Giving every £ a job

Blackcats

reporting in to say that the winter bedroom worked brilliantly - in fact I woke up at about
1am feeling too warm but that soon passed.

nice sunny day here today so I got some washing done and did the food shop in Lidl which was a bit more expensive than I expected.  

We have noticed a bulge in one of the car tyres - front passenger side.  We think it was caused by a foray into a pothole last week.  It wasn't a massive pothole but we must have caught it at the wrong angle.  New tyre needed which is very annoying but there is money in the car pot - I just resent having to spend it.

Blackcats

New tyre will be fitted tomorrow.  OH shopped around and the best price was from our closest garage so he can drop the car off and walk home.  We will pay on the credit card and then transfer the money from savings pot when we pay off the card at the end of the month.  Will mean a teeny bit of interest and a minuscule amount of cash back but it all counts. 

We are camped out in our garden room which heats up quite well with an electric heater and is a nice change of scene.  We bring tea and coffee down the garden with us and pretend we are in a coffee shop.  I planned to have an admin afternoon but I have made a start on a few things and hit the buffers for a variety of reasons - mobile gone flat so can't receive a verification code, forgot to bring card reader so can't move money out of one account into another etc etc.  so I'm feeling a bit "scattered" lots of things underway but no completion ticks.

I was reading about being more organised and the article described how disorganised spaces make you feel scattered.  Definitely me today.  Time for another cuppa and to get tonight's chicken pieces marinading in the spiced yoghurt mix. 

Blackcats

Well that's my 2 day working week finished!  

New household organising system is working well in so far as I know what we want to achieve this month and which of those things are scheduled for this week.  My dad has just added 2 fairly trivial things to the "other people's urgent" list but they are important to him so I'll get them done tomorrow.

This weekend I'm going to finish the crochet blanket that has been a stop start project for the last couple of winters.  It's used up lots of the wool stash but I've also added my mum's wool to my wool so it's still a healthy collection that will probably be enough for another blanket.  Nice and easy and relaxing when watching tv.

lucielle

I like crochet but can only do granny squares, I see some lovely ones on fb. I’d like to go on a course and learn how to do different ones. 

L

savingholmes

Glad things are going well. I managed to be organised for work but lack energy for life admin 

CL21

Just caught up on your diary - a winter bedroom sounds like just the thing! Bad news about the tyre 😒

Blackcats

@lucielle my crochet repertoire is fairly limited too - my last blanket started as a long chain to the width I wanted and then I just went backwards and forwards in treble stitch stripes until it was the right length - but it does look nice.  I've just started a new blanket using Attic 24's granny stripe instructions.  I remember @CRANKY40 shared a photo of her amazing ripple pattern blanket and I notice there's instructions for that stitch too on Attic 24's website.

@savingholmes and @CL21

A fairly good week MSE wise@CL21

After chasing up I finally got a refund from m n s for a returned item.  Will send that money to my gifts pot and the rounding down amount to the AMG pot

still keeping food spends as low as possible.  A friend came to visit and I was able to make a cake from store cupboard ingredients and dinner from existing stocks too.  I would previously have gone out and spent plenty of money in an unplanned smash and grab at the supermarket.

some good food from Olio too including some sandwiches, cake and fruit which made a perfect picnic lunch.  It was drizzling on Saturday so we went for a walk and then ate our picnic in the car looking out over a beautiful view.  Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch?

we had a £10 Valentines Day celebration (we don't usually bother but decided that as we couldn't beat em we would join em 😻)  We each had a budget of £10 for gifts so I was able to finish the blanket I've been making for OH forever, bought a CD he wanted and had enough left to buy him a bag of giant wotsits!   Dinner was a £10 budget too and we had an m n s £7 stir fry meal deal and spring rolls.  No money left for pudding but I found 2 mini roulades in the freezer and served with a fruit compote using frozen fruits.  We used pretty table linen, candles and our indoor hyacinths bloomed just in time to decorate the table too.  We actually enjoyed the challenge very much.

I'm on leave from work this week so will try and get through some chores and have some MSE fun too. 

Sun_Addict

Enjoy your week off ☺️

MissRikkiC

What a nice way to celebrate valentines 

savingholmes

Enjoy your time off. It sounds like you hit the right note with your Valentine's celebrations. Blanket sounds very impressive.