Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

scandimore

Sorry to hear about the frustrating car situation. I hope it will be resolved soon. Also, hope you managed to procure some buns.

Sun_Addict

Oh no. It sounded so promising too 🙁

foxgloves

We are on tenterhooks as car is being delivered back to us this morning. Will it be 2nd time lucky? Will we accept it this time? Can only wait & see. Fingers & paws crossed.
F

marionmgcars

Hope everything ok this time.  At least the repair shop know you won’t accept anything that is not back to perfect 🤞👍

EssexHebridean

Fingers crossed. It's good at least that the issues were able to be resolved locally rather than the car having to be sent right back to the original workshop! 

foxgloves

Hello Frugal Diary Friends,
The news of the day is that we have accepted our car back, As if it wasn't enough hassle dealing with the outcome of a non-road watching numpty driving into the back of it, it turned out we had a range of extra hassle to deal with - still some outstanding, but I think I will put the car saga into a separate post so that people who would rather eat their own feet than read about other people's car insurance problems can simply scroll on by.
So let's do today's small budget helping positives:
*Despite hassles to be outlined in following post, we did manage to return the hire car by the deadline of 5pm today. Any further hire would have had to be paid for by us so we are naturally pleased THAT didn't need to happen.
*Wrote grocery shopping list & did the final grocery shop of the current budget cycle.....& we have come in under budget. I didn't think we would, as we spent over target on 2 of the previous weeks, & had told Mr F that an underspend would mean he'd have some beer money for the weekend. Got to wonder if this helped with focus, lol.
*Loyalty vouchers for 2 of the items on our list & availed ourselves of free coffees while we were there.
*Potted on 2 tomatoes I'd missed yesterday.
*Experimented with home made bottle watering devices to try & keep plants alive during holiday. Unfortunately the pack of watering spikes I bought don't fit any plastic bottles we have tried so far, either with or without the adaptors provided. Very annoying. I have invented my own device - shopped from home - involving recycled bottles, strips of old bath towel from the rag bag & pebbles, & turned out 15 of them this morning. The water goes through faster than I would like so will carry on experimenting to see if I can slow the transit time. You don't need to know this level of tedious detail......but it was a shopped from home attempted solution so I have included it.
*Not money saving for me, but I may have possibly saved my sister some money as I have a jacket which I am happy to gift to her to wear at a forthcoming wedding (not one which involves me, thank goodness). Have washed it & will iron tomorrow. It is currently not compatible with the Foxgloves boobs (what is?!), so it would be nice to think it is getting some wear as a nice jacket from the tropical storm shop.
*Did a couple of surveys, but only for pence.....while beside me, Mr F was busily filling one in for £15. He is already on £55 PA earnings this month, which is nice, as he doesn't usually get much opportunity for surveys.
*Made some pre-holiday lists. Being organised always saves us money one way or another. Things to do before we go, packing list & food box list (self catering).
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.
*Mr F's credit card bill arrived & I nearly needed the defibrilator when he told me how much it was.....before realising I have already paid off over £300 of transactions on it from various savings pots, so that was a relief!
And that's it for today. Will add car saga later....even this afternoon it developed another chapter.
f x

PennysIntoPounds

Hooray for car being back and hire car being returned by the deadline

Got to love Mr F's budget focus 😁

That's nice of you to donate the jacket, and nice it can get an outing. It'll only get crumpled in the post though (or you can blame it on that!) so no ironing needed at your end!

Paspatur

Foxgloves, my friend in a hot country made something similar but using the yellow part of those washing up sponges
I remember spending hours of my holiday cutting the bottoms off big water bottles, drilling holes in the bottle caps, cutting off the green bits of the sponges and stuffing the sponges in the bottles then burying them beside all the veg (a lot of veg)

foxgloves

@PennysIntoPounds - Ah, you have picked up on my regular ironing moans. Alas, I shall probably have to iron the jacket in order to get it properly dry. The weather forecast said I had another 3 hours before the rain started, so I put the whirlygig up & naturally the rain arrived precisely 8 minutes later! 

@Paspatur - Yes, that is exactly the kind of activity which has been manically going on here! I don't buy washing up sponges any more, as they were one of our regular household items we changed to a non-plastic alternative, but I can see that they would work very well in bottle-watering situations. If only Mr F hadn't got such a 'thing' about letting a trusted neighbour have a key for a mid-week watering session, but he absolutely won't budge on this one. I think it may partly stem from a long time ago when my parents came up & did the watering for us while we were away & didn't lock the french doors properly when they left, although I think part of it is not wanting neighbours having carte blanche to look around the house. We sing from the same hymn sheet on pretty much everything else.
f

PennysIntoPounds

I absolutely don't consider them ironing 'moans', rather they're very well justified comments on the height of rudeness of these items demanding a boring (and not always easy with arthritis) job be done!

It is a bit mean but could you ask Mr F if he wants the plants/cattery money to come from his personal spends since it's his personal request to not let a neighbour come in? *gets uppity on your behalf* 😁
I really don't think the vast majority of normal people wouldn't have respect for you and your home, I certainly wouldn't dream of doing anything other than the jobs I'd been asked to do if someone asked me (okay I might read a shopping list on the fridge door if I was meant to be in that room and it caught my eye)
Even if he does have a secret S&M dungeon, it might be a nice way of finding like-minded people