Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

First, I didn't get to the Carrs ad this week, unfortunately.  I've been sitting on hold with Denali Kidcare so much this week I swear I'm hearing the same loop of music they play over and over and over again in my sleep.

Anyway, it's Friday (woohoo!) so it's time for another Frugal Friday!  Here's some of the things I did to save money this week.

1.  I was able to score cheap toothpaste this week at Carrs.  You can load a 1.00/1 E-Coupon onto your card for Crest and it's on sale for 1.25 this week at Safeway, so you pay a total of .25 for a tube.  The glory shot of my .25 thing of toothpaste is above (normally I would just go for the Cavity protection stuff, but was worried the coupon might not like it for some reason, so I got the spiffier type).

2.  I made some desk organizers for my bills and incoming and outgoing mail out of cereal boxes.  I took scrap booking paper from a kit that I got as a Christmas gift years ago (thanks for the gift, Nicole!) and took some packaging tape and just plain wrapped the boxes once I cut them to be a more desk friendly shape.  I thought they turned out rather well and they fit in my desk perfectly.

3.  Speaking of which, I rearranged my house a bit and put an antique desk I'd refinished when I was in college and put it back together (I'd been using the lower portion, which is like a small dresser, as a microwave cart).  I'm working on organizing it and getting things together to use the desk as a budget center where I'll manage coupons, bills, ledgers and the like.  I'm glad I've finally got an area set up where I can keep it all in one spot in the corner of my living room.  The more organized I feel, the more in control I feel of our situation, so doing this one little thing helped out a lot to alleviate some of my anxiety.

4. 

I've been doing some fun little projects while waiting for my son at therapies after picking up crochet again (I haven't done it in a while).  I was trying to come up with a good pattern for a hotplate by spiraling my stitches outward, but got the center too tight, so I turned the first attempt into a Stetson Downs hat for the teddy bear I made my daughter a while back.  My husband put a tie on him and now my daughter has a private eye teddy bear, which she loves (she's a big old school Scooby Doo fan and such, so she thinks it's really neat to have an investigator bear).  My husband has been having fun going into her room, grabbing the bear and making "Untouchable" references in his best Robert Stack voice.  It's pretty funny.

5. 

The second attempt at a hot plate came out much better.  A couple of people remarked how pretty it was and asked what stitch I was using, to which I responded with a baffled, "Uh?  Stitch?"  Yeah, that's how I roll when it comes to crochet.  So long as it looks all right and does what I want, I just roll with it *laugh*.

6.  I went to Fred Meyer and got my free yogurt earlier in the week.  I ate it for lunch sitting out on my deck enjoying the sunshine one day.  And I even manged to avoid getting swarmed by mosquitoes somehow.  It was a nice day.

7.  I made all of our meals at home, which saved us money.

8.  I went ahead and planted our garden (I'll give an update on that soon) as we're once again having a huge spider mite problem this year.  I've never seen an infestation of bugs as bad as the spider mites that infest my front yard every year.  I'll have thousands, literally, plastering the side of my house in no time flat, tons of them get into my house through the small cracks in my bedroom window...it's disgusting.  Luckily my garden area has a expanse of asphalt between it and the garden (and my front yard is elevated by a retaining wall), so I've been able to keep the majority of the spider mites off of my garden plants.  I ordered some food grade insecticide (can't use pesticides on my yard because our well is right in the middle of our front yard) that people swear by off of Amazon.  Oddly enough shipping for the insecticide alone was going to cost me 20.00 and the printer I have been wanting to get (ours is on death's door) was on sale for 20.00 and would land me free shipping on the order, so I ordered the printer too.  Figured this way I get the insecticide and end up with the printer for free.  Hopefully the Canon works better than the Epson did...at least the ink is cheaper if nothing else.

9.  I've started actively hitting coupon and deals blogs again for about 20 minutes in the morning to see what samples I can get or other things I might be able to get cheap or free.  I've been getting a couple of samples a week that I know we'll use ordered, so once those start trickling in that'll be a boon.

10.  I called and yelled at our electric company as I got an estimated bill this month that was estimating my energy consumption at above December's consumption.  I have been working my tail off to save money on utilities as people who read this blog know, and it seemed like I was able to save money one month and then poof that was it.  Turns out, once I threw a fit and went outside and read my meter for the electric company that they had estimated my bill THREE MONTHS IN A ROW!  Wrongly of course.  So my electric bill for this month is now 1/2 what they had estimated it should have been after adjustments.  And that was 10 days AFTER what my normal read date would have been.  I'm still a BIT mad about this...can't tell can you *laugh*.

Anyway, there are some of the ways I saved money this week.  How did you all do?