The Weekly Frugals

Another week, already?  Was it just me, or did this week fly by?  I hope yours was a good one - here are frugal things we did:

A neighbor who has done some major sorting and de-cluttering called and offered us some plastic storage totes.  We happily took them!  We will use them to store items in our garage while we're finishing the basement.  On that front, we moved some bookshelves out to the garage, and we are going through our books.  The ones we are keeping will go on the garage shelves, and the rest will be sold or donated.

We gave some excess ceramic tile with the same neighbor who gave us the totes.

I bought some of these gladiolas last year at Dollar Tree - there are six bulbs per pack, and they were absolutely beautiful.  I want to expand the bed, so I picked up some more to plant this year.  The ones from last year should return as well.

We borrowed books, games and movies from the library.

I colored my hair at home.  Since I have short hair now, I used my digital scale to weigh out half of each bottle of hair color into a glass bowl.  I stirred it with a couple toothpicks, used just one of the gloves that came with the kit, and I had more than enough product to color my hair.  I'll use the second half (I still have half of everything, includine one glove!) next time.  This wasn't so much about saving money - the whole kit was only $3 - but this way I wasn't wasting half the hair color that I didn't really need yet.

We used our wood stove for heat, burning firewood we picked up free.  Husband has already cut and stacked the truckload of firewood we picked up last week, and he thinks we might have enough for next season already.

When you've got a sweet potato, a couple russets, some pepper,
onion and a carrot, just toss it all together with some oil and spices
and roast it all in the oven.  This was a delicious way to use up
some odds and ends.

We did a fair amount of scratch cooking this week, and Husband made ribs, turkey wings and turkey legs in the smoker.  Husband uses trimmings from our fruit trees for smoking, so it's really affordable.  We had the ribs this week, and wrapped and froze the turkey for future meals.  I made a few things that use 'a little of this, a little of that' to avoid waste, and used some canned fruits and vegetables to stretch our fresh produce a bit.

Marinated 3-bean salad was a great way to stretch fresh produce this week - I added
some cucumber and celery for crunch.  Yum!

A single granny smith apple, a can of fruit cocktail and a few chopped pecans became
5 servings of fruit salad.  The syrup from the fruit cocktail helped sweeten some fruit punch.

Husband combined coupons, sales, and Ibotta/Checkout 51 offers to maximize our grocery dollars.  However...since we keep a fairly substantial pantry in our basement, we are going to dial back on the grocery purchases some.  We need to 'eat down' the pantry somewhat, so we have fewer foodstuffs to store while the basement work is completed.

I (finally!) got some things listed for sale on a local sale page.  Baby steps!

What did you do this week to spend less, save more, and make do?