Archive for the Category »the simple life «

15
Dec 2009

Window Coverings On A Budget

FrugalBabe

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.

Category: the simple life, ways we save money  5 Comments
07
Dec 2009

21st Century Holiday Greetings

FrugalBabe

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?

Category: hobbies, the simple life  11 Comments
30
Nov 2009

A Homemade Christmas Present

FrugalBabe

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:

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For the blocks, I bought two sizes of wooden dowel, and the rest are just made from scraps of wood (mostly 2x4s) 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:

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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. 

Category: baby, gifts, the simple life  5 Comments
29
Nov 2009

Cold Frames In Action

FrugalBabe

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.

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The glass is just old double-pane doors that we found at the Habitat for Humanity store.  The frames are made from 2x4s (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.

Category: organic living, the simple life  3 Comments
19
Nov 2009

No Impact Man

FrugalBabe

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.

Category: other bloggers, the simple life, thrift stores  3 Comments
05
Nov 2009

Entertaining Our Toddler

FrugalBabe

I got an email from a reader today, asking what sort of things our toddler does with his time, particularly since we don’t have a TV.  I thought I’d share some of what we do, in case other readers are looking for ways to occupy a small child without TV or expensive toys.

I’m very lucky in that my husband and both work from home.  When our son was born, I cut back to only about three or four hours of work for our business each day – the rest of my time is devoted to our son and our household.  My husband has his office set up in our basement, and we keep the stairs blocked off so that our son stays on the main level with me during the day.  We have childproofed the kitchen/living room/dining room area, and put childproof covers on the doorknobs leading into the other rooms.  That way he’s always in the same area with me during the day.  When I go outside to water the garden or hang up laundry, he goes with me, and entertains himself by playing in the dirt, gathering stones, stacking flower pots… we have a 3/4 acre backyard, so there’s always plenty for him to do out there.

In the house, we keep it pretty simple, which means he gets ample time to use his imagination.  He loves to play with my pots and pans.  He will entertain himself for long stretches to time by taking every pan and lid out of the cupboard, and carrying them one by one into the living room, where he sets them on the coffee table.  Then he gathers whatever containers he can find, and pretends to pour or shake “ingredients” into the pans.  Then he gets some utensils (I let him have save ones like spatulas and wooden spoons) and stirs his imaginary soup.  I guess he’s spent plenty of time watching me cook!

We have a fairly large collection of board books, thanks to my friends at the library where I used to work (they had a book shower for me before our son was born).  He likes to climb up into the recliner and “read” his books.  He’s always thrilled if we join him, but he’s also happy to just flip the pages and look at the pictures.

Every day, unless the weather is really horrendous, I take our son and our dog for a walk, usually for about an hour.  Sometimes we use the stroller, sometimes the Moby Wrap.  Our son loves to point out cars and dogs and airplanes – pretty much anything that moves.  We also go to the playground if the weather is nice.

We keep a box of toys in the living room, and he likes to dump them out and make up games to play.  They are all simple toys, mostly gifts from his grandparents, and a few wooden toys that we’ve picked up at thrift stores.  We also made a play area down in the basement in my husband’s office, using one of those super long sectional baby gate/cage things (my husband found it in a dumpster, and it’s in perfect shape).  We keep another box of toys down there, and in the evenings while I do yoga, my husband takes our son down to his play area in the basement, and they hang out together.  They are both happy for long periods of time just tossing a ball back and forth, so they do that a lot.

We keep a third box of naptime toys in our son’s room, in the closet.  Every day, when I put him down for his nap, I put the naptime toys in the crib with him.  He plays with them for a few minutes before he falls asleep.  Since we started this trick a few months ago, we haven’t had any fuss at all during naptime (he used to cry or need to be nursed to sleep for his nap).  The naptime toys are just toys that I gathered up from his other boxes – nothing special, but because he doesn’t see them all day, he’s interested in them when he does see them.

Our son has never watched TV.  We had one until he was about 11 months old, but we never turned it on while he was awake, so as far as he knew, it was just a black box.  Now that we don’t have one at all, his days are automatically taken up with other things.   He’s never seen commercials, so there’s no desire on his part to have any new toys or gizmos. Nothing we have is fancy, but our son is happy pretty much all of the time.  Thus, we’re going on the “if it ain’t broke…” theory.

We don’t have our son enrolled in any sort of programs or structured activities.  We go to the library, but I haven’t enrolled him in story time yet, mainly because we go at different times every week, whenever I can fit it in around the rest of my schedule.  We see other kids at the playground, and I get together every now and then with a friend who has a toddler, for a playdate.  My honest opinion is that kids just need love, lots of laughter, toys that let them use their imagination (stuff from the recycle bin works just fine), and a secure environment.  I’m not a fan of structured activities for preschool age kids.  I also like to keep our life as low-stress as possible, and not trying to juggle a bunch of  outside commitments for a toddler helps to keep it that way.

That’s our life with our son.  It’s simple, very inexpensive (mostly free), low-stress, and lots of fun.  I often find myself on the floor, driving “cars” (blocks) around the carpet, making vroom-vroom sounds, and realizing that nothing could make me or my son any happier.

Category: baby, family, the simple life  16 Comments
29
Oct 2009

Frugal, Simple, Clean. Three Of My Favorite Words.

FrugalBabe

I’ve mentioned before that we use one credit card for pretty much all of our spending.  We get 1% cash back on the card, and it’s an easy way to keep track of our spending, since it’s all listed in one place on the statement.  Our billing cycle starts and ends around the 10th of each month.  This morning, I noticed that we’ve spent a total of $835 so far in this cycle, and we’re already 2/3 of the way through it.  And that includes plane tickets to go visit my husband’s parents in the spring ($280 for two tickets – our son will still be under two, and flying for free at that point), and $110 to have all of our locks and deadbolts changed (something we had been meaning to do ever since we moved in, but only got around to doing a few weeks ago).  That means we’ve only spent $445 on everything else so far, and we only have about another eleven days in this billing period.

Most of that money was for food and home repair stuff, with a few other random things here and there.  Basically, we’re living well below our means, and loving it.

Last night, after dinner, we sat around the living room and my husband made funny noises at the cat.  Every time he did, she would open her eyes very wide, and stick her ears straight up.  I was laughing so hard that it hurt, and our son couldn’t stop laughing either.  And it hit me – this is what it’s all about.  Having fun, laughing, enjoying my family… we really don’t need anything else.  There is nothing that I could have bought that would have given me more pleasure than just laughing with my two favorite guys.  (Ok, so I guess we did buy the cat – the adoption fee was $85 at the animal shelter, and we do have to feed her.  But she’s obviously worth it.)

Lately, I’ve been noticing more and more that I am really happy, nearly all of the time.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my happiness seems to have increased as we’ve been actively trying to simplify our life.  I have mentioned before that I don’t particularly like to clean.  As a result, our house was often chaotic and messy, but I brushed it off by telling myself that I was just a creative cook, or too busy to clean.  A couple months ago, I decided to change this aspect of myself.  I started by making the bed every morning.  For two months now, I’ve been making the bed as soon as we get up, every morning.  At this point, I can’t imagine not making the bed – even though I only used to make it once or twice a week.  After I got in the habit of making the bed, I decided to tackle the kitchen.  First, I decluttered in a big way.  Then I committed to cleaning up the kitchen after every meal.  I cook from scratch pretty much all the time, and used to only clean the kitchen after it got really messy.  But for the last month, I’ve been cleaning as I cook, and cleaning thoroughly after each meal.  I cannot even describe the difference this had made in the state of our kitchen, and in my own mental wellbeing.  I love walking through our house now, and seeing lots of wide open spaces and clean counters.  Just as with making the bed, I now cannot imagine leaving a mess in the kitchen after a meal.  Frugal Trenches, one of my favorite bloggers, keeps her house 5 minutes from ready.  We have a toddler, so I’m shooting for 15 minutes from ready – still a big improvement over what it used to be.

I know this post seems a bit disjointed, but I’m hoping to convey the feeling of peace and calm that I have nearly all of the time now.  We don’t even have to try to not spend money anymore, because we’ve just gotten in the habit of doing things that don’t cost money.  We don’t know what the future holds as far as our income, and by not spending the money we’re earning now, we’re giving ourselves a cushion against future lulls in our income.  And if that doesn’t happen?  Well, early retirement sounds good to me.  Living simply and frugally, combined with decluttering, organizing, and keeping our living space clean and simple has all contributed to greatly reducing the stress and worry that I used to carry around with me.

Category: family, food, just my life, the simple life  12 Comments
23
Oct 2009

Ditching Some More Disposables

FrugalBabe

This is a bathroom-themed post, so if that’s tmi, here’s your fair warning to mosey along now. 

For some time, we’ve been on a mission to reduce the amount of disposable stuff we use.  It’s cheaper and far more environmentally sound to go with reusable products, and we’ve found that it’s a lot easier than it seems.  Our son has been in homemade cloth diapers since he was born, and I barely even notice the extra loads of laundry.  Amy at Crunchy Domestic Goddess has a challenge on her site about ditching disposables – check it out if you’re looking for inspiration.

Anyway, I started thinking…  Why not make myself cloth wipes that I can use instead of toilet paper when I pee?  I wash diapers all the time – how hard would it be to toss in some little squares of cloth along with the diapers?  So I got out my sewing stuff and my recycled fabric.  Remember the flannel sheets that I got at a thrift store before our son was born?  Those sheets have definitely earned their keep around here.  Diapers, a sling, more diapers, and they’re still going strong.

I cut little rectangles of fabric from one of the sheets, about eight inches by four inches.  Then I folded them in half and sewed around the open edges, leaving a little space to turn them inside out.  Then I stitched up the open space… done and done.  It took me about 45 minutes to cut out and sew 20 little squares.  Now I have nice soft flannel double-thick squares of fabric, instead of toilet paper.  And I’m the only girl in the house, so they’re all mine.  I toss them in the diaper pail, and they use no extra resources at all, since I’m running the washing machine anyway, with or without them.  By the way, I’m a very well-hydrated girl, so those 20 squares last me two days – I was going through a lot of toilet paper.

(I should note that this is not an original idea.  My parents did this when I was a kid, long before “green” was the buzz word of the decade.)

That got me on a roll, and I started thinking again about all the tampons I’ve thrown away over the years.  I checked out some of the websites that sell cloth pads, and considered buying some.  But then I thought about what an awesome sense of satisfaction I get from making stuff myself.  And even though my sewing skills are nothing to brag about, I figured that if I could manage to make diapers, I could make a pad.  I read through the directions on the Tiny Birds Organic website (I got that link from Alissa, who sews beautifully and makes amazing-looking pads and diapers and all sorts of other stuff), and then I sat down to give it a try.  I’ve found that with diapers, I prefer pockets and inserts rather than having the soaker layer built into the diaper.  So I skipped the extra layer, and just cut out the front and back of the pad (the back is made of two overlapping pieces).  Other than that, I followed all the steps listed.  Then I made an insert using a layer of flannel from the sheet, a middle layer cut from an old towel, and a backing layer made from an old fleece sweatshirt that I had been using to make diaper liners.  The fleece provides some waterproofing, but you can also use wool.  I’m thrilled with how well it turned out, given that it’s my first try.  Here’s a picture of the pad and the liner:

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And a picture of everything all put together, with the wings folded underneath:

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I still need to figure out a snap.  I’m going into town tomorrow, so I’ll browse around at the craft store and see what they have in the way of snaps.  This project took me about 30 minutes, from start to finish.  My sewing machine is quite old and before I started making diapers last year, my previous sewing experience was limited to home ec class in 1990.  So trust me, if I can do this, anyone can.

Category: hobbies, organic living, the simple life  14 Comments
11
Oct 2009

Kitchen Decluttering

FrugalBabe

I don’t particularly like cleaning.  I love to cook, do laundry, work in the garden… but cleaning is pretty far down on my list.  But I love living in a clean house, and having lots of wide open, clean space around me.  And therein lies the conundrum.  Lately I’ve been on a mission to purge stuff from our house, so that it’s easier to clean and less likely to get messed up ( if you don’t have it, you can’t mess it up, right?)  I’ve pretty much stopped going to thrift stores, as there really isn’t anything we need, and thrift stores tend to entice me to buy stuff just because it’s there and it’s a screamin’ deal.  So at least no new stuff is coming into the house.

In addition, I’ve been going through the house and really looking at our stuff.  Asking myself if we’ve used it lately, or if we could do without it.  The back of my car is full again with stuff to drop off at the thrift store next time I go to town, and it feels great.

Yesterday, I tackled a set of kitchen cabinets.  The cabinets where we store tea, coffee, some spices, baking stuff, random kitchen gadgets that rarely get used… sort of the catch-all cabinets.  I took everything out, and tossed the stuff that I never use.  There were spices that were more preservatives than spice – and that I knew I would never use again – but were somehow still lurking in the back of my cabinet.  There was a beautiful glass pitcher that we got as a wedding gift from friends of my in-laws and have used one time.  One time, and we’ve been married since 2003.  Regardless of how pretty the pitcher was, in our kitchen, it was taking up space.  Now it’s in my car to donate, and will hopefully end up in a home where it gets used often.  By the time I had finished, I had a large stack for the thrift store, and an equally large stack for the trash.  And my cabinet looks and feels SO much better.  I can find everything.  I know that everything in there is stuff that we regularly use.

A while ago, I started saving plain glass jars when they were empty, instead of putting them in the recycle bin.  Yesterday I cleaned off all of the labels, and transferred all of the stuff that was in plastic bags in my cabinet to the jars.  Cocoa, dried coconut, spices… all of the stuff that our health food store sells in bulk bags.  Now it’s all in pretty jars instead.  I made labels out of scrap paper and black ink and glued them to the jars.  I love how it looks with all the different jars, and it’s easy to tell if I’m running low on something.  And with the cabinet all cleaned out, I can see all of the jars at a glance.

Ah, kitchen decluttering.  Perfect activity for a cold, snowy weekend.  And it’s free, which is always a bonus in my book.

Category: home improvement, the simple life, thrift stores  11 Comments
03
Oct 2009

Wrapping Up The Outdoor Chores, And A Few Good Links

FrugalBabe

I got a blog award last week, and in the process I discovered a new blog.  Kristina writes at Growing A Better Me, and has all sorts of interesting things to share.  Thanks for the award Kristina!  As far as passing it on goes, the blogs on my blogroll are my favorites, and I highly recommend them all!

While I was browsing Kristina’s blog, I found this recipe that she shared for spinach burgers.  I didn’t have any cheese (we’re mostly vegan these days) so I made cashew cheese by blending cashews, water, garlic salt, apple cider vinegar, and some spices.  It turned out creamy and wonderful, and I added it to the spinach mixture in place of cheese.  The dish was fantastic, and smelled great while it was baking.  I didn’t have bread either, so I whipped up a batch of tortillas, and we had spinach burritos.  Very yummy – thanks for the inspiration Kristina!

I also came across this article last week, with 100 ways to recycle a t-shirt.  My favorite?  The diaper, of course!

My husband is hard at work in the backyard right now, building two more mini-greenhouses to put over our other garden beds.  We’ve had to cover them with tarps for the last couple nights, as it’s been below freezing.  So it will be nice to have them covered now as we head into the cold season.  He’s using a lot of scrap lumber that we got for free from a lumber yard (check around, if there’s one in your area, they might let you come in and pick up offcuts).  We had to buy several long 2x4s, but all of the shorter pieces were free.

We’re starting to wrap up our list of outdoor chores.  I’ve been moving gravel in the front yard for the last few weeks, and finally finished this week.  We have a huge front yard, and it was all grass when we got here (well, sort of – it hadn’t been watered or mowed in a very long time… but it was supposed to be grass).  We didn’t want to be watering and maintaining all of that grass, and decided to xeriscape a chunk of the yard instead.  The previous owners had purchased gravel to go along the driveway and between the street and the sidewalk.  They had also put gravel back by the fence, and had apparently over-ordered.  The excess was in the area by the fence, which was over a foot deep in places.  So I got out the wheelbarrow and shovel, and started moving gravel.  We bought weedblocker to put down under the gravel, and I’ve filled in roughly 400 square feet of yard with xeriscaping.  We planted a few low-water plants and grasses, and I put in a wavy edge along the gravel using some old bricks that the previous owners left.  Even the plants were mostly free – a neighbor didn’t want them any more, and offered them to us if we’d come over and dig them out of her yard.  I love our new front yard.  It’s still mostly grass, but not as much as it was before, and we paid almost nothing for the new landscaping.  I also got lots of good workouts by shoveling gravel, which was an extra bonus.

Hope you’re all having a good weekend!

Category: home improvement, the simple life  3 Comments
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