Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

The new year just starts and I'm already late on posting Frugal Friday *laugh*.  I'm off to a stellar start ;).

It's been busy around here.  I've been trying to get some deep cleaning done house-wise this week as after the holidays and things I just want my house decluttered, cleaned and as zen as I can make it in preparation of the coming year.  Between that and just trying to keep the kids busy and happy and me feeling just wiped out and not feeling great all week...it's been a challenge for sure.

But, hey let's get to the week, shall we?

1.  We ended up getting a decent amount of snow earlier in the week and I had to share the pics of sunrise the next morning as everything looked like a winter wonderland!  We finally got enough snow at one time, combined with temps with a high of 30 the next day so I took the kids out sledding in the backyard for over an hour.  The kids had a blast, everyone got really tired trudging up the hill over and over again to sled down it (I got to run up AND down the hill every time the son went sledding, so hey, I got my cardio in for the week *laugh*), and hey, it was free to do!

2.  This week saw me trying to get some cleaning chores done that I hadn't really had much of a chance to do the last year due to the weather and such.  I took the H2O at Home cleaning glove I had gotten last year and cleaned all of my window screens with it.  I had read online that it was excellent for that job and I REALLY needed something that would do a good job on the screens without removing them as most of the screens in the house are broken after some bad wind storms blew them out of the windows the first couple of years we lived here...they are now held into the windows with nails to reinforce the screen frames, so cleaning them requires a bit more planning than it used to.  The glove worked awesome and now I have nice spiffy clean screens to show for it!

I also got all of the Christmas stuff put away into the storage van and the other places the things were meant to go.  I felt great getting that done, honestly, as last year Christmas stuff was in the den until about March due to the long, cold and very snowy winter we had.  I then went into my furnace room and just started brutally decluttering it and getting rid of things I hadn't used in forever and weeded a bunch of stuff out that was just ready to go to the used store.  While in there I was also, finally, able to find the Spring and Summer decorations for the den (I do a coastal theme with some shells and things to remind me happily of summer through the rest of winter) and put those out, which made the kids happy as they both love the decorations and playing with them.  So, yay for already being ahead of last year on the cleaning and organizing front!

3.  When putting away my wreath for the year I ran into an issue.  See, my wreath holder is SHOT and I mean SHOT.  At some point it had been out in the garage one Christmas season and my husband had fired up his air compressor, which somehow the wreath holder had fallen onto the belt of said air compressor for a moment, which had burned and sliced a nice hole in the cover of the wreath holder.  From that point on the wreath holder had just cracked out from the hole, to the point that it was coming apart this year.  I had fixed it with duct tape, but my son found it and proceeded to play with the duct tape, thus wrecking my repair job, so I was kind of back to square one.  I took some different types of tape (out of duct tape after repairing the wreath holder the first time so I used a combo of strapping tape and packaging tape) and fixed it as well as I was able and then took super glue to it as well.  I have to store the wreath inside this year to make sure the wreath holder survives another year, but it worked!

4.  Shopping went pretty well this week!  The biggest highlights of the trip were getting bread and hamburger buns (on the list of things my son will eat) for .97 a piece (on sale with a coupon at Carrs).  I also got a half gallon (or what passes for a nearly half gallon) of ice cream for 1.49 (on sale with a digital coupon, limit of one) and the vanilla actually doesn't have a peanut warning on it, which was a nice find.  I also got boneless skinless chicken breasts for 1.77 lb on sale when I ran in to get my son's medication filled early in the week and I got some thin cut steaks for 3.87 lb on sale.  I did go over the grocery budget by 10.00 because I bought a thing of olive oil (7.99 for a quart of good quality olive oil on sale with a coupon) and some cereal (2.00 per box on sale this week at Carrs).

5.  My daughter insisted I share this photo and tell you how great she is at doing puzzles.  She even said, and I quote, "You can put it up, mom, because we own the puzzle so it was something free I did!"  *Laugh* like mother, like daughter ;).

We also had a lot of fun playing Candy Land and Connect 4 this week.  I went and dug out the buried basket of board games from the den (that had gotten lost behind the couch) and put them up on the TV stand upstairs.  We're playing the games a lot more now, which is really nice.

6.  I mended a shirt and a pair of pants this week.  And managed to dig up a BUNCH more mending as I got the laundry completely caught up and put away, but such is life.

7.  My husband went to the dump last weekend and we found that we were nearly 30 lbs less in our waste.  I feel pretty good learning things like that, knowing that the efforts I make to waste less are paying off.

8.  I repurposed containers and baskets we had around the house to help organize things as I cleaned.  It's amazing how many different ways I've found to reuse a container or other object in the house instead of having to go out and spend money on something new.

9.  My husband and I have been digging through the free videos on Amazon that we can stream with our Amazon Prime membership for free.  We were thrilled to find some Rifftrax movies that we had been wanting to see, a documentary on John Millius that my husband had been wanting to see forever (and had been hoping to buy), but wasn't available in the US on DVD (it was excellent by the way) and we also found that they have Unsolved Mysteries on Prime too!  We love that show, so we're looking forward to watching more of those in the coming weeks :).

10.  I have also been having fun re-watching, "Edwardian Farm" online.  It's funny.  At first, "Edwardian Farm" was my least favorite of the farm series, but the more busy and hectic my life has become with juggling appointments and things while also essentially running a household by myself 5 days a week (with my husband working the shift he does), the more I really relate to how the team is running around all over in "Edwardian Farm" and it has actually kind of become my favorite out of all of the series of farm series of late.

11.  I have found a couple of side benefits to having my hair at shoulder length.  One is that I'm not blowing through hair elastics now, which means I don't have to buy extras (I have been using my extras to put up my daughter's hair instead because she loves her longer hair) and I'm using way less shampoo when washing my hair *laugh*.  A small savings, but a savings none the less.

12.  I made sure to eat up leftovers, so we didn't waste food (a constant habit anymore, but a good one).

And there you are folks.  Some of my week in a nutshell (I know there was more, but MAN I'm tired and am zoning here).  How did you do this week?