Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

PennysIntoPounds

Duvet wrestling *is* exercise and should be an Olympic sport and I shaln't hear otherwise

foxgloves

Hello Sunbeams, & thanks for all your comments, which I have enjoyed reading out here on the coffee bench. What a rubbish weather forecast it was yesterday. We did get a downpour in the end & even a few rumbles of thunder, but it arrived very late in the day so Mr F had already watered all the veg, borders & containers thinking that it was going to pass us by. Then it arrived just before bedtime & Soot was most unimpressed that he couldn't go out for his usual post-suppertime biscuits perambulation. Ash goes out in anything & came in so soaked through he needed 3 sheets of extra-strong blue roll to dry him off. Today began with a calamity. We had a lot of jobs planned, including pulling out the futon sofa bed in the man cave which doubles as our guest room. I'd already made up a futon-roll bed for my nephew in Foxgloves HQ & had retired to our bedroom to paint my toenails. I'd just got to the end of a 2nd coat of fabby shocking pink when there was a loud & prolonged crash from the man cave followed by lots of loud swearing. I went running in to see what had happened. Mr F had been on the other side of the room when a tall heavy double CD unit simply toppled over, cascading wooden shelves & CDs everywhere, bulldozing over another one as it went down. The units hadn't broken, cats were not in any way culpable - it was caused by an uneven floor (1930s house, mostly original boards & some suboptimal repairs from when Mr DIY Numpty lived here in the 1980s). He managed to get it upright again but we have wedged it with some layers of thick card so that it leans slightly backwards to rest on the wall. The CDs have been put back OUT OF ORDER!! Mr F is a big muso anorak & won't be able to cope with this at all. I guarantee he will be sorting them out as soon as our guests depart after the weekend!
Meanwhile, I continued with kitchen tasks, decided to put some eggs in the fridge, was transferring one when it pinged spectacularly out of my fingers & smashed on the tiles. It couldn't just be a broken egg, could it? No, too easy. I have never seen a smashed egg travel so far! One end blew out & a load of egg managed to travel across a metre of floor & the other end smashed upwards, blobbing my clean-on-today-& now -in-the-washing machine linen dress with spots of egg white. By then, I hadn't got time to change for fear of missing my hair appointment in town, so I had to go in with egg-white adornment. It wasn't until I was getting out of the car afterwards that I realised that my footless tights were also well & truly spattered. I must have looked a sight in town! Honestly, it was a single large egg.....you'd have thought it was an emu's egg the amount of mess it caused! 
Anyway, enough yakking, onto today's budget-helping efforts:
*Parked on supermarket carpark for free as we needed to go there & knew that other items on my list wouldn't take long.
*Had a lovely hair cut. £13. What a bargain that is. She sprays & straightens it first then it's just a a dry cut, which is perfect for me as I am extremely bad at sitting still for longer procedures.
*Got the outstanding grocery list items for our weekend with guests. I deliberately didn't budget extra money for this as we do have a LOT of food in stock plus a fair bit now coming from the garden. Hope I don't regret this, but can still take from the August buffer zone if it does look to be a problem later in the month.
*Mr F found a box of one of his favourite beers at a decent price.......then announced that he was paying for it from his Personal Spends. Not going to argue, & as he rightly says, there is enough to last a good couple of weeks.
*Did 2 surveys.
*Garden pickings: Just 2 tomatoes for my cheese & tomato sarnie. I could do with taking a basket around for tomatoes, beans, aubs, etc, but then I would have to deal with them & I don't have the capacity for that until early next week.
*Entered a competition.
*Oh & it's so hot & muggy atm that we have swapped to cold baths. There's a little bit of a saving on gas-use to help with our pre-winter credit balance.
*Had a peruse of bungalows in the area of Suffolk we'd like to live when Mr F retires (or Agent Millions visits - he forgot us again the other day). Quite a few of the ones I've been watching for interest have been reduced in price, but now that I've project managed a refurbishment of our current home, I have a much better idea of how much an up-do can cost, & my goodness some of these are nice bungalows on the outside, but very old-fashioned & in need of work on the inside. Ah well, the main thing is that this has motivated me to carry on saving, so that we have a bit of a bridging fund ready when the time comes. Most, but certainly not all, of the properties I like would require savings of between £10k to £30k. So like today, I do like to look at what is around now & again so that we keep our heads firmly in the savings game.
Well, it's not my cooking night, so I think I shall go & hang my string of vintage bunting on the shed above our sunny bench, then enjoy some reading time. Guests arriving from St. Pancras tomorrow afternoon. I intend to spend the morning baking bread rolls, Twink's hobnobs (a recipe which was doing the rounds on these forums when I first joined up), making the conservatory (dining room) look lovely & trying to make sure Soot doesn't climb straight up onto my freshly pressed summer tablecloth. 
Wishing everyone a pleasant Friday night.
F x

foxgloves

@EssexHebridean - Your tomatoes have plenty of time as yet & once a few start to ripen, it seems to encourage the others. I usually end each summer with a trayful that are still green, but I find that putting it in our sunny conservatory ripens most of these. If any are still green at that point, I put them in a brown paper bag, peg the top closed & just check every few days to take the ripened ones out. It's been an odd year for veg growing. I had to re-sow a couple of tromboncino due to absolutely p*sstaking levels of slug-scoffage. I sowed these right at the end of the last viable window so currently have 2 small but healthy plants soon to be transferred to a veg bed & the remaining one from my original early May sowing which is nearly as tall as me with several fruits swelling. I have decided that this is one of those years where I am going to harvest as much as I can & be very grateful for it, but will doubtless have to accept that different weather conditions would have provided better outcomes for certain things. 
F

PennysIntoPounds

I love a bit of bunting, so friendly and yet classy (well, depending on the design!)

Hope Mr F copes okay with the CDs being Out Of Order and doesn't wake your guests up in the wee small hours because he's having palpitations that The Beatles 61-63 is after The Beatles 64-66 

foxgloves

Me too, @PiP. A few years ago, our elderly relative who died recently gave my sister (who is v good at sewing) a large bundle of fabric, much of it vintage 1960s. She made the smaller pieces into strings of bunting & they do look pretty, as well as being a good use of little scraps.
Bunting is just one of those simple things which raise a smile, I think.
F x

southern_chick

PennysIntoPounds said:

Duvet wrestling *is* exercise and should be an Olympic sport and I shaln't hear otherwise

Would you get extra points for entering a mixed doubles team 🤣🤣🤣

kayannie

foxgloves said:

Me too, @PiP. A few years ago, our elderly relative who died recently gave my sister (who is v good at sewing) a large bundle of fabric, much of it vintage 1960s. She made the smaller pieces into strings of bunting & they do look pretty, as well as being a good use of little scraps.
Bunting is just one of those simple things which raise a smile, I think.
F x

In the 1970's I was given a black bin bag full of off-cuts of lovely cotton fabrics - small prints in co-ordinating colours. Remember the company, initials  L A, that made beautiful flowing dresses in lovely cotton prints? The person who gave me the fabric worked in their factory making curtains, blinds etc in these lovely cotton prints & they were allowed to take home remnants too small to sell. I made a patchwork duvet cover with some of the fabric - I still have it although much faded now. I also started a patchwork bedspread, hand sewing the little hexagons together, but have never got round to finishing it. I think that will be a good winter project! 
KA

PennysIntoPounds

That's lovely @foxgloves, and yes definitely one of life's simple spirit raising pleasures 😊

Blimey you'd have to be on extremely trusting sporting terms @southern_chick!

badmemory

I was hoping agent million would visit this month, unfortunately it was only one of his subordinates agent 200.  I could have done with agent 10k to cover my 5 figure spend in the middle of last month.  Still I am fractionally ahead of the 5% game.  To those wondering I slightly lost the plot & decided to **** with it & got solar panels.  Anyone else familiar with the phrase "oh no what have I done".  If only it was already set up to pay me for what I have exported.  My usage from the grid has gone down to 10% of before.  I'm just hoping for a lot of winter sun although I am not expecting much from it then, if anything at all.

teapot2

foxgloves said:

 Twink's hobnobs (a recipe which was doing the rounds on these forums when I first joined up),

I still make Twinks Hobnobs too from time to time but only when I have folk visiting otherwise I can easily scoff them myself as they are so yummy