Find the SecondStar and soar, and then straight on till the morning…

LadyWithAPlan

Well done on your own wisdom.
Seeing one's own buying patterns is powerful stuff. I can be very good at waiting and saving for some things eg a specific heated throw I waited 18 months til it was in the sale and is cheap to run.
However getting off online sites/email lists is the single best advice -  I am on an auction website mailing where I bought Made furniture before   and accidentally bought a fabulous v expensive designer handbag before xmas.. yes it ended up being about 1/10th of retail price and I got it given as my main xmas gift  but still did I need it? Nope. If I hadnt seen I would not have needed it.  I have only used it once on NY day and got huge compliments - it screams classy, beautiful and expensive (and the lining is almost more beautiful than the exterior) but still its a want I would have had regret about if I had not asked for it as a main xmas gift.

On the GF - I have tried various breadmakers and the Panasonic one which has 4 GF settings is the one that consistently makes perfect GF bread. 2 others I tried were difficult and never worked out perfect or had crazy ingredients like half a pot of honey per loaf! Panasonic also makes it in 1 hr and 6 mins vs 3 plus hours. I wanted one for 3 years and it was my other main xmas gift but suggest you look on line for 2nd hand and often Amazon Warehouse has the Panasonic ones much cheaper on returns.
It works out about £1.30 a s/m GF loaf  vs the £3+ ones in the shop, no additives and gorgeous bread. You do need to slice and freeze what you dont use as it goes hard quite quick but it freezes beautifully. 

KajiKita

Thanks for coming back @LadyWithAPlan 😊❤️

@SecondStar - awesome self-watching and resistance! 👏 I bow down to you!! 😊🤩

KK

SecondStar

I’ve put up a new wall calendar, and have been marking off the No Spend days - 3 days so far! I’m counting ‘no spend’ as ‘no additional spending, outside of planned bills and planned variables (food, petrol, essential pet costs)’.

It was my birthday, and pay day, on December 30th. I’d been feeling itchy to start decorating more of my home, and knew I had a tin of this beautiful light yellow-green paint in the shed - leftover from painting my studio at my last house. My partner and I spent my birthday painting the living room, and it was just perfect. I ordered 2 more tins to finish the other walls and the ceiling (yes, it’s all going green!), and they arrived today.

It was £96 that was in the red already this month, but it was before I sat myself down and had a serious talk about not spending impulsively for a while.

I don’t feel guilty for it; but I am going to make sure that any other bits of decor are done either for free, secondhand, or on a teeny tiny spend, which will be saved up for and not taken out of savings.

The room is bloody stunning already, and we’ll finish up the painting this weekend. Any spare time will be spent doing free things - probably lots of walking, the local museums and galleries, and picnics in places. We’re both on the same page with being skint, so it’ll be fun to find free things to do together.

KajiKita

The return you will get on that £96 of paint will be so worth it - you spend so much time in a space like that, especially in winter so it is worth investing in 😊

KK

the_end_of_the_rainbow

SecondStar said:

I’ve put up a new wall calendar, and have been marking off the No Spend days - 3 days so far! I’m counting ‘no spend’ as ‘no additional spending, outside of planned bills and planned variables (food, petrol, essential pet costs)’.

It was my birthday, and pay day, on December 30th. I’d been feeling itchy to start decorating more of my home, and knew I had a tin of this beautiful light yellow-green paint in the shed - leftover from painting my studio at my last house. My partner and I spent my birthday painting the living room, and it was just perfect. I ordered 2 more tins to finish the other walls and the ceiling (yes, it’s all going green!), and they arrived today.

It was £96 that was in the red already this month, but it was before I sat myself down and had a serious talk about not spending impulsively for a while.

I don’t feel guilty for it; but I am going to make sure that any other bits of decor are done either for free, secondhand, or on a teeny tiny spend, which will be saved up for and not taken out of savings.

The room is bloody stunning already, and we’ll finish up the painting this weekend. Any spare time will be spent doing free things - probably lots of walking, the local museums and galleries, and picnics in places. We’re both on the same page with being skint, so it’ll be fun to find free things to do together.

Sounds intriguing - please do post a photo 🙂

SecondStar

Well, poo!

On Friday I started prepping the 3rd wall ready to paint - scraping bits of loose paint, filling & sanding back any cracks or chips - and ALL of the old paint just started peeling off the wall, right back to the plasterboard! There was a healthy 3mm gap between the plaster and the paint, and it came off in chunks bigger than my head. Clearly whoever had first painted that wall hadn’t prepped the plasterboard properly.

To top it off, the 2 tins of expensive designer paint that I bought didn’t match the original tin, and were a horrid colour!

I put the paint debacle aside, and I ended up scraping the whole wall back on Friday night, then on Saturday had to get a chemical paint stripper for the stubborn remaining parts. It got polyfilled and sanded, the edges all caulked, and a mist coat of white emulsion applied.

Today I’ve been running around trying to find a replacement green - nowhere could accurately colour match the original green. I couldn’t find a near match, but I fell in love with Farrow & Ball’s ‘Cooking Apple Green’. Of course, I don’t have F&B money, so I was going to have it colour matched and mixed at Homebase…except they were out of sample sizes!

I was close to just saying ’b*gger it, just give me 10l’, but common sense and maturity prevailed - I don’t want to be stuck with about £90 of non refundable paint. So I’m waiting till Tuesday when they have the sample pots available, I’ll pop down to have a sample mixed, test it, pray, and then go back for the rest of the amount. 

I’m trying to tell myself that this isn’t a race, there is no deadline, there is no pressure, or stress, this is not a competition. No one is judging me, no one is expecting anything from me. No one can even be annoyed or put out because of it - this is MY house, and no one else’s. If I have to live with a mist coat and walls full of patchwork green paint samples for a week, then so be it. No one died, this is not a tragedy, and it can and will all be fixed.

Pics when it’s ready to be shown! 

KajiKita

Wow 😮 to the condition of the 3rd wall. Thank goodness you found out BEFORE you put your lovely paint on it ….! 

If it makes you feel any better it took me three goes to get the right shade of paint for the wall behind our new fireplace in the lounge last autumn. Mr KK kept going “No”, “No” …. if he’d done it again he’d have found the job delegated to him! 😂

KK

SecondStar

Definitely better to find out first! My partner was a bit stunned that I ended up stripping back the entire wall, but I’m calling it ‘thorough prep’ hahaha.

As part of my ‘life isn’t a race, let’s not spend beyond my means’, I made the very grown up and mature decision to wait until February to buy the rest of the green paint. If I went and did it now, I would need to be taking money from my savings to afford it. And if I’m taking from my savings, then I can’t really afford it at all!

I won’t die if I have to live with patchwork walls for a few weeks, and if I wait till February then I’ll be able to assign money specifically to the project. It’ll make me feel far more in control, and not so impulsively spendy.

My ADHD brain wants to do it NOW! That’s where the dopamine lives! I’m squirming in my seat just thinking about having to wait. But I know that it’s for the best - for my brain and for my bank account - so I’m going to have to find dopamine somewhere else for a while.

Aimingforthegoodlife

Wow, just read your diary, what a rollercoaster! Amazing work on stopping the spending this year so far, hard to do but you are doing it!

SecondStar

Have had 7 NSDs this year so far, including today. I’m counting NSDs as days with no unplanned expenditure. On Saturday I had to buy paint stripper and sample pots to test greens.

Yesterday I made a batch of pancakes for breakfasts for the next few days, and also made 5 portions of sweet potato and butternut squash soup for dinners. I’ve left my prescription in for 6 loaves, 1 box of pasta, 1 box of flour, and 1 box of porridge - I need to alter my request to increase the amount, and to change a couple of things as I’m not eating as much porridge as expected!

I’ve got £129 left for food this month, and confident that I’ll come in under budget - as long as I don’t chip away at my grocery money for other things!

I’m returning an unwanted book to Waterstones tomorrow, and using the £10 to collect a secondhand sheepskin which came up for sale on a local page! It does pay to wait after all!



My partner got me 2 lengths of fabric for Christmas, to use for making viking reenactment clothing - a mustard linen, and a gorgeous handwoven broken diamond wool. I’ve also got fabric sitting for 3 other dresses, 2 head coverings, a coat, and a cloak. I’ll be using my free time this month to start sewing more pieces - they’re all done by hand, and each dress might take 7 evenings of stitching. That’ll keep me busy and occupied for a while, so I’m not thinking about painting, or wondering what I can buy!