Every week (ish) I share five frugal things that I’ve done during the previous week just to show you that the small things you do all add up to a great frugal lifestyle where you can learn to live a fabulously frugal life.
Hey! 👐
1) Regular readers will know that back in the day, I used to treat myself to flowers (albeit reduced price flowers) as often as I could but it’s been ages since I’ve been in the right place at the right time for the right flowers at the right price. 😁
Today, I took a risk on these potential beauties…
I say potential as they were a bit worse for wear when I picked them up today for £2.42. The leaves surrounding the flower buds had definitely seen better days so I had to really cut them back but I’m hoping that in a day or two, they’ll open up and be lovely. If they do, they’ll be stunning I think. I couldn’t leave them in the shop so in my trolley they went and now I have my fingers crossed that they bloom as I hope!
2) You know how much I love a Too Good to Go Bargain, right? Well this week we got a great one (actually two as this is two bags from the same service station) with this little lot…
The bags cost £3 each and when I arrived at the garage to collect them, the man behind the counter literally took two carrier bags and wandered around the shop picking up things from each session, filling both bags to the brim. He emptied the heated section of southern fried chicken sandwiches, sausage rolls and othery bakery items and then headed to the chiller for sausages, pasta and ham. Then he moved on to the bread section where he topped the bags up with buns, pancakes and muffins before popping in some grapes, lemons and pears into the bags!
My partner fed his whole team at work the following day with the bakery items and the pancakes! We don’t eat bread but the kids do when they’re with us so we’ve frozen the bread and lots of the other things ready for when we want them.
We do Too Good to Go once a week (ish) and this is the best bag we’ve had! I genuinely recommend the app to everyone but don’t expect this every time as it’s rare to get such good value.
You can see more about Too Good to Go and how it works here and see some examples of bags we’ve had in the past too.
3) Our ambition for this Summer is to get our garden sorted out but we have lots of other priorities so although I know we’ll do something with it, I just don’t think we’ll do as much as we want to do to it in time for the Summer months. I suspect it will be more of a temporary fix job with a bit of rearranging and pressure washer cleaning but we’ll see how it goes for now.
The table in the photo below was one that my partner asked me to take apart and pop in the trailer ready for a tip run with some other stuff while he was at work last weekend. It was way past it’s best and looked a bit rusty thanks to a Winter left out in the garden so I went into the tool shed to get what I needed to loosen the bolts holding it together.
I opened the door to the shed and found a can of black spray paint staring me right in the face. It was literally crying out to be used so it wasn’t even my fault that I deviated from the plan of trashing our rusty table.
I was quite pleased with the results as a do-for-now garden table although it’s far from what I had in mind as our garden table. We have a plan to make our own table (I know, who even am I?) but there’s no way I can see that happening until we have the motivation of a nice garden to put it in. 🤣
Honestly, we currently have an 18ft Dodge Ram truck project parked in the back garden along with our Summer house, a 10ft trampoline, a trailoer, two sheds and a cycle shed so we really need to have a clear out . Oh, we also have a netball net and a large pile of tyres so yes, a clear out is definitely needed which is why I say it may not happen imminently as it’s a bloody big job!
For now, we have our shiny upgraded table and some chairs which we bought off FB marketplace for £20 for four last weekend. We saw that they were the same folding chairs as we already two of so we added an extra four to our collection which means we have plenty for the Summer when we have all the kids around at once or we want to invite friends round.
4) Yesterday was a lovely day and we have the two younger kids for the week so we wanted to get outside and do something fun. We couldn’t decide what to do and places to visit in our area were coming up at £50 plus for us all which we weren’t up for paying. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of free things to do in our area but we wanted to do something we haven’t done recently.
We decided to use our National Trust membership and head to Cragside which is a fab place to visit about an hour from us with loads of stuff for the kids!
We had a lovely day and enjoyed the pinic I packed sat in the sun near the playpark.
We pay £13 a month for our family passes and definitely get our money’s worth out of them – Cragside would have cost us £57 for the four of us if we didn’t have them. We had a full day out having fun and only spent what we spent on diesel and an ice cream for the kids which is a good day all round if you ask me!
5) Today, I’ve had a good day catching up on stuff as it’s been a mad time lately with lots of things going on that have been keeping us on our toes. I filled my Zoflora spray bottle up with some lovely black cherry scented disinfectant and have cleaned the house from top to bottom with no surface left untouched, 😊
You don’t need a stack of fancy cleaning stuff to clean – I have a few microfibre cloths and this spray and my house is spotless and smells amazing!
So, there’s this week’s five frugal things!
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