Five frugal things I’ve done this week:
1. My new Fridge Freezer arrived on Monday and although I love it, it’s certainly a lot bigger than it looked when I bought it. We thought to measure the depth and width in the shop to make sure it fit where we wanted it but we didn’t really consider the height of it until it was delivered.
It’s at least a foot taller than our old one which means I can’t store anything on top of it like I used to so Monday night was spent in the kitchen re-organising! The problem I have is that I have too much ‘stuff’ in the kitchen and even the shelves that we bought from Argos for the dining room end of the kitchen seem to be overflowing with things that I don’t want to part with but equally don’t want to be on display looking messy.
Whereas in the past I would have been straight online looking for a solution, on Monday I went and looked in my garage (which is also jam packed but in a tidy way now after my recent clear out) to see if I had something I could work with and as luck would have it, I found some wicker storage boxes that I had forgotten about.
I know it still look’s cluttered in the picture but it’s better than it was and I used something that was just sitting in the garage rather than buying new storage. 😉
2. I also got a new washing machine this week (not by choice – my old one died around the same time as the fridge freezer by some unhappy coincidence) and I discovered that not only is there a quick wash on there but you can adjust the length of time on the quick wash and a 9 minute wash is actually good enough for a load of dark or coloured washing. I tried it with whites too but they didn’t come out as clean looking as I’d like so I’ll stick to the normal wash for whites but I love the time and money saving aspect of using the quick wash for washing where possible.
3. I bought a battery charger with 4 AA batteries on sale at Tesco this week for £9 which is only around double the cost of a pack of four good batteries. It’s an Energizer re-charger and their website says that rechargeable batteries like this can be re-charged 100’s of times so I’m really pleased with them. They’re going to be used for XBox controllers only as they’re the biggest battery drainers in our house.
4. Is it too early to say the C word? It probably is so I’ll get this one over with quickly and move on…. I have a Match & More card from Morrisons and I keep getting the £5 vouchers from them every couple of weeks and although my intention was to save them for Christmas, so far I have just spent them on the next week’s shopping. I’ve just discovered though that you can go on to your Match & More account online and ask them not to give you the vouchers as you earn them, instead you go back online when you want them and change the option back and you’ll get all that you’ve accumulated next time you shop. So I’m going to store them for Christmas shopping that way instead of relying on me not using them.
5. As my mobile phone contract is with EE I took advantage of their current offer of giving a free power bar to all of their customers. I had no idea about this promotion until I saw it on one of my friends Facebook status’ but all you have to do is text Power to 365 from your mobile phone and you’ll be sent a code (there are delays at the moment due to demand) which you can take in to your local EE store and get a free power bar so you can charge your phone on the go. The power bars are worth around £20 (although you can definitely get them cheaper than that online) so it’s a great deal – presumably to make up for the withdrawal of Orange Wednesdays earlier in the year.
What frugal or thrifty things have you done this week?
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