It is a cold snowy Sunday here today.  Perfect for sitting on the couch sewing felted wool sweaters into diaper covers.  Later on we’ll head to the gym, but other than that we’ll be staying indoors today.  I’ve been using my Moby Wrap to exercise with our son lately, and it’s working great.  Our gym has an indoor track and a set of stairs with 28 steps going down to the level below the track.  I put the baby in his wrap, grab two 9 lb weights, and hit the track.  I just walk laps, and I go down the stairs and back up on each lap.  I carry the weights while I walk, doing all sorts of bicep curls, tricep kickbacks, military press, etc.  We’re usually there for about 90 minutes, and by the end of that, I’ve had a great workout.  Nothing fancier than walking, stairs, carrying the baby and some light weights.  But it works well.  When it’s nice outside, we do the same sort of thing outdoors.  But today is a good day for the gym.  I love being able to get in a workout and snuggle my baby at the same time.  And it’s all free, since my job at the library includes a free gym pass.  Even though I’m just a sub at the library now, I still get the free gym pass. 

I’m getting much better at making wool diaper covers.  After I blogged about the one I made last week, Alissa left a comment with a link to a very simple wool cover pattern (thanks Alissa!)  I tried that pattern and I’ve made two covers this weekend.  I’m sewing them by hand with thick crochet cotton, and they’re turning out great.  It’s very relaxing to sit on the couch and sew by hand.  And the combination of the wool and the thick cotton thread means that they come together really fast.  I’d say it took me about an hour to make each cover.  Here’s a picture of the one I just finished this morning:

I’m still using old sweaters that a friend felted when she was making covers for her son.  I have two sweaters that I haven’t cut up yet, which should make four more covers.  That ought to do us for a while.  And I can also make long wool pants using the arms of the sweaters, so I probably have enough wool to make diaper covers to last until our son is out of diapers.

Last night I went shopping with a friend, and we ended up at the thrift store near our house.  I bought an extra-large men’s fleece sweatshirt that I’m going to make into diapers.  I’ve found that fleece is a great fabric for the inside of the diapers, since it’s soft and doesn’t stain the way knit cotton does.  I got the shirt for $2.50, and should be able to get at least four or five diaper liners out of it.

Around the Frugal Blog Network,

The Tight Fisted Miser writes about how he and his girlfriend divide their expenses.  She’s not as frugal as he is, but they’ve both compromised a bit, and it works for them, which is all that really matters.

Almost Frugal has written about her guilty pleasures.  We all have them, and frankly (unless your guilty pleasure is a Ferrari) I think they’re worth it.

The Frugal Duchess has a post about some of the financial schemes to which people are particularly vulnerable during bad economic times.

Frugal Zeitgeist has a very helpful post about getting promoted.  Any tips that lead to a promotion or a raise are good right now, considering how tough the job market is.

Not Made Of Money has details about some things you might not know about your credit score. 

I got a comment today on my post about our financial goals that I thought was worth further discussion.  Dave wrote:

“I don’t know much about you but it seems like you folks have plenty of money. Anyone know of a blog directed toward the working poor? Somebody making / surviving on $30K a year?”

Dave, you make a very good point, and one that I’ve thought about a lot as I write a blog focused on frugal living.  But as as recently as 2004 we were indeed living on about $30K.  That year, our savings amounted to $100/month into our IRAs and that was it.  We were frugal out of necessity.  When we found out that my husband would need $5000 worth of dental work that year, I took a second job at the library, shelving books for $8/hour to pay off the dental bill.

When I started this blog in 2006, we were still in debt and although our income had increased a little beyond $30K, it still wasn’t huge.  Over the last couple years our income has increased further, but our lifestyle has stayed about the same.  Yes, we could spend more money now.  But we choose not to, because we’d rather save for the future than spend everything we have right now.

We’re actually earning a pretty typical income for two college-educated professionals in our 30s.  But we’re still in the same modest house we bought six years ago (we plan to stay, and are paying off the mortgage as quickly as possible).  We still drive cars that were made when nobody outside of Arkansas had ever heard of Bill Clinton.  We buy all of our clothing in thrift stores (and rarely shop at all, even at thrift stores).  I think the last time we went out to eat was in September when my in-laws were visiting.  Yes, we have options – we could choose to drive new cars, upgrade our house, shop at the mall, and go to Starbucks.  But instead we’d rather pretend that we still earn $30K and save the rest.

In order to make our goals happen next year, our family of three will have to keep our monthly expenses to about $2500, including the mortgage and health insurance, which amount to about $1500 together.  I feel confident that we can do it, because we’re used to living frugally.  Being forced to make do on very little money in the past taught us that we really don’t need a lot of money at all.  Now that we have more money, we’re able to give to causes that matter to us and save for the future, since we’re still perfectly happy with our frugal life.

I remember when I started blogging, I read NCN’s blog and was amazed at how much money his yearly savings amounted to.  I remember thinking that he was saving nearly as much as we were earning in a year.  And that served as a huge motivator for me.   The nice thing about being committed to living frugally is that if you work hard and focus on increasing your salary, chances are it will go up as the years go by.  But although the cost of living will increase too, frugal habits will mean that your expenses won’t increase as much as those of the people around you.  I’m sure that people see me pulling out of the thrift store parking lot in my 91 Civic and assume that I’m poor.  And that’s fine with me.

I’ll open the rest of Dave’s comment up to my readers:  what are your favorite blogs written by people who are working to stretch small incomes?  And what about your own experiences – have you found that frugal habits you developed years ago have stayed with you even though your income might have grown to the point where you don’t have to be frugal anymore?  Anyone finding that well-ingrained frugal habits are helping them weather the current recession?  I think this is a great topic for discussion – are you frugal because you want to be, or because you have to be?  For us it started out as a necessity, and then just became a way of life.  My guess is that a lot of other people find the same thing – once they get used to living frugally, they notice that big TVs and shopping at the mall and cars and fancy houses no longer hold much appeal.

I’ve written before about how much I love sprouts.  They’re about as close to a perfect food as you can get, as far as nutrition goes, and most of them are pretty tasty as well.  I eat small amounts of sprouts on sandwiches and salads, but by far the majority of the sprouts we grow end up in our green smoothies.  It’s a lot easier to just blend them into a drink, so that’s what I do.

On Saturday, my husband went to a local store that sells bulk sprout seeds.  He got a pound of mung beans, a pound of alfalfa sprout seeds, a pound of broccoli sprout seeds, and four ounces of fenugreek seeds.  The total came to $33.  I use about an ounce of seeds to grow a quart of sprouts (within a few days the jar is completely full of sprouts).  So the seeds my husband bought us should make about 50 jars of sprouts.  That works out to 66 cents a quart for fresh, homegrown sprouts.  Maybe not the cheapest food ever, if you count stuff like ramen noodles.  But I can’t think of a less expensive food that’s as nutritious as sprouts.  Or as quick and easy to grow.  So if you’re feeling the crunch at the grocery store, buy a bag of sprout seeds.  If you don’t like the taste, just blend them up with fruit or something that you do like.  Your health and your wallet will thank you.

My husband has been working every evening for the last couple weeks, getting the hydroponic garden up and running.  The goal is to automate as much as we can, so that the upkeep going forward is minimal.  Tonight he plumbed in a water line coming from our under-sink water filter, going into the crawl space.  That way he can just turn a faucet under the house to refill the water tanks for the garden.  They’re 20 gallons each, and need to be refilled every two weeks.  Since we wanted to use filtered water, it would otherwise have involved standing at the sink filling buckets, and then carrying them down under the house.  So by spending a couple evenings getting the extra water line set up, he’s reduced considerably the amount of effort needed to maintain our garden.  I love that guy.

Another thing we needed was containers to hold our plants.  Each reservoir is 2 feet by 4 feet, so we needed quite a few containers.  The store where we bought our hydroponic supplies was selling them for 80 cents each.  But we figured we needed between 50 and 70 containers, and at 80 cents each, that was going to be a serious chunk of change.  So we came home and dug out all the containers we could find in our recycling bin that would fit the bill.  We had three.  Then I went to the recycling center to drop off all of our stuff, and looked in the big bins there to see what I could find.  Good idea, but it was slim pickins because the bins had just been emptied and I couldn’t reach far enough into them to get much.  I got five containers that day.  We checked out local thrift stores, but they didn’t have anything either.  Then my husband went to our local nursery and hit the jackpot.  It’s the end of the planting season, and they had piles of containers in various sizes, that they were giving away for free.  I think that the nursery does landscaping for people, and these were all the leftover pots from the plants they transplanted this summer.  We have a stack of pots about four feet tall, and they were free.  Pays to keep looking, even when the first few places you look don’t work out.

So now we have 35 plants growing in our crawl space.  The swiss chard is doing the best – some of the plants have four inch leaves already.  We also have lettuce and Japanese mustard growing, along with various other salad greens.  We’ve filled one of the two reservoirs, and now we’re going to start working on the second one.  So far it’s working out great, and it will be wonderful to be harvesting our own veggies all winter long while the outdoor garden is buried under snow.

I’ve been environmentally conscious for years.  But ever since my husband and I started talking about having a baby (and especially since I got pregnant last year), I’ve been more and more concerned with avoiding toxins and chemical crud.  If money were no object, I’d love to build a super-green house with no chemicals in it at all, but alas – money is an object.  For me and everyone I know.  So I’m doing whatever I can to minimize our exposure to chemicals… but my kitchen floor is still made of vinyl, and that’s just the way it has to be.  My goal is to be frugal and green, so I take whatever steps I can that don’t cost an arm and a leg.

I’ve been concerned lately about storing food in plastic containers.  I’d much rather use glass, since I don’t want my storage containers to leach into our food.  I have lots of glass mixing bowls of various sizes, but none of them have lids.  I can use plastic wrap on them, but I hate generating waste every time I store food.  I see glass bowls at thrift stores all the time, but they never have lids.  I saw a set of four pyrex bowls with lids in a catalog, but they were $50.  Ouch.  Then I remembered a commercial I had seen on tv ages ago for Smart Lidz (I didn’t remember the name, and had to look it up – they are lids that fit on any container).  Yesterday I bought a set of four lids for $10.  They fit on my existing mixing bowls, and although they are made of plastic, they don’t touch the food, so I figure it’s ok.

So now I have glass food storage containers!  All of my pyrex bowls came from thrift stores to begin with, and I use them for mixing and serving – now I can use them to store leftovers too.  It’s one more step towards the green lifestyle that I want, without spending a fortune to get there.

It’a Thrift Green Thursday time at Green Baby Guide.  They want to know what we’ve done to be thrifty and green, and I figure that fits my life just about perfectly.  So what have we done?  It’s been an evolving process for us over the years.  I was raised to be very thrifty, and pretty green (I remember my mother carting van-loads of stuff to the recycle center long before recycling was cool – there was no curbside pickup of recycling back then).  But I’ve come a long way since the days of Rave hairspray and glittery green eye shadow.

My husband and I bought our house in 2003.  It’s about 1300 square feet, and we intended it to be a starter house.  Once we got settled, we found that we really liked it, and didn’t want to move.  We didn’t want a bigger mortgage, and we didn’t want to waste energy heating and cooling a larger place.  So we did a little remodeling and made it work.  We’re now a family of three, and still in our “starter house” – where we plan to stay.  Not quite as impressive as Derek and his family, but it’s better than moving up to a 2200 square foot house.

Little by little, we’ve eliminated chemicals from our life.  I use baking soda and vinegar to clean pretty much everything in our house, including the cloth diapers we use for our son (plus a tiny bit of eco-friendly detergent).  I brush my teeth and wash my hair with baking soda, and use vinegar as conditioner.  Baking soda is a lot cheaper than toothpaste and shampoo, and there’s no worries about what chemicals I’m sending into the water system.

We don’t use our dryer at all anymore.  I have four clothes drying racks, and we just got a retractable clothesline at a garage sale for $1.50 last week.  In the winter, I dry stuff on racks in the house – in the summer I set the racks outside.  Cheaper, better for the world, and better for our clothes.  Nuff said.

We also use the sun to cook our food – we bough a solar oven earlier this summer, and have used it almost every day since then.  My husband makes our oatmeal in it every morning, and he’s also baked some amazingly good bread in it.

We just set up a hydroponic garden in our crawl space.  Might not seem thrifty at first, since it was a bit expensive to get going.  But we should break even within about 8 months, and after that we’ll be in the black.  As far as being green, it’s a winner for sure.  Homegrown veggies year-round, all organic, much less water usage than outdoor gardens, no transportation impact… it’s hard to beat.

I’m breastfeeding our son, and will continue until he’s at least a year old.  Once he starts eating solids, we’ll be pureeing vegetables for him in our blender, and grinding up whatever we’re eating in a little portable food grinder.  No baby food in tiny wasteful jars – it’s gotta be un-green to buy anything where the packaging takes up as much space as the contents of the container!!  And it costs almost nothing to puree some veggies, freeze them in ice cube trays, and defrost at meal time.

My husband and I used to mountain bike several times a week, but that involved driving 30 minutes each way to get to the mountains.  Now that we have our son, we’ve started trail biking instead.  There are trails that start right behind our house – no driving involved.  We strap our son’s car seat into the bike trailer and off we go.  Great exercise, great price (free), great fun, and zero environmental impact.  Not quite as thrilling as single track trails in the mountains, but we’re thrilled by different things these days.  Like our son learning to laugh.  And we both really like the fact that we’re no longer driving anywhere for our entertainment.

More and more we’re focused on our impact on the environment, and we’re actively trying to minimize that impact.  We want our son to grow up with a great respect for nature and the world around us, and we also want him to be part of a family with a solid financial foundation.  We’re working every day to mesh these two goals – and we find that more often than not, the green option is also the frugal option (solar panels are one exception we’ve come across lately, but we’re hoping that by the time we have enough money saved to buy them, the price will have come down a bit).  You don’t have to make huge changes to be green, or to be frugal.  Bike to work.  Take shorter showers.  Turn down your hot water heater.  Use a drying rack.  Keep the house a little warmer in the summer and a little cooler in the winter.  Eat less meat.  There are lots of little things that you can do that make a difference, both for the world and for your budget.  Once you get started, you might find that you keep wanting to do more.  That’s what happened with us, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

We’ve made another step towards becoming self-sufficient.  Yesterday we bought everything we need to set up a 4 foot square hydroponic garden in our crawl space.  This came after much discussion and research – we decided that the sizable upfront cost ($800+) will be a good investment that will pay for itself many times over.  We spend about $60 – $70/week on fresh produce, plus about $100/month on frozen produce at Costco.  The majority of our diet is veggies and fruit, and everything we buy is organic.  We do have a garden that has cut down dramatically on what we spend on swiss chard, kale, and spinach.  But we live in a pretty harsh climate for gardens.  October – April it’s too cold to grow anything outdoors.  Then from May – October we’re able to have a garden, but it requires a ton of water and gets baked in the sun.  We’ve had a total of 3 inches of precipitation this year, and every day now it’s just hot (near 100) and dry.  Plants have a tough go of it.

We want to grow our own food for lots of reasons.  We know exactly what went into it, we minimize the ecological impact by eliminating transportation issues, and the food is as fresh as can be.  But our yard is very small, and the area where we live is categorized as “high desert” – gardens struggle.  Perfect scenario for hydroponics. (my sprouts are hydroponic, and they do fantastically in our kitchen cupboard, with a new supply ready to go every few days)

Our crawl space is huge.  It’s under half of our house, and more than four feet tall (if they had just dug a little more, we could have had a basement, dang it!).  We’ve been using it for storage, and there’s tons of unused space under there.  So now a bit more of it is being used.  Our hydroponic system includes two water reservoirs and two trays for plants (each one is two feet by four feet) so that we can have leafy greens in one and fruiting plants in the other (they each require different levels of nutrients in the water and different pH levels).  For now, we have one full-spectrum grow light, although we may add a couple more that are specifically designed for certain types of plants.  We’re on a mission to find seeds this afternoon, although it’s August and the pickins are slim.  I think we’ll end up ordering most of our seed online.  One of the major advantages of hydroponics is how fast things grow and how much they produce.  Plants grow 4 – 5 times faster, and by adjusting the light you can make fruiting plants (like tomatoes) produce more tomatoes and less plant.  In the store where we bought the equipment, they had a tomato plant that was a seed in May and is now covered in red tomatoes.  My tomato plants were seedlings in May, and are now about 18 inches high, with no tomatoes in sight yet.

So we’re very excited about this project.  Obviously we can’t grow apple and avocado trees in our crawl space (we did have an indoor avocado tree for a few years, but alas, no avocados).  Things that grow on bushes and trees will still have to be purchased.  But we should be able to cut our produce bill by about half.  16 square feet of hydroponic garden will produce a lot of veggies – way more than you would get from the same space if you’re growing in soil.  If we can save $30/week, that’s $1500/year – which means we break even in less than a year, even if we have to go buy some more lights or equipment (the lights are the most expensive part).  And we’ll know that our produce is garden fresh, year round (there’s no such thing as “not in season” when it’s growing under lights in your crawl space) and hasn’t been transported from half way around the world to get to our kitchen.  We’re very excited about this project.  I’ll keep you posted.

We’re so close to the end of our painting project. We got our HOA to give us an extension to the end of the month, and it looks like we’re going to make it. We’ll probably have to spend two evenings this week and then it will be done. (actually, it looks like about two hours worth of work left, but every time I estimate a timeframe for a home improvement project, it takes us three times that long, so I’m going to give us two evenings and not be disappointed).

This weekend, we worked on the really high parts of the house. The top of the chimney, and the gables at the front and back of the house on the upper story. Our 22 foot ladder wouldn’t reach them, so we rented a ladder. We had thought about buying a used one on Craigs list, but everything we found was at least $100. We rented a 40 foot ladder for $26, and now we don’t have to store it anywhere. This is the first time in over five years that we’ve ever needed a ladder taller than the one we have, so it didn’t make much sense to buy one and have to store it. We picked up the rental ladder yesterday at about 11:30 am. We worked until dark last night – about 8:30. Then we got up at 5am and were outside painting by the time it was light. (bonus – it’s much cooler at 6am than it is at noon… something we night owls don’t usually get to enjoy). We worked all morning, taking turns on the high ladder. It’s nerve racking being up that high, and very tiring – probably because every muscle in your body is tense the whole time, hoping that you’re not going to end up skewered on the picket fence way down there. So we found that it worked better if we switched off, with one of us working on the shorter ladder and the other on the tall ladder. Half the battle was moving the darn thing. It weighed 200 pounds – seriously. Getting it into position would take us at least half an hour each time we needed to move it. Guess we got our workout in today.

We finished the last high spot, got the ladder loaded back on the roof racks of my trusty civic, and returned it to the store, with two minutes to spare. Now we only need to do the back side of the chimney (we just have to stand on the roof behind the chimney to do that) and one section of trim where we can stand on a patio roof. We’ve bought 10 gallons of wall paint, 3 gallons of trim paint, and 16 tubes of caulk. When you add in the ladder rental, the grand total comes to $360. Not bad for a full exterior paint job. We started about the middle of June, but we took a couple weeks of recently when my husband’s family was in town. My family pitched in one day last month and helped us make huge progress – otherwise we’d probably be working on it until September. It’s looking great, and although painting a house is not that high on my summer fun activities list, it feels great to have done it, and I’m so glad that we did it ourselves for just the cost of materials, instead of paying someone else to do it.

Next up… the HOA says we have to paint our fence. I think we’re going to put in a vinyl fence instead – either way, that will be next weekend’s project.

My two sisters in law and their five children are visiting us this week.  Today some of us went to a local amusement park, which I much preferred to the big Six Flags style park we went to a few days ago.  There were seven of us today, including the baby.  This park allowed us to just walk in, and then pay for rides as we did them, which was great for moms pushing newborn babies in strollers – free! (at the big amusement park, my ticket still cost $25, even though I didn’t ride anything and spent the day with my baby).

My sister in law is famous for her frugal ways, and I had to smile when the children started asking for food.  Of course there were food vendors all around, but my sister in law reached into her purse and pulled out a loaf of bread and some turkey and cheese that she had just taken out of the cooler in her car.  We found a shady spot and she made sandwiches for all of us.  Amusement parks usually charge quite a bit more for food than regular restaurants (which are spendy enough as it is), so it probably would have cost $40 or $50 for all of us to eat at one of the food places in the park.  But thanks to her frugal ways, we escaped without spending anything.  I am used to being the frugal one in any group, and I love having a someone else around who thinks the same way I do!

Before our son was born, my mother and I made about two dozen diapers for him. We followed a pattern we found online, and made the medium size diapers. We thought they would fit him for about 4 – 6 months. When he was born, he was just under 7 lbs. Now he’s 13.5 lbs, and ten weeks old. I guess he didn’t get the memo about babies doubling their birth weight by six months. I could tell by the time he was a month old that the diapers were not going to last long. But I couldn’t bear to see all that work go to waste, and I didn’t want to start over right away with another huge diaper-making project. So I improvised. I bought a used sewing machine, and started adding wings to the back of all his diapers. It was much easier than starting from scratch to make bigger diapers, and didn’t require any new material. I used offcuts that we had saved from the original diaper project. I just removed the velcro tabs from the back of the diaper (the parts that wrap around to the front when the diaper is on the baby), and set them aside. Then I cut rectangles of fabric about 6 inches by 8 inches, folded them in half and sewed them into little pockets. Then I slipped the pockets over the existing wings on the back of the diaper (where the velcro had been) and sewed them to the diaper. Then I sewed the velcro back on, at the ends of the wings. Before I altered them, the diapers still fit just fine everywhere except the waist. They just weren’t big enough to go around his waist and fasten in front anymore. Now with three or four inches of extra waistband on each side, he has room to grow. The wings overlap by a few inches on his little belly, so they’ll fit him for a while. Eventually I’ll have to make new diapers for him, but for now it was a lot easier, cheaper (free!), and faster to just add a bit of fabric to the nearly-new diapers we already had.

Our diapers were very inexpensive to begin with, although we had a lot of time invested in them. But if you bought expensive fitted cloth diapers that are not adjustable, a fast-growing baby could be quite a budget buster. Adding wings could solve the problem without having to go buy a bunch of new diapers.

What have you done lately to improvise and get by with what you have, instead of buying something new?