchers from when we got married which I felt we should not spend on the kids on general rubbish but on something housey, in the spirit of wedding gifts. Rather telling that we haven’t really spent anything on the house in the last 4 years though! It’s quite pricey though so I am swithering about it.

The naice cotton bedding we have is doing okay but is around 9 years old so not looking quite so pristine white these days. I also feel like new bedding to celebrate DD getting out of our room and giving it a good spring clean and hopefully the return of sporadic Marital Relations I should do it, right?

I'm in the no to fleeces camp! However my aunt bought me fleece pjs for Christmas and oh. My. God. They're amazing. The most comfy thing I've ever worn! They're amazing.

Yes seacow! Bed is the best place in the world so needs to be super cosy

Nsd day today. Work was so busy I brought my lunch home again and had it for tea!

I’m in the fleece camp, no point being cold.

Seacow buy the sheets!

Snuggly un-Mumsnetty hugs to you

Catface at your house prices

sunny we’ve upped our budget since last year as we felt we weren’t getting enough house for our money. 2 small double bedrooms and a teeny box room just didn’t cut it for that price. I had a conversation with an estate agent today about a place I wanted to view but since found out has subsidence. Asked agent about the subsidence. He said it was only a little bit and that it’d take around £40k to fix. This was on a 3 bed bungalow. Which needed renovation. I asked whether the vendor would accept an offer £50k less asking. He said they wouldn’t. But it’s be fine. Small subsidence. What’s not to love?! Needless to say I won’t be viewing. Which is a shame really as it could have been nice. Wrap around huge garden, massive kitchen working fireplace...but subsidence.

Hey ho.

One place tomorrow is vair country cottage. One is a Georgian townhouse (with parking yippee!) and the other a regular house. Townhouse needs work (and has secondary glazing my pet hate!) but could be lovely. From the pictures though the lovely original features have been either ripped out or covered up.

Have pm ed you Seacow

Oooh house hunting catface -love it !
Hope you get something nice .
I bought this house without DH seeing it as he was abroad at the time.
I loved it and he was happy that I was !
Really love it here as we have lots of space outdoors and the chooks love their orchardy bit .
Hanging on until payday !

Oh I forgot -Big Fat Noooo to the fleece !

I do say yes to lovely cosy merino thermals though

Catface I know just what you mean. It's the same here. When we were looking everything had subsidence, or a massive crack in the wall. We were lucky in the end and the people who owned our rented house sold it to us. I hope some of those other houses that you're seeing turn out to be good. All fingers crossed here.

I had a nice afternoon today as dh showed up at the school gate totally out of the blue. He's been working so hard for weeks and weeks and I've been holding the fort at home mostly on my own, and standing at the school gate on my own in my very sexy fleece which I bought in San Diego and like a lot LOL! and it was lovely to have him appear like that.

We spent a whole hour doing target practise at the basketball hoops with rubber eggs and then went home. Splendid.

Ok, trying to catch up but my iPad keeps jumping to the bottom and annoying me!

Sunday £20 for karate, £30 top up shop (that included £6 on a new, longer bath mat and a hand mixer reduced to £7.50), onions 90p
Monday £100 for dancing for the term for the girls, paid out of their £55 each from panto.
Popped into Tesco today to buy cat litter, they didn't have the one I wanted, so will need to try elsewhere tomorrow. £30 on various bits, but including bread, crumpets, buns, milk and expensive coffee pods.

Also received my feed in tariff money which will go against the cost of Christmas sitting on my credit card!

Someone mentioned how expensive theatre tickets are (trust me, I know) I am a member of a seat filling agency which gets very cheap theatre tickets,often for small, edgy stuff, but mainstream too. I took the kids to see Annie last year, and Wind in the Willows, took mum and DD2 to see Evita, saw Guys and Dolls....

If you find London accessible, and are interested, message me for details. It is a private club and you have to be recommended by a member, so you would need to disclose your name to me (but only for that purpose)

Aw Sunny that sounds lovely.

A maisonette I owned previously had subsidence (though not to my knowledge when I bought it). It actually wasn’t as awful as i thought to get it stabilised and at the time it was mostly covered by insurance. Big sigh of relief as no spare money at that time. But even though it wasn’t too tricky I wouldn’t be keen to buy a place with known subsidence!

I have just remembered that my printer has stopped working. I’ve tried to fix it by following the instructions on the Canon help site for the relevant error message but no joy. It’s already causing me aggravation not being able to print. I could get a tech guy on it or I could buy a new one. Given the age of the thing (c 10 years), inefficiency with ink (its a rubbish inkjet) and underwhelming print quality, I think the latter. Like Need and the washer, just not worth fixing. So now I need to figure out what to buy as the best longish term investment. We are low level but regular users, then sometimes I go through a flurry for work or DS’s paperwork and print a lot. Double sided laser printing would be good. Any recommendations?

Btw I meant to say Cag, regarding photocopying forms (which I agree with!) you don’t need to use a public scanner if you haven’t got one at home, you can use your phone camera. I think there are apps that process and name the file like a scanned document. Apologies if this is stating the bleedin’ obvious but it’s only just occurred to me that I don’t need to replace my current printer /scanner exactly, just a printer would probably be fine for me with my camera phone on hand too.

Then again I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer at the moment so shouldn’t judge the rest of you by my low brainpower standards

What kind of bad luck is it that I just went to buy one of my favourite tops online just after it's gone in the sale, but also when it's sold out in my size. Darn!

Oh sorry to come back again but re. Printer, do those of you with school age dcs find they need to print stuff in colour? I am trying to figure out whether we need colour printing. I often print out to proofread work stuff (involving presentations /graphs) so it would help me massively but it’s a fair bit more expensive to run colour laser jet if it’s just for me. So just wondering whether school projects etc are likely to require it also?

I definitely find that we need colour inkjet for school. I have a cheap-ish canon inkjet for photos that is really very much needed for school and beavers and sending cards. (Canon MG4250)

For our own stuff, we have an ex-office colour laserjet. It's big but cheap to buy and very cheap to run. Maybe £70 every two years for ink. It's an HP Colour laserjet 4600 from ebay. Absolute workhorse.

cag and fluffy how do you find plusnet as a service? We have internet from them and it has been terrible, really patchy and their customer service seems non-existent. We are tied in until July I think.

I do actually have a scanner... on the printer I still haven’t set up... 😳😂

Not sure about plusnet really as I have been with them ages and I’m terrible for switching so I can’t really compare to anything. I am not assertive so would find haggling difficult, I need to phone up and see exactly where we stand with contracts and tariffs and all that stuff.

Think tomorrow will be spendy on various things. Will need to go into town, so will probably try and get everything done in one go. Not that we don’t have plenty to do at home of course 🤔😕

Morning all. Early start day urgh! seacow definitely colour for school projects, it’s invaluable and school projects are stressful at the best of times (here at least) so every little helps.

No I'm not sure who bandit is.

£500k would buy an awesome house here but I'm in the North East so not helpful. Good luck with the hunting.

LSD planned today as need wraps. £60 yesterday settling milk bill. Will get cash for dance today too.

No printer advice here but probably should take note as dd is in year ,5 now

Peonies

We're with BT at the moment but had plusnet a few years back. Ours was good & we never needed to contact them.

BT tries to slow you down at peak times so I run Spotify on the highest quality to demand more bandwidth.

Sky's hub dropped the line all the time & drove me crackers.

Vodafones currently £24 for 76mb fibre with no set up fee. No free calls but we don't have a phone plugged in anyway. The cashbacks rubbish though.

We have virgin broadband and is has been fine, with no glitches. Our phone is from the post office, also fine.

Okay, I give you.....

Will post later after sorted all the general morning stuff

Classy need

Mammy I'm going to pm you