Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

rtandon27

Awwww - how sweet they are! 

The neighbour's enormous ginger tom came to visit me today while I worked in the summer house.  He rumbled contentedly in his sun patch by my feet until it became too warm and then chirruped a goodbye and left.

PennysIntoPounds

Oh what adorableness @Crazycatlady2

Foxgloves, I think "I'm currently sitting on my reading bench sharing an apple with my blackbird" is possibly the most wholesome thing I've ever heard and should be taught in schools as life goals 

foxgloves

Hello everyone & thanks for all your comments, which I've enjoyed reading, as always.
@Blackcats, @rtandon27 & @joedenise - I think the main problem with my lack of survey earnings for this month is simply that I have been doing other things & haven't engaged with any of my usual sites. I've done 3 this morning though, so maybe I'll have a bit of a final sprint to the price of 2 coffees, who knows?!

@Makingabobor2 - So far, I've stayed away from all the chocolate-covered lovelies in the local eco-refill shop, but I can't say the same for the chilli peanuts & spicy fried snacky noodles. Haven't bought any for the last couple of weeks though as we have been eating very healthily.

@Crazycatlady2 - Oh my life, how sweet are they???! Thanks for sharing.

@PennysIntoPounds - Sharing an apple with my blackbird is pretty much a daily thing here during the summer months. I have a crown tip on my front tooth, thanks to a break back in the dawn of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth & I was at primary school - tripped over playing kiss chase & banged teeth on a drain cover. So I never risk biting into an apple, always core it & slice it up, & Mr Blackbird (whom I call Lord Flash because he has a white streak on his wing) is more than happy to guzzle the cores. I swear he waits in the hedge ready to swoop.
F

foxgloves

Greetings Monday Money Savers,
I didn't get round to posting over the weekend, but we had a useful & pleasant couple of days - a mixture of garden tasks & relaxation. Mr F made good inroads into filling the new raised beds. It's taking a bit of time because we need to layer it in from different sources - the backfill of earth which came out of the previous raised bed which we dismantled, our own compost bins & several bundles of chopped-up comfrey. All of this over a base layer of small sticks, twiggy bits, which will provide both drainage & nutrients as they break down. The big raised bed is really deep as well as large so it is taking some filling. We still have bagged compost to add to our layers, prioritising the top, to help keep down weeds springing from our homemade compost. My weekend garden tasks were potting up peppers, a couple more geraniums & having a huge sort out of bedding plants & other stuff waiting to be planted out. I decided which to plant out around the front courtyard & moved it nearer the house so I can get on with that this week. Weeded a small bed to stash all the other plants which are destined for the back garden. 

Today, like most Mondays here at Foxgloves Manor, has been all about getting set up for the week on the domestic front, so nothing remotely exciting, but as I've said before, anyone who wants 'exciting' would run a mile from this diary! I arrived on the diary section of the MSE website from the 'Small daily things' thread, & that is still pretty much how I tackle staying solvent, saving & living more sustainably. Doing the small things regularly so they become ingrained habits are the key, are they not? Anyway, plenty of yakk to come when I tell you about Mr F's generosity to the bloody shed mice & the sewing machine budgeting dilemma (I did say it wasn't exciting) so I'll get on with today's budget-friendly stuff:
*A no-spend day.
*Did my regular Monday morning budget updates. May's grocery budget was looking a bit front-loaded at the end of Week 1, but we pulled it back in Week 2 & Week 3, when we had done a really good sweep of 'stuff we already have in the freezer' came in around £50 under target spend. This means that we can do the butcher stock-up for the freezer as part of Week 4, which will also assuage Mr F's increasingly urgent need to have a BBQ! My CC bill landed too, so I have reconciled that & paid it in full.....which brought the sewing machine decision to a head (will explain).
*Sorted clean laundry which I did yesterday to get ahead of myself. Only 3 items required ironing so even better.
*Baked a batch of seeded bread rolls.....two of which will be buttered & served along with...... 
*.....tonight's very cheap & easy nosebag of gigantes plakis from the freezer.
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.
*Entered a competition.
*Added a couple of titles to my library wish list.
*Cleaned my laptop using a little glasses-cleaning wipe  - inexpensive boxful bought from the useful shop which rhymes with 'toys' - I usually avoid wipes because of the sheer amounts of the blimming things in landfill. These 'claim' not to be a problem, but I'm not sure I believe that, tbh. 
*Did 3 surveys.
*Water greenhouse, veg troughs, strawberries & bedding plants - I haven't done that yet, I have been waiting to see if the afternoon is going to heat up, but it's clouded over now, so I shall make that my next task after chatting to you.
So that's today's efforts.
Hope everyone managed at least a reasonably decent weekend.
F x

foxgloves

I meant to pop this photo up....it is just to show how the late-Spring colour is really getting underway now, here at Foxgloves Manor. The colours are much brighter in reality, but the sun had gone in when I took this, so it is more subdued in tone. This is the view from my reading bench. There's another big bed like this one between the old pear tree (pictured) & the greenhouse. Our small wildlife pond is on the other side of the garden & the section from the greenhouse down to the bottom of the garden is the veggie plot, now being refurbed as our kitchen garden (but same difference in terms of what we grow). The very end section is our composting area which is left wild for pollinators, birds & our hedgehog, who Mr F is determined to call 'Spiny Norman'! 

themadvix

Garden looks absolutely gorgeous Foxgloves!

Am waiting on tenterhooks to hear about the sewing machine palaver!

foxgloves

In which Mr F is unnecessarily generous to the shed mice.......
Last month, Mr F announced his intention to fill up the fatball feeder for our feathery friends. He fetched the box from the top shelf of the shed & opened it to find.....well, in bird food terms, carnage, in rodent terms, the evidence of several nights of bacchanalian feasting! We had taken advantage of a good offer on a box of 150 fatballs, tightly packed in bags of 6. The naughty squeakers had opened probably around half the packs & totally shredded the fat balls into crumbs. Mr F filled up the hanging feeder with random lumps of gnawed fatball & sprinkled the crumbs onto the lawn. Birds tucked in, end of story, I thought. But no, because it turns out that he then replaced the box EXACTLY WHERE IT HAD COME FROM, so when I went to refill the feeder yesterday, I was met with a truly vast amount of new crumbs. I can only assume that fatballs are very highly compressed, as you simply wouldn't believe how much lardy-crumby mulch splurges forth from a few packets. Being SENSIBLE, I borrowed a lidded bucket from something else & fished out all the miraculously still-entire fat balls, refilled the feeder with the gnawed ones, then placed a big plant-pot saucer full of a ridiculous amount of crumbs on the lawn for the birds to enjoy. They are defo eating them, but I think it will take a good few days plus extra magpies & woodpigeon action to clear the plate. 
I asked Mr F if it had occurred to him that the contents, having been well & truly discovered by mice, needed to be in a sealed container. It had. He didn't think we had one. Ah well, thankfully we have saved a good few unchewed packs. Love how he put them up on the top shelf as though mice can't climb! Years ago, I lived in a student dive where the mice would climb between 3 floors using the wall cavities! 
Note to self: Send Soot into the shed to investigate. They are both great mousers - I think the smell of cats has certainly helped prevent our usual pantry incursions over the past Winter.
F

Elisheba

That looks like a really peaceful and relaxing space, and a lovely place to read your book.  Very good for the soul! Another one hear who is waiting with bated breath to hear all about the sewing machine dilemma! 

foxgloves

Financial discussion of the past week.......my new sewing machine. (This one is for the dedicated budgeters....)
You'll remember that I inherited some money from an elderly relative recently & when allocating it to various budget/savings strands, I included £1000 each to both mine & Mr F's Personal Spends, just to be there, a nice thing, in case something more expensive cropped up, to which we might like to treat ourselves. I decided to use some of mine to buy a new sewing machine, as my old one (around 26 years old) needs some attention now. Anyway, I didn't go mad, I went for a definite upgrade, but stayed very much within what I thought was an appropriate model for someone like me who, while wanting to get into making clothes, will always be more of a natural knitter than sewing-bod. So I spent £279 & I'm really pleased with it. 
Over the past week, it's become a bit of a point of discussion, however. We were just chatting one night about our Personal Spends, & I mentioned that I still need to deduct the cost of my new sewing machine from mine, before paying it off my credit card. Mr F looked at me aghast & asked me why I was buying it with my Personal Spends. I said that I'd always intended it'd be bought with my money as it's my machine, bought to support a hobby, etc. Well, his view was very much that I shouldn't be using 'my own' money to pay for it because I have always run up lots of household projects on my old machine - curtains, table cloths, cushion covers, bunting, new covering for an old armchair, etc, & that I would doubtless also be using the new one for all of these things, plus mending clothes & stuff belonging to both of us. And that's true, but I still didn't feel comfortable buying myself a new sewing machine from the House & Garden Pot or indeed the Appliances Replacement Pot. And Mr F remained adamant that our household benefits strongly from me having a good working sewing machine & that there is no way I should be spending my own Personal Spends (which is more sort of 'treat' money) on it. We were discussing rather than arguing but 2 strong opposing views on the fairest way forward. Me thinking I am being fair to the overall household budget, him thinking I am being unfair to myself. Hmmmm.
Well, this morning when I sat down to sort out my regular start-of-week budget updates, I decided on a solution. I ring-fenced an amount of money to cover the kitchen garden refurb currently underway & it has become clear that I over-budgeted for this. We now only require some sacks of compost & very much less gravel than we originally thought, so I have used some of the underspend to pay for my sewing machine. That seems to tick all the boxes. It hasn't come from our Savings Pots, I haven't paid for it myself, but it is now fully accounted for & paid for & the transaction will not lurk any longer on my credit card, where it was getting quite close to incurring interest. 
Back in the Spendy Years, the only question was whether to buy an item (& as I had an overdraft for 24 years as well as loans & a CC, this would absolutely always have added to my debt) or leave it in the shop (not a very frequent decision back then). More complicated range of decisions now, but worth it for the security of all our money now being our own. 
And just a little coincidence......my elderly relative who left me the money started work at the age of 15 & on receiving her first pay-packet, she went out & bought herself.....a sewing machine! What goes around, comes around.
F x

Makingabobor2

You garden is lovely.  Glad you sorted out the best way to pay for the sewing machine.