Frugal Babe

We’ve had a very productive weekend, although I feel like I need another weekend so that I can have a little time for doing nothing!  We made another step forward in our house-beautification project.  I tackled our bedroom, and now we’re wishing we had done this years ago.  When we moved in, the bedroom was in desperate need of a paint job.  And for some reason, we picked a paint that was somewhere between light pink and off-white.  We painted the walls and trim the same color, and while it wasn’t horrible (like the mauve bathroom) it wasn’t particularly great either.  Add to that our random assortment of art, and a length of wood with nails in it that I had hung on the wall to hold my jewelry (I told you I’m low maintenance!).

Anyway, our bedroom got a makeover this weekend.  The walls are now a wonderful brown shade, and the trim is white.  We took down the faded plastic 1985 blinds and put up wooden blinds that we got at Home Depot.  (as an aside, I remember talking to a friend who had a window person come in and install wooden blinds in her house.  They look identical to what we have, and she said they paid about $2000 to have it done.  If you’re willing to install your own blinds and shorten them to the correct length, places like Home Depot will cut them to the right width for you and the overall cost is far lower than having them installed by someone else.  The blinds in our bedroom took us about 20 minutes to install this evening, and it will take us about 10 minutes to shorten them.  We’ve paid about $375 for blinds for six windows, which is all we need – the rest of the windows have curtains).

Our bedroom makeover cost about $130 and took the better part of a weekend.  We bought two gallons of VOC-free paint (I will never use any other kind.  Painting and not having a slightly sick feeling is priceless), a thrift store picture, and new blinds.  The trim paint was left over from another project.  We still have about half a gallon of wall paint left over, which will be perfect for an accent wall somewhere.  And the improved look of our room is not only great for us, but it should be a big help once we put our house on the market.

Here is a picture of our bedroom now.  I love how the bed looks without a bed frame taking up space.  I forgot to take "before" pictures, but you can use your imagination:

That picture over the bed came from a very productive thrift store trip we made yesterday morning.  It was $12, and makes the room feel much classier than the random art we had on the walls before.  Over on the dresser you can see a little wooden box.  That’s my new jewelry box, which is a step up from the piece of wood with nails in it that used to hang over the dresser.

I found the jewelry box at one of my favorite thrift stores yesterday.  It was marked $18, but it was half price day, so I got it for $9.  It was perfect timing, because I had just taken down my improvised jewelry rack, and had all my jewelry piled on the bed.  Now it has a home.  I love thrift stores.

My husband found a great toy for our son while we were thrifting yesterday:

It’s a keyboard, and our little guy loves it.  He had a great time banging away on the piano last time we were at my parents’ house.  Since we’re not likely to get a piano anytime soon, we had been looking out for a keyboard for him.  This one is battery operated, but we have rechargeable batteries and a charger.  I’m not sure which of the three of us has had the most fun with this thing so far, but we’ll say that it’s our son’s keyboard….

I was reading some other blogs just now, and I came across this post from Frugal Zeitgeist.  She included a link to the Hyper Homemaker, and I’ve been happily browsing that site.  I’m not even close to as clean and organized as the Hyper Housewife, but I am very inspired by her site.  If you’re looking for some motivation to clean, look no further.  I think I will even be washing windows soon…

I also checked in on Alissa at On Purpose Living.  Her baby is due any day now, and I absolutely love this post about how she had cloth diapers all packed to take to the hospital.  All the best Alissa, and we’ll be checking back soon to see your updates about the new little one!

Now that the bathroom is finished, I’m moving on to other sprucing up projects around the house.  As usual, I’m looking for ways to have a large impact without spending a lot of money.  Our bedroom is average size for a smallish house.  If we’re going to try to sell our house, anything we can do to make the room appear larger will be a plus.  We don’t have a lot of furniture cluttering up the room (although sometimes when I get behind on laundry, the laundry basket takes on a life of its own), but I wanted to make more floor space available.

Our bed had a black metal headboard and foot board made of curving pipes.  They didn’t look bad, but they did take up space.  I knew that if we replaced the bed frame with one that just went under the bed, without a headboard or foot board, the bed would take up less space.  Not the mention the fact that it’s a whole lot easier to make a bed when there’s no foot board.  I wasn’t ready to revert to the college apartment look with a mattress on the floor, so I began my quest for a bed frame.  I checked our local thrift stores a couple times, but didn’t have any luck.  So I asked my parents to be on the lookout for one, since they go thrifting more often than I do.  Within a week they brought us a bed frame that they found for $13.  We replaced our old bed frame with the new one and the transformation is dramatic.  The space between the foot of our bed and the shelves we made last year is about eight inches wider now.  The bed looks great and is much less intrusive in the room.  My next project is to sell our old frame on Craigs list.  I think I’ll sell it for $25, which will be a bargain for someone else, and will mean that we come out $12 ahead on this bedframe swap.

I highly recommend an invisible bed frame (second hand, of course) if you’re trying to make a bedroom feel more spacious.  And parents who like to scout around thrift stores looking for treasures are definitely a plus.  A friend called when we were setting up our new bed frame; when I told her what we were doing, she commented on how we were helping the economy by buying a new bed frame.  I laughed and reminded her that she knows me better than that!  Unless we’re talking about the second-hand economy, in which case I’m all about giving it a boost.

Last spring when we remodeled our kitchen, we bought a dishwasher that we found on Craigs List for $100.  It was about six years old, and the retail price was $600.  We replaced a 21 year old dishwasher that was loud and ugly and rusty but still working.  Our new (to us) dishwasher was amazingly quiet, very stylish, and worked great – until this week.  On Wednesday evening, I turned it on and nothing happened.  I pushed a few buttons and thought I smelled smoke, so I shut it off and went to bed.  My parents were planning to visit us on Thursday, and I wanted to get their opinion on what might be wrong.

When they got here, we pulled the dishwasher out and it took my dad about 8 minutes to find a very fried part of motor.  Dang it.  We briefly thought about trying to get a new motor, but since we didn’t know what had caused the motor to burn out in the first place, we didn’t want to put a new motor in and have it burn out again.

Since time was of the essence (we had to shut off the main water line to the house while the dishwasher was connected) we decided to go to Home Depot and just buy a new dishwasher.  Our fridge and stove are white, so we wanted a white dishwasher.  There wasn’t a lot of decision making to do, as there was a grand total of one white dishwasher in stock at our Home Depot.  We forked over $350 and brought it home.  Thanks to my parents, it’s now installed in our kitchen and working perfectly.

I don’t like buying anything new when there’s an option to buy used.  But convenience won out this time.  And it is nice to have a warranty on our new dishwasher.

We’re focusing on living very frugally in order to have money saved for a down payment if we decide to go ahead with our idea of buying another house.  And it would have been nice to be able to put that $350 into our house fund instead of buying a dishwasher.  (We don’t consider a dishwasher to be an emergency, so we’re using money that would have been allocated to our down payment fund rather than emergency fund money.  We’d rather delay our house purchase than deplete our emergency fund.)  But situations like this remind me of how glad I am that we worked so hard to get rid of our non-mortgage debt over the last several years and that we live below our means.  It’s a bummer to have to take a chunk out of the money that we’ll put into our house fund this month.  But it would be a much bigger bummer if we were also struggling to pay off consumer debt at the same time (we did have a few of those sort of situations arise when we were working to pay off debt, and they were even less fun then).

If you’re focused on off debt, I promise that the result is worth it.  Appliances will give out, emergencies will crop up, unexpected expenses will always show up when you have much better plans for your money.  By focusing on needs rather than wants, living below your means, and setting aside money during times when you don’t have unexpected expenses, life becomes a little easier when the unexpected expenses show up.