Bricks Not Books

savingwannabe

Gosh you've done loads. Blimey!!!! I'd need a holiday to recover. Still some really useful jobs were done and some travelling too which is great.

Glad Dr Who is a woman too. It's inspiring:T

Sorry about the expenses of the car, hopefully it will be fine for ages after the changes are made.

Hot weather predicted next week. Hopefully you will have fun in garden when you come home after a day at work. :j

VintageHistorian

I don't like hot weather SW so I tend to lurk indoors rather than bathe in it outside XD I just end up feeling horribly sticky and tired, so heatwaves aren't my thing. I prefer the chill of a nice autumn day.

Expenses have paid out - £78.66. Technically not clearing until Monday but I've sent the OP now as I was too excited to get it! Combined it with £5.39 from Quidco and a TT of £4.48, in total this month I've OPed £121.61 :T There's no happy dance emote :rotfl: But still, work expenses have really helped me with this month's OP, it would be well under £100 without them!

Back at work this week, had 105 emails in the inbox when I got in Monday morning, but happily most were just replies I'd been copied in to and sorting out what I needed to do was quite quick. We've got two new staff starting, one in August and one in September, so we're going to have a swap around of offices to accommodate everyone better. It'll also give us a bit of a chance to have a clear out and a bit of a tidy-up.

DH is working today and then we've got pizza for dinner tonight. I was really tired last night and fell asleep quite quickly, only woke up as he was leaving at 5:30 this morning. Fell back asleep but woke up several more time as I remember seeing 8:05 and 9:30 on the alarm clock, but woke up properly at 10:40 so I must have been more tired than I thought! Had a bit of a headache today but finally gave in and took some Neurofen, which has cleared most of it. Still can't find the energy to go and do anything productive though, so the first time I'll put some non-pyjamas on will be when I drive down to get DH from the station. I doubt I'll wear anything other than PJs tomorrow as well :rotfl:

I need to work out what to do for next month's OP as expenses will be miniscule, all I'm buying at the moment is milk for the office fridge. I'll double check the coffee stash on Monday though as we get through that quite quickly (I don't like it but a lot of the office does) and I can stock up on a few bags for the cupboard to boost my next claim if it's needed. My parents also dropped off the china we used for the wedding when they came round last week so I might stick some of that on a Facebook selling group. My MIL is missing a sugar bowl, a plate, and a teacup from the stuff she bought and wants to keep, but so far all I've found is the teacup so I need to check with Mum if she's still got anything at home.

I also mentioned to my boss the other day that I was thinking of selling on my wedding dress and she was quite shocked. She suggested that if I can't find room to keep it then I should get it made in to something else. I admit the lace part could be used to make a cushion cover, but frankly I keeping looking at it and just seeing £100 or so we could use for the mortgage, or some more furniture. I think saving your wedding dress used to be the "done thing" years ago as it was always a big family thing, your Mum would help you buy it, your Granny might help embellish it if you'd got something a bit plain, the veil would be passed down the generations, the dress itself was sometimes cut down to be used as a Christening gown etc. I bought mine on the internet without any kind of fitting, and none of my children are going to be Christened so it won't be used for that! I feel like it might as well go to someone who would like a nice dress (it's from Monsoon) but can't necessarily find £300 for it, getting £100 or so would be perfectly fine with me, and I'd be happy to know it meant someone else could enjoy it again.

Might have a bit of a think about it, also need to get the dress drycleaned first so that will impact how much I want to sell it for too!

Right, need to go and find something slightly productive to do so I don't feel like the day is entirely wasted, have a nice weekend everyone!

Moominmamma89

Oh I have the same dilemma about my wedding dress - not planning on wearing it again, kids aren't christened and don't want my daughter to feel she has to wear it as fashion changes. Keeping it for now to let her dress up in it a bit when she's older but will eventually sell it I think just not sure where, I heard good things about pre-loved but never looked into it properly x

VintageHistorian

Glad I'm not the only one Moominmama! Pre-loved was also recommended to me when I was buying stuff for the wedding so I might try there too, thank you for reminding me!

VintageHistorian

Last day of the month tomorrow so I rounded the mortgage down and OPed another £7.66, making this month's OP a grand total of £129.27! :T Very happy with that, can't see it getting topped any time soon as July has been a quiet time for work expenses.

Car insurance is due at the end of this month so I've done the comparison on Quidco this evening. Cheapest is £320 :eek: Only £33 cheaper than last year, gone at the days when comparing could save you the right side of £50, I think tax on insurance companies is going up this year so of course, us punters have to pay it.

The problem is that the £320 quote came from my current insurance provider. I don't know if I can then buy it through Quidco, or do I need to phone them for it? I've also got to do it in my maiden name as my driving licence hasn't been updated yet so I'll need to pay the admin fee to update it in a few months :mad: Really need to get the driving licence sorted now I think about it, I've been procrastinating with that for too long.

So tomorrow will be the money swap, going to try allocating my monthly own-spend money to specific pots and see if that helps me keep track a bit better and save a bit more.

No idea what furniture we'll buy this month, DH has now hung our cheap Wilko bathroom mirror and the room looks so much better for having it, even though it doesn't match the rest of the suite. Next weekend we're thinking of driving up to Ipswich to visit John Lewis (it's the closest one to us as Colchester doesn't have one) with our wedding giftcards, so we might get some nice bits with those!

Onwards to August!

VintageHistorian

Right, full money shuffle has now been done, including tucking away all the food and petrol money for the rest of this month. I also divvied my spending money for the month up in to specific envelopes for specific things, and so far it's really helping me see where my money is going (mostly top-up food shopping visits!) and helped me resist spending quite as much as I would have done.

I got an email from my car insurance provider with a quote for next year, which is more expensive than the quote for them that Quidco gave me :mad: So I'm going to phone up tomorrow, request my NCD certificate, and then buy my insurance with them through Quidco later in the month. Hopefully that will work and I'll still get the cashback.

Today has felt like a long day but I'm not sure why. I did get up a little earlier than normal (trying to avoid a headache like I got last week after sleeping in past 10:30). I have FINALLY found the remote for my TV (which has a built-in DVD player) in one of my boxes, so I'm now finally able to watch my DVDs! So had the TV on while I had a cuppa this morning and left DH to sleep. Once he was up we drove over to Ipswich with our John Lewis wedding giftcards. It turned out that the John Lewis there is just a "home" JL that's attached to a large Waitrose. But we still managed to spend the bulk of our cards, got four lovely big bathtowels (in raspberry pink, red, turquoise blue, and purple), and two lovely duvet sets. We're going to upgrade to a super kingsize duvet next month so we've now got two duvet sets to go with it, all my current ones are just standard double. Our bed is kingsized and having a smaller duvet is going to cause problems in winter, it already causes problems now :rotfl:

We stopped off at Burger King for lunch and then drove home, and I spend most of the afternoon on the sofa in front of the TV again doing bits and pieces while watching Family Guy. Oh yes, that was the house update, we've also now got a sofa but it's turned in to a bit of a nightmare. The company sent us two sofas, but no sofa arms DH had to email them (we bought through Amazon) and eventually convince them (after sending photos of the boxes we'd received) that they needed to send out arms for the sofas, but when it comes to the second sofa they just said they would contact us about collecting it after they've delivered the arms for the first one. It's taking up a lot of space, we don't have room for two sofas, I hope they pick it up quite quickly afterwards.

Tomorrow I need to cook some meatballs in tomato sauce to go in the freezer, and then make a toad in the hole in the evening for dinner.

Oh, and since my planting foray a few weeks ago my petunias have come along really well! Lots of new green growth on them and lots of extra flowers too. The lavender is still looking very small and spindly but it's had some nice flowers on and it's certainly not dying so I think it just needs more time to get going.

Anyway, after the money shuffle was done I moved over our standard £30 OP plus a TT of £1.86 to kick things off. I need to get round to posting things for sale on the Facebook group this month. I bought a game off one of the groups last week that it turns out isn't as good as I thought it would be (Sims 3 for the Nintendo DS) so I might sell it on on eBay, I don't want the person who sold it to me to think I bought it just to sell on!

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

savingwannabe

Hello for some reason I didnt realise you had posted the last few times so i didn't read them.

I think it is mse to sell your wedding dress - you can recoup some money and use it for something useful.
With regard to the saga of the two sofas - crumbs. On the plus side Amazon v often let you keep the faulty items when they are small - you might end up with both!

I have lavender and petunias too. You sound luckier than me with the lavender. It wasn't growing at all in the waterlogged soil so I moved it into pots and its doing famously. The petunias are not doing so well as I don't really feed them. I have a few flowers but they look a bit dejected. I wish I had fed them a little more. Maybe there is still time!

Well done on the overpayments. Make sure you are resting I am sorry about your headaches. Sometimes they are exacerbated by caffeine intake. Hopefully they were a one off.

Your overpayments are amazing. Keep it up!!!!

VintageHistorian

You sound like you've got the lavender all sorted SW! I must admit I've just left the petunias to their own devices, I was watering them every day but they didn't seem too happy about it, so then I swapped to every other day, and now it's rained so frequently that I haven't had to water them myself for about 3 weeks, and they're thriving! Maybe they prefer rainwater over tap :rotfl:

Envelope budgeting is continuing to go well, I had to use my card once for some work purchases but since I can claim those back on expenses I think it's best if I don't use my regular spending money for them.

Sorted out my car insurance, but it cost more than anticipated. I realised that I had the start date on my insurance quote slightly wrong, so I redid it so it started on the right day. Unfortunately some time between my first quote and the second one some crime statistics must have been released, because my quote went from £305 to £435 :eek: :mad: I couldn't get it to go back to the £305 one, so in the end I paid the £435, very begrudgingly. I get £27 cash back out of it, but I was still fuming that it had jumped so much. Lesson learned for next year - when you get a low insurance quote, buy it immediately! That means that my savings had to be dipped in to, I had enough from my wages to cover the £305, but not £428. Really annoying as I want to build my savings back up until I buy more bits for the house, so that's been delayed further by this.

On the good side of things, this month's expenses got paid out - £12.37! I combined it with a TT of £1.18 and made an OP of £13.55 this evening.

Today me and DH drove over to the garden centre and had a little stroll around. I ended up photographing various seed packets that I'd like to try and grow next year. Why are there never any prices on the packets? Am I supposed to make a guess at how much carrot seeds cost compared to celery seeds? Very annoying, I can't budget appropriately if I don't have all the costs to factor in! The only thing I purchased in the end was two cheese scones from the cafe to bring home for a late lunch, we had to stop at Waitrose on the way home and buy an onion so DH got himself a lunch from there.

This evening we had a nice dinner and watched a DVD that I borrowed from work - turns out the main library has a decent DVD borrowing section with a lot of really recent releases! I borrowed Finding Dory the other week and loved it, this week it's Captain American: The Winter Soldier. I really want to borrow the new Star Trek movie, it was on the shelf when I first found the library but wasn't there this week, hope I can find it this week instead! I think I'd like us to get in to a pattern of dinner and a free DVD on Saturday nights as a cheap night in :j

Right, off to bed soon I think. No plans for tomorrow other than to let DH have a lie in!

savingwannabe

Omg the insurance was a bit steep. I always think I would love to drive but cringe when it comes to the cost. Well done on planning for the garden next year. Hopefully the seeds wont cost much, check on fleabay as the prices can be cheaper sometimes. It's great that you get free DVDs from work a good resource.

redofromstart

If you have access to a Lidl they have seeds at the right time, 29p for carrrots, tomatoes (smaller seeds) and then 59p for bigger seeds (peas and beans, etc)

HTH