Diary of a spendy cow

mooomin

Spendy day yesterday, although today will be better as I'm hitting the shops to return things!

Food spends:

Asda - £2.79 including MANY bargains which had been reduced. I got WW Mousses for me for 15p (Normally £1.25) and their garlic bread for 11p (Normally 98p so got two packs for the freezer!) and a load of celery to make soup with later for 13p per pack

Morrisons - £10.80 which included a big bag of tatties (seconds for being less pretty than other potatoes) for 40p

Tesco - £18.38 because cat food was on offer at 2 for £8 when I went in and when the little blighter runs out of food it's never on offer :rotfl: I also bought olive oil which we needed and isn't cheap and splurged on low fat bacon for me. Now, just to remind Mr Mooo that if he eats then I'll sulk (like last time)

Christmas 2014 spends:

M&S - £1.50 on gift tags.

Other spends:

£3.00 - utensils jar for the kitchen. I'm in the middle of a major declutter in there at the moment to make space for various bits and pieces, and this was the nicest and cheapest jar I had seen all day
£10.00 - Tesco. Jeans for me at a whopping £10 and an iPad case. The case is going back though because when I took off the sticker on the front it took some of the material from the front of the case with it, so I'm not paying for that sort of rubbish!

To do list to follow....

mooomin

List for today:

• Brave town and collect my Lakeland order
• Return clothes to M&S, Primark and Next
• Remember to bring paperback to town with me for the queueing!
• Find PIN number for FD account and change it while in town
• Visit friend outside Edinburgh and pass on the stuff she wants from my kitchen clearout
• Mooch around the John Lewis sale for kitchen items
• Transfer value of returned items to current account once it's all done

Anything else I see in the sales for next Christmas will be coming from my own money, as I have £8.95 left in my Christmas account (!) That should keep the costs down if nothing will

Ali-OK

How did the trip to town go?

And more importantly, can I be nosey and ask how you organise your kitchen?! I've just started decluttering in mine and wonder how people arrange things, ie. do you have food in wall or floor cupboards, plates at eye line height, where do the tins/storage boxes etc live.

The back story- kitchen was refitted when a double wall unit came away from the wall, depositing everything everywhere. So a kitchen refit took place, but only finished the night before I had 15 due for lunch the next day (the big Xmas one but several years ago) - so everything just got bunged in cupboards and I've never really got it put any thought to re-organising it for optimal use. Tips most appreciated

mooomin

Ali-OK wrote: »

How did the trip to town go?

And more importantly, can I be nosey and ask how you organise your kitchen?!

It was SO BUSY!! I didn't buy anything though, hurrah I did accidentally buy a dress in Sainsbury's today though. I'll return it if it doesn't fit though

I don't know if I'll go as far as saying that my kitchen is organised, but it's getting there. Here's how I do it (bear in mind my kitchen is VERY small, so use of space is premium!)

• Most of the food is stored at eye-level. One cupboard has all the pasta/rice/lentils. One has all my WW-friendly food so it's all organised. I keep my lunchbags there too. The final food cupboard has my cooking essentials like tinned veggies, stock, herbs, oils and whatnot.
• The other two eye-level cupboards have mugs/glassware (still to be sorted through as I have more mugs than space!) and plastic storage boxes. I need to have a lot of these for when I batch cook but storage is a b*gger
• Lower cupboards have been rearranged this weekend to move the pans beside the cooker and in a cupboard that's more accessible. The other one was very deep but hard to access so I would end up with pans I didn't use or with all of them falling out first thing in the morning
• I've got one cupboard with two collanders and a food processor as I have nowhere else to keep them. I still don't technically have room for the Actifry but I'm hoping to fit it beside the toaster and the George Foreman grill.

The big thing I've done this weekend is move all clutter from the worktop. I used to have a knife block, oils, some herbs and a HUGE wooden chopping board out all the time, but the knives were needing binned, so they're off to the tip this week, as is the board. The rest has been put in cupboards. More worktop space has made the kitchen look and feel bigger.

mooomin wrote: »

• [STRIKE]Brave town and collect my Lakeland order[/STRIKE]
• [STRIKE]Return clothes to M&S, Primark and Next[/STRIKE]
• Remember to bring paperback to town with me for the queueing! Oops! Thankfully the queues weren't that bad
• Find PIN number for FD account and change it while in town Double-oops. I'll need to try and remember to bring it with me next time...
• Visit friend outside Edinburgh and pass on the stuff she wants from my kitchen clearout Another oops. By the time I was done in town I was knackered.
• [STRIKE]Mooch around the John Lewis sale for kitchen items[/STRIKE] Didn't buy anything though
• [STRIKE]Transfer value of returned items to current account once it's all done[/STRIKE]

I returned £29.50 worth of items to M&S and Next and that money is on its way back to my current account. The jumper from Primark was a cash payment so that's in my wallet. I also returned some items to M&S, some of the refund went back on my debit card (£3ish) and the rest on a gift card. I've now got a balance of £8.76 on an M&S gift card, which I'll likely just spend on food

I had another wee spend in Morrisons today (oops...) because I wandered in to buy Golden Syrup to make biscuits. That was disasterous - I'm not a baker. A good bargain was had though - got some whoopsied Cathedral City for 95p instead of £4ish. :j

mooomin

This week I'm going to be doing an inventory of my freezer. Someone on the Frugal Living thread linked this so I'm going to use it

Ali-OK

Thank you so much for sharing all that - that all makes very good sense and I like the idea of clutter free worktops too. Quite a project to re-arrange but I shall do it as part of the clear out and clean over this holiday period whilst I've got a run of days left.

One of my kitchen floor cupboards is full of alcohol, as my DB said Cinzano went out with the 80s and mine should have at worst been thrown out probably 2 house move ago in the 90s :rotfl: . At least the bottle bank is only down the road and I can go in the dark .

A good amount of refunds there and the Morrie's bargain. Ooh golden syrup - on porridge, flapjacks, on pancakes? Does it fit in with the WW plan?

Freezer inventory link is fab, thanks for that. Think I might print and stick on the freezer door, will defo keep on top of the contents that way. :T

mooomin

Account balances:

Food - £117.85
Current account - £240.00
Christmas - £6.86
Savings - £1281.91

I have a balance of 631 Nectar points, which isn't too bad. I'm going to keep saving them up through the year and hopefully use the balance to help pay for Christmas next year.

Not a lot of MSE plans for today apart from NOT going to the supermarket!! The food account balance is wandering ever downwards and I need to try and behave The trouble is that I really do need to get some things added to my normal shopping list so that I can achieve my aim of cooking from scratch more - every time I find a new recipe it needs a herb or spice I don't already own :rotfl:

I'm going to print off the freezer inventory too and get that done tonight. Once I know what I have it'll be easier to meal plan. I did check my second freezer this morning and know that I have less meat than I thought :eek: It'll just require some creativity over the next couple of weeks and then I'll use whatever is left from my grocery budget to start restocking.

rising_from_the_ashes

mooomin wrote: »

This week I'm going to be doing an inventory of my freezer. Someone on the Frugal Living thread linked this so I'm going to use it

Ahhh thanks for that - I have loads of these saved somewhere from when I did my Household Binder last year

I did do one then (which is still stuck on the front of my fridge!) and it was really useful - it's got so many things scored off / written on though I really must do a new one!

tomtombeanie

I love that organized home website - have just spent a happy 20 minutes reading about decluttering. January is always my month for cleaning/sorting the darkest deepest cupboards and closets in our house

mooomin

Have arrived at work, and am entirely drookit. The weather at the moment is rotten. So bad in fact that my roof is leaking - I'm waiting for a call back from the man who usually does repairs.

I've printed off my inventories so I'll aim to do that tonight. I'm going to use one for each freezer so I know what's what!

I remembered this morning that my bus pass has expired, but rather than topping it up for four weeks (at a cost of £53ish) I just bought a day ticket as I'll likely be working at home for the rest of the week and don't want the days to sit unused, as once you swipe it, the time starts ticking.

My non-MSE action of the day was that I didn't have anything in to make my lunch I'll probably just get soup from the canteen though which will be cheap and filling.