Frugal Babe

We’re in the middle of painting our house, but thanks to my family we’re a lot closer to the end of the project than we were two days ago. We’re painting because the HOA told us we had to - as they did with about half the neighborhood, from the looks of the semi-finished [...]

Just found this post from Mrs. Accountability about using baking soda and vinegar on her hair.  I’m excited to start doing this myself.  I’ve made a lot of changes in personal hygiene over the last few years.  I only wash my hair every third day, and I switched to chemical free shampoo a year or [...]

My parents go thrift store shopping every Monday.  It’s mostly a hobby for them; they enjoy the scavenger hunt that ensues in a thrift store.  And Savers stores - in our state anyway - have 99 cent sales every Monday.  Items with particular color tags are 99 cents on Monday.  So the goal is to [...]

We got our $1200 economic stimulus payment today.  We put the whole thing into our HELOC, since we have decided to make the HELOC a priority for the time being.  We’ve already maxxed out the HSA and my husband’s IRA for the year, and instead of moving straight to my IRA, we’ve been focusing on [...]

I met with the HR rep for my library job this week, to go over maternity leave details.  She gave me all the forms to fill out and explained how the leave works with FMLA, short-term disability, and vacation time.  I was very honest with her and told her that I’m not at all sure [...]

We just about finished our kitchen this past weekend.  It’s very exciting to see it all come together and have it look just like we planned.  We still have some trim/paint/touching up to do, but we should be finished this week.  Then we need to get cracking on replacing the carpet in our upstairs.  We’re [...]

My parents and sister just spent another weekend at our house, working on our kitchen.  The five of us have spent the last two weekends working on it, and it’s coming along amazingly quickly.  This weekend we got the new (to us) dishwasher installed, and counter top installed around half the room.  We also got all [...]

Our house is wonderfully warm right now, thanks to my parents.  When our furnace died on Wednesday, I had described the problem to them, and told my father that we had removed the igniter from the furnace in hopes of getting a replacement on Thursday (we knew the problem was the igniter based on the [...]

We bought a new dishwasher today!  New to us anyway - we found it on Craig’s List and drove to the other end of town today to pick it up.  We paid $100.  It currently retails for $645, although the lady who sold it to us said that it’s about 7 -8 years old.  It’s fully [...]

Wow, what a week this has been.  And we don’t even “do” Christmas - can’t imagine what it would be like if we did!  On Monday, I bought a shadow box picture frame (50% off) and was up until midnight making a scrapbook page to put in the frame for one of my best friends.  [...]