Hi everyone!  Sorry about the lack of posts recently.  We’ve been on vacation, and I took a break from the computer while we were away.  We spent several days with my husband’s parents at their sunny winter home.  They live in an RV park in the southwest during the cold months, and it was great to see palm trees and wear shorts!  But it’s great to be home again too.

While we were away, we used disposable diapers for our son.  Before we left, we bought a package of 7th Generation diapers at the co-op where we now do all of our shopping.  They were definitely more expensive there ($20 for a pack of 35 diapers) than they would have been at a baby store, but we were in a hurry that day, and wanted to make just one stop.  We considered taking our cloth diapers along and washing them while we were there, but decided to just take the easy route this once.  It’s the first time we’ve ever bought disposable diapers for our son, and he’s 22 months old, so we gave ourselves a pass.

The first thing I noticed about the disposables is that they hold a lot more liquid than the cloth diapers.  I typically change our son about once every two hours, but I found that even after three or four hours a disposable diaper would still feel completely dry on the inside.  So the package we bought lasted for the whole trip, and we even have a few leftovers that we’ll give to a friend.

It was nice to have the convenience of disposables on our trip.  But I must say, I’m thrilled to be home and have our little guy back in his regular mama-made diapers.  For starters, the 7th Generation diapers still use the same crystalline absorbency technology that other disposable diapers use.  I like the fact that they don’t use bleach to whiten the diapers (they’re a light brown color), but I do feel better with plain old cloth on my baby’s behind… even if it isn’t as absorbent.  And no matter how convenient the disposables were, they didn’t come close to dispelling the guilt I felt about the bag full of diapers that we sent to the landfill this morning before we left.  There is no way I would be able to do that for two straight years.

I’ve always liked our homemade cloth diapers.  We’ve spent barely any money on them, they’re a cinch to use and keep clean, and I have no concerns about what’s in them.  And each week we just dump a tiny amount of trash into our outdoor bin (still using that same garbage bag we were using in January!)  Now that I’ve tried disposables too, I’m still just as sold on my cloth diapers.

I’ve written before about how I’m trying to buy less plastic.  I just read a really inspiring interview with Beth Terry from Fake Plastic Fish, and I’m ashamed to admit that on the rare occasions when we eat out, I’ve never thought to ask the waiter to bring my water without a straw.  Around the house, I’m doing pretty well, but we still have a long way to go.  Just about all of my food storage containers are glass now – I have a bunch of glass bowls and casserole dishes with lids that I use in the fridge, and I’ve been recycling jars into food storage for a while now.  Jars that once held olives, artichoke hearts, and almond butter now hold dried lentils, sesame seeds and walnuts.  I soak them in hot water until their labels peel off, and then glue on new labels for whatever I’m putting in them.  Jars like that used to end up in my recycling bin, but I figure this is an even more effective way of recycling them.

Once we get our garden going this summer, I’m hoping to dry a lot of food and my repurposed jars will be perfect for storing it all.  I can picture a whole shelf full of mis-matched jars filled with various garden goodies, and it makes me smile.

I try to avoid plastic quite a bit, and when I do buy it, it tends to be secondhand.  For the most part, I’d rather have things made of wood or glass or metal, and that’s pretty much what I see when I look around our house.  But the bulk food at the health food store where I shop comes pre-packaged in little plastic bags with twist ties at the top (there are no bins).  And when I look in our recycling bin each week, there are always several plastic containers that somehow made their way in there.

A month or so ago, I started dumping the contents of our indoor trash can into our outdoor trash can, without removing the bag from the indoor can.  We compost all of our food scraps and use cloth diapers, so there is never anything wet or disgusting in our trash can, and there’s usually not much in it at all.  I had noticed that each week we were removing the big plastic bag from the trash can and taking it out to be picked up with only a little bit of stuff in the bottom.  It started to seem like a huge waste of a big plastic bag.  I think it’s been about five or six weeks now that we’ve been using the same trash bag, and it’s working great.  I imagine that eventually it will get holes in it and I’ll have to start with a fresh one, but at this rate our huge box of garbage bags should last until we retire!

Beth’s Fake Plastic Fish site is a good read for anyone looking for inspiration to reduce consumption in general and consumption of plastic in particular.  Reducing consumption is the ultimate in frugal living, since it translates to not spending money.  And if there’s a greater purpose to it, that’s even better.

Lately my husband has been spending huge amounts of time researching investment strategies.  While we’ve both been committed to long-term savings goals for years, he’s really been getting into the nuances of it lately, and it’s made our retirement portfolios much more interesting to look at (of course they haven’t been much fun to look at this week, but that’s how it goes).  Between our various savings accounts and the extra principal payments we make on our mortgage, way more than half of our income goes into savings, and the new things we’re learning about investing just make us more motivated to keep it up.

We were talking today about how so many people with incomes similar to ours end up spending most of what they earn each month.  It would be easy to do, with payments on two newer vehicles, a more expensive home with a larger mortgage, several meals/movies out each month, some new (as in, not second-hand) clothes here and there… we started tallying up the money that an average middle class family could easily spend each month and it got high very quickly.

Then I started thinking about why people spend so much of their income rather than saving it.  For us, a healthy IRA balance is FAR more exciting than a new car, but I know that this isn’t the case for a lot of people.  In addition, a lot of people really don’t like their jobs, and feel huge amounts of stress over trying to balance work, family, fun, and all the rest of it.  But those same people might have brand new living room furniture, top of the line kitchen appliances, a new car, and a house with lots of custom upgrades.  The disparity between what they own and how they feel is striking.  Many of them are working at a job they don’t really enjoy, just to pay for all the things they own.

Some things are worth the money.  If a thing brings you great pleasure or gets used all the time, it was probably worth the money you spent on it.  My VitaMix blender is a good example.  It cost nearly $400, but I’ve used it at least twice a day (sometimes a lot more) ever since I got it in 2008.  It came with a 7 year warranty, and I can’t imagine my kitchen without it.  Each of us have things like that – a super comfortable piece of furniture, an outfit we feel great wearing, a vacation that created awesome memories… But a lot of us have things that we bought because we figured they would be impressive.  And often times, it wasn’t ourselves we were trying to impress.

This made me start thinking about my friends, and our relationships with each other.  I have friends with a wide range of incomes.  Some have fancy houses filled with fancy stuff, and others have apartments with futons that they’ve had since college.  And I can say for sure that I don’t care at all about any of it.  They’re my friends because I enjoy spending time with them.  They make me happy, and that doesn’t have anything to do with whether they have impressive “stuff.”  Think about your own life and the people you love.  Chances are, your friends and family don’t care about your stuff either.  When they come over to visit, it’s to see you, not your new living room set or big screen TV.  If you had to choose your five favorite people, my guess is that they would be the people who make you the happiest, who make you laugh, who provide a shoulder to cry on when you need it.  And whether or not they have a new car or a house with granite countertops probably has nothing to do with it.

Just food for thought for the next time that the urge to buy something impressive strikes (and yes, it strikes me sometimes too, although I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing it for what it is and moving on).  The people who love you will love you regardless of what possessions you own.  The people who would like you better if you had more fancy stuff probably aren’t worth keeping around anyway.  And a secure financial future will get you a lot further than anything you can buy at the mall.

Ok, I’m stepping down off my soapbox now.  Hope you all have a good weekend!

The first year my husband and I were together, I remember going shopping for Christmas presents for just about everybody we knew.  Family, friends, coworkers… we did some serious shopping.  We did most of it at outlet stores and off-retail places, but we did a lot of shopping.  A few years later we hosted my husband’s parents for Christmas, and we had just bought our first home earlier that year.  So we put up a tree and strung lights all over our house, and bought lots of presents.  My husband told me later that he nearly fell off the two-story roof onto the picket fence below, so the next year we just put lights on our porch railing.  We’ve gradually been scaling down Christmas around here for the last several years, and it just keeps getting better and better.

This year, I made ornaments for our nieces (something I do every year, and our nieces really like their homemade ornaments).  I also made some blocks for a friend’s daughter, and a small scrapbook for my mother in law.  The week before Christmas we went to visit an elderly friend who is in a rehab facility following a broken hip.  We spend some time just sitting and talking with him, and it seemed to bring him a lot of happiness.  We put together a basket of food for him, including some homemade soup that we took to his house and stashed in the freezer so it would be there when he got out of the rehab facility.  On Christmas day, we went to my parents’ house for dinner with the whole family, and took along some homemade treats.

That’s all that we did for Christmas, and it was wonderful.  No decorations, no shopping, no hoping that UPS would get a last-minute gift somewhere on time.  No holiday craziness at all.  We opened our gifts from my husband’s parents on December 23rd (my brother and sister visited on the 24th, and we were at my parents’ on the 25th, so the 23rd made sense).  In true toddler fashion, our son enjoyed the wrapping paper most of all, and a pair of dad-sized gloves.

I know a lot of people get a bit bummed after Christmas is over.  It makes sense if you think about it… there’s so much build up and anticipation surrounding the holiday.  People shop for weeks (and months!), make all sorts of plans, wrap presents, count down the days of December… and then it’s over.  Advent calendars always seem a bit odd to me – aren’t the first 24 days of December just as good as the 25th?  Why would we want to bypass them and count them down?  It’s like wishing your life away with a fancy, decorated calendar.  And of course there’s the financial stress that so often comes after Christmas is over, when all the credit card bills roll in.

For us, Christmas was just like any other day, except we got to go have dinner with my parents and siblings.  We didn’t spend any more money in December than we do in any other month, and we didn’t have any holiday stress.  If you truly love the commercial celebration of Christmas, then by all means, have at it.  But so often I hear people talking about how much they hate the commercialization and stress that go along with Christmas.  If that’s the case, you don’t have to keep doing it the same way you’ve done it in the past.  Make the holidays a time to relax and enjoy your friends and family instead of a time to spend money and stress yourself out.  It can be done, and my own experience is that it’s a whole lot better this way.

I hope you’re all having a great holiday season, and that the things you do to celebrate truly bring you peace and joy.

I was walking home from the post office today when I spotted a huge dumpster out in front of a house, filled to the brim with what looked like a lot of wood and cardboard.  I had the dog on a leash and our son in the stroller, so I wasn’t in much of a position to dumpster dive at that point, but this evening I went back with my car.  I rang the doorbell and asked if I could take some of the wood; the lady said it was all going to the dump anyway, so I could have what I wanted.

I ended up with five pieces of wood, all about five feet long, 12 inches wide, and about half an inch thick.  They will be perfect for the shelves I want to build in the craftroom we’re going to make in our basement (currently the basement is unfinished, so it’s a blank slate as far as what we want down there).  Not only were they free, but I prevented the wood from ending up in the landfill.  That’s about as green as a building material can get.

There are a few nails sticking out of the boards, and some of them are a bit dirty.  But I’m planning to paint the shelves the same color as the walls, and I think they’ll end up looking great.  I also snagged a four foot section of thick wooden dowel.  I don’t have an immediate use for it, but I know that they are a bit pricey in the hardware store, and I couldn’t let it end up in the landfill.

Have you ever dumpster dived?  Did you ask permission, or just go for it?  Broad daylight or in the dark?  What did you find?  I recently borrowed this book from the library, and loved every page.  If you’re into dumpster diving or just curious, it’s a great read.

When we bought our new house, all of the window coverings were cheap plastic venetian blinds.  There was no covering at all on the kitchen window, but our neighbors gave us a blind that fit that window perfectly.   In the bedrooms, the plastic blinds provided privacy, but did little to block light from coming into the rooms.  Our son’s room is at the front of our house, and there’s a streetlight at the corner of our property that cast a good amount of light into his room all night long.  A few months ago, I sewed two dark sheets together to make a double layer curtain for his room, and it works amazingly well.  I spent six dollars on the sheets at the thrift store, and we found a curtain rod for three dollars – his room is now almost pitch black at night, for a total of nine dollars and about an hour spent sewing and mounting the curtain.

Our own bedroom has two windows, both of which also let in a good deal of light at night.  I went looking for a solution at the thrift store a few weeks ago, and found a really neat-looking comforter that was big enough to cover both windows.  I cut it in half, hemmed the cut edges, and viola – two light blocking, insulated curtains!  I spent $15 on the comforter, and it took me about an hour to make the finished curtains.

Window coverings can be very expensive, but they don’t have to be.  Look around for creative solutions – you might already have stuff on hand that can be made into curtains and curtain rods, and thrift stores are filled with blankets, comforters, and sheets that are much less expensive than similar amounts of fabric purchased from a craft store.

I just finished making our first holiday e-card, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out.  We always send out photo cards, but the cost of postage and the cards, combined with the time I always spend addressing envelopes, made me decide to try an electronic version this year.  Nearly everyone we know is online these days.  We have just a handful of elderly friends and relatives who don’t use email, and for them I will still mail photos of our family.  But for everyone else, I created a digital scrapbook page with two photos, some simple text, and a few holiday-themed embellishments.

I’ve been scrapbooking since 2001, but had never tried digital scrapping.   So I turned to Google and found more information and free template downloads than I could ever use.  Nearly every digital scrapbooking site has free downloads that you can use, some are just there for the taking, some require that you sign up for their newsletter.  I made my layout as an 8.5 by 11 page, and it fills a computer screen nicely when the recipient opens it.

Zero time spent addressing envelopes, zero dollars spent on cards and postage, and a really cool-looking scrapbook page as our holiday card… what’s not to love?  If people want to hang our greeting on their wall for the holidays, they can easily print it out.  But I think most of us store our photos digitally these days, and our e-card will be easy for people to store with their digital images.

Anyone else going the electronic route when it comes to holiday cards?

Last week, I decided to make a Christmas gift for a friend’s daughter.  The little girl is about the same age as our son, and we get the two of them together every month or so.  They’ve evolved from looking at each other, to poking each other in the eye, to running around the playground and taking turns on the slides. 

I wanted to make her some wooden blocks, and a bag to put them in.  The project ideas came to me while I was out on a walk with the dog, and the whole thing was very simple.  For the bag, I used fabric from a huge mu-mu that I wore to a costume party (and got at a thrift store).  As an outfit, it was pretty horrible, but as fabric for a little girl’s bag, it’s fabulous.  I lined it with flannel from those sheets that I bought last year to make diapers (those sheets just keep on going – I’ve used them for a whole bunch of projects, and they aren’t even close to gone yet).  For the handle and the velcro tabs on the bag, I used a waistband from a pair of jeans that my husband didn’t wear anymore.  Here’s the finished bag, filled with blocks:

For the blocks, I bought two sizes of wooden dowel, and the rest are just made from scraps of wood (mostly 2×4s) that we had in the garage.  My cuts aren’t the straightest, but it gives stuff you build with the blocks a bit of a Dr. Seuss feel, which I think is pretty cool.  I didn’t measure anything, I just cut the wood randomly, so the blocks are all different sizes.  The most time-consuming part of the whole project was sanding the blocks, but even that was fun.  I sat on the back patio sanding blocks while my husband worked in the yard and our son played in the grass with the dog.  Here are pictures of the blocks:

I finished the blocks on Black Friday, which I thought was appropriate.  Sitting outside sanding blocks of wood was a lot more fun than standing in line at a store somewhere.  I spent $8 on the dowels, but everything else for this project was from scraps of wood and fabric that we already had. 

We have three homemade cold frames in our backyard now, where we are growing our greens.  We’ve already had about three feet of snow so far this season, but our greens are doing great.  Here’s a picture of one of the coldframes, and a close-up shot of the greens inside it.

The glass is just old double-pane doors that we found at the Habitat for Humanity store.  The frames are made from 2×4s (we bought the long ones, and salvaged the short ones from a lumber yard that was giving them away).  They have some foam insulation in the end walls, and weather stripping around the doors, but the insulation is pretty minimal overall, and they aren’t heated at all.  On sunny days, it’s often over 100 degrees inside the cold frames, even when it’s in the 30s outside.  During the night, the temperature inside drops to about the same as the outside temperature, so these sort of frames will really only work for things like greens that are pretty cold hardy.

I make green smoothies for us everyday, and before we were growing our own greens I would spend at least $15/week on organic greens.  During the summer, the greens in our local store come from farms in the area, but when I look at them now, I see labels from farms on the other side of the country (places where they haven’t had three feet of snow so far this year).  So if I were buying our greens, not only would I be spending at least $15/week, but I would also be contributing to the pollution that goes along with trucking food halfway across the country. 

Our cold frames were very inexpensive because most of the materials were used.  My husband came up with a pretty simple design, and it works perfectly if you get a decent amount of sunshine during the day – regardless of how cold it is outside.  As long as there is sun hitting the glass, the greenhouse effect will heat things up.

If you have a decent amount of sunny days in the winter, see if you can grow some cold-hardy plants.  It’s such a welcome sight to see bright green leaves growing in the middle of a brown (and white) landscape this time of year.

For a couple years now, I’ve had Colin Beavan’s blog – No Impact Man – on my blogroll.  His site is both interesting and inspiring, and I’ve always enjoyed it.  I  just finished reading his new book (also titled No Impact Man), and highly recommend it.  The focus of the book is on Colin and his wife and daughter as they work to eliminate as much as possible of their carbon footprint for a year.  No transportation except their feet and bikes, no food that isn’t local, no electricity in their apartment, no elevators… it’s quite an impressive feat.  Especially since they live in a 9th floor apartment in NYC.

The book is inspiring from an environmental perspective, but my frugal side was inspired too.  Colin and his family transform themselves from a typical TV-watching, Prada-buying (well, maybe that part isn’t typical…), taxi-riding, Starbucks-drinking family to something much more simple, and much more pleasant.  In the process, they stop buying new things (thrift stores are fair game, as used merchandise is always a green option), start riding bikes and walking everywhere, give up their TV and hang out playing games in the evening, and gather around the kitchen to prepare fresh local food rather than order take out.  All told, it seems that nearly all of the changes they made would have a dual effect of both lessening their environmental impact, and also reducing their spending.

The book is far more interesting than just a simple journal of their progress or a how-to list for environmental action.  Colin does an excellent job of weaving introspective musings in between the details of his life, and the result is a more thought-provoking read than many of the environmentally-focused books I’ve read.  If you’re looking for a book that will give you some ideas and inspiration for living a life that is a bit more gentle – on yourself, your wallet, and the planet – I definitely recommend No Impact Man.