101 Money Saving Ideas: Numbers 42-59

To review:  Totally bogarting this series idea from Centsible Living with Money Mom on the youtubes.  She's awesome!  Watch her.

42 A dollar a pound, all year round.  This was part of hint #32 and I want to expand on it again because it really works. It's a food purchasing GOAL but not a hard line. So, what can you get this week at the local grocery stores for 1$/lb or less?  USUALLY potatoes, onions and bananas are available year round so those can be staples. All are flexible.  E.g. my favorite soup is potatoes and an onion.  About 4 medium to large potatoes and 1 medium to large onion.  Dice them up, add 4-5 cups of water.  Boil until tender. Eat.  It's super good when sick or tired or sick and tired (so basically every day for me since I find my fellow humans exhausting).  Change it up with spices, a diced boiled egg, drop a raw beaten egg in there and bring to the boil while stirring to make potato egg drop soup.  A bit of lemon juice, lime juice or vinegar in your bowl just before you eat it will make this incredibly delicious.  Mexican spices, Italian, whatever you have, poultry seasoning you can never seem to use up, a knob of ginger diced up ...ANYTHING is good in here.  Maybe not sugar but who knows.
The left overs turn into mashed potatoes eventually.

What else is 1$/lb or less this week?
24oz loaf of bread for 99cents...that's under 1$/lb
Pasta is right at 1$/lb and as a dried product, cooked up it is even a better savings.
Remember that principle with dried beans too if you have a way to cook them!  1lb of dry beans will make 2-4 lbs of cooked.  Canned beans are often 1$/lb but not nearly as good a deal as the dried.  If you don't have good cooking facilities, canned are the better deal.
Frozen veggies, 99cents/lb
2 jumbo cantaloupes for 5$...WEIGH them.  You're bound to find a couple that are 2.5lbs or more making them 1$/lb or less.  I'm almost ready to start carrying a little hanging scale and old onion bag so I can weigh at the Grocery Outlet and etc where fruit and veg is all by the piece or bag.
You may notice I left out all sugary drinks.  Those are never a deal even at under 1$/lb because they are not nutritious.  But if you must drink them (and sometimes I must), then pay less.
You probably won't find coffee and spices this low so techniques on those later in the list (probably)

43  No Plastic Days.  Just TRY to spend money without acquiring plastic!  You may not spend at all or you may spend less.  Be mindful of packaging and of the plastic coated receipt paper!   Once in a while I shop online but that is just acquiring the plastic later.  Also, usually can't check mail on a "no plastic day" because of those damn little windows in the envelopes.  Those CAN just be open without plastic like they used to be or your address could be on the envelope...like the old days.  If only.  I spend time when watching a movie or youtubes tearing those damn things out so I can burn or recycle the envelope  Aggravating.

44  Write a letter.  Sure, the stamp costs you something, but it takes up time you might be spending or online shopping, and you get ZERO targeted ads based on handwritten letters.  Your emails, facebooks, texts and cell phone calls are scanned and you get targeted ads.  If you manage to turn off the snooping on your own email/phone, etc, likely the person on the receiving end did not.  And you get targeted ads.  Try even talking by someone's smart phone. I like to say things like "Nutterbutter ice cream sandwich" or "artisan" and watch the ads roll in next time I'm on the internet.  Creepy man.  Targeted ads are more effective, that's why they do them.  So get targeted for things you don't use, at least. And at best, avoid being targeted.   People also love getting letters. 

45  Review your insurance(s).  I try to do this once a year or so and see if there are savings, if a rate deal has been dropped (e.g. I need to take another cheap defensive driving course in order to get money off my car insurance).  Call the insurance agency, not just email and online.  Get someone on the phone.  It shocks them.  They might drop it a few dollars.  Maybe get some easy online quotes and see if you can get something cheaper.

46  Can you consolidate some of your items/tasks/bills and save $$?  You never know.  A few years back I reorganized, culled and consolidated 2 storage units into 1 slightly larger than the previous "big" unit (heh heh) which save 50$/month.  I'm going to try another cull to see if I can minimize it again and maybe get down a size again...though I like the location.  But you say...why have a storage unit?  Get rid of that sh*t! Well, yes, ideally (see #47) I would do that.  But alas, living in 135sq feet and wanting my furniture for the house being built as we type, I have it in storage.  I am a genetic hoarder so have to downsize in phases.  That's what works for me,

47  Get rid of crap in storage units.  This saves you the storage costs.  If you are lucky, you can sell some of your crap and/or share it out to people who will appreciate and use it.  In #46 I get defensive about why I am keeping my crap in storage.  And another thing...about a 5'x5' portion, 11' tall, of the storage is "live" storage where I keep things like off season clothes, extra food storage containers, a gift bin so I can buy gifts when they are on sale.  The stuff outside that goes through periodic culls.  I'm working on it.  #genetichoarder!

48  Drink Tap Water.  Guess what is in those bottles and gallons of water you buy...TAP WATER.  Maybe it's spring water and maybe it comes from somewhere with "springs" in the name.  Much of the time it's tap water.  It's EXPENSIVE.  Drink tap water.  I bring tap water from work to my house because I haven't bothered to get the well tested (house! HA!  I flatter the shed sometimes).  It's not hard.  You fill about 1 gallon a day and bring it home for drinking and cooking.  Live on the streets?  Well, then you have bigger issues.  Chlorine in your water?  Air it out a bit or get a filter pitcher AT A THRIFT STORE.  I also generally found the filters, still packaged, at thrift stores.  Also, lots of people drink chlorine water.  Maybe work with your town if you don't want it in there.
So, how much is it to drink bottled water which is total BS on so many levels....at least refill the goddamn bottle.
1 qt of bottled water is about $1.50, maybe a buck.  I get a gallon of distilled (for the solar batteries) for a dollar or so.  We'll be nice and say 1$/day for buying bottled water.   Cost of municipal tap water per gallon?  $0.002  on average.  That's 2 onehundredths of a cent per gallon for well water?  I spent 19,000 or so on the well and solar to run it (but the solar does more).  I use about 500gallons a week in the summer when watering the garden.  Less in the winter or rainy season.  So, let's call it 250gallons a week...250/7 = 35/day.   I've used the well for 5 years and 6 months or so... 19000/5.5years = $3555 per year/365 9.45/day cost for 35 gallons.  9.45/35 =   $0.27per gallon!!! Already cheaper than buying water!! Woot woot!   It gets cheaper every time I use it.  I don't waste it to drive down the cost. I 'm very frugal with my water usage.  Aquafers are precious resources and one does not save money by wasting water.

49  Change clothes when you get home.  I hate doing this but I try.  Right now it's so HOT that I change into thin pants and tissue thin shirts before working around the property after work. Easier to wash those.  I keep "work pants" hanging on a hook all year round.  Those get washed less and are sacrificial pants.  They are meant to be worn out and stained and grubbed up.  Changing out of "office worthy" pants and shirts saves those.  It means I've been wearing the same jeans to work for years and my office shirts last for years too.  Boring, but cheap! 

50  The clothes/fabric use chain.  When clothes DO wear out and are not shareable, tradeable, donateable, then what?  For me, they get torn into rags.  Seams on jeans and the waste band are usually strong even after the fabric rots.  I use them to tie up stuff in the garden.  Since I wear 100% cotton most of the time, or 100% wool/linen/natural if at all possible, these things decompose into the soil eventually rather than being there as plastic bits forever (functionally forever...who knows when that sh*t goes away?).   The main body of the clothes get used as wash clothes or reusable rags until they are so bad they become a 1 use rag to be trashed.  These are good for engine oil checking.  Or for wiping up greasy spills and then being used to start fires (in the woodstove...not just random locations).  Elastic off bras and undies has various uses as well...tie up tomatoes etc.  But, has to be gathered up as it won't decompose in a reasonable amount of time.  I keep a bag on a shelf near the other cleaning products for clothes that need to be rags now.  I fish in there for what I need when I run out of wash clothes, or am crafting, or need to start a fire and paper isn't cutting it to get the kindling going.

51  Do something while you stare at the TV/Computer/Whatever.  Watching a movie or show or random youtubes?  Do something.  Lately I've been folding boxes for mustard samples. You probably don't need to do that, but maybe you have mending or you like to knit.  I like to darn socks while I watch a movie or listen to a book.  Don't have any that need darning right now but I do need mustard sample boxes.  In fact, I'm blogging this during a work webinar.  Maybe I shouldn't but the webinar has repetitive bits so when something is being repeated, I type.  Then tune back in when it's new info.

52  Sell something you like to make/do.  This is new to me, but I'm testing it out.  I like to make mustard so I started selling it.  I'm tracking the money to see if the cost/benefit works out in my favor. It takes time and space, 2 things I don't have lots of to spare.  But, I like doing it.  And so far the mustard is selling at a local farmers market.  I'm just above break-even right now and had to do a price adjustment so we'll see.  Some people cook meals for those without time or space, others do sewing alterations, manual labor, or whatever.  It doesn't hurt and might be worth a try.

53  Keep Long Term Goals In Mind.  These would be financial related mostly.  Like I want to retire some day.  Every day I spend half what I earn, I earn a day of NOT WORKING because I have that amount of money saved (hopefully with interest) to pay for that day of retirement.  This is above and beyond my retirement fund and Social Security.  Another goal is having a house, garden and land the way I want.  I hasn't been super cheap getting toward that and compromises have and continue to be made, but if I keep going the way I'm going, I will get there debt free.  When I was trying to buy land I had a cost per square foot so before I spent $$ on something, I figured out how many square feet of land I could buy instead.  It wasn't totally accurate but it helped keep the spending down.

54  Gratitude moments.  I take a moment now and then when I get discouraged with the thrift and just want a giant expensive meal out or a 7$ iced coffee on a no spend day.  I use that moment to think through things in my personal life that I am grateful for.  Many of them end up having to do with being debt free and having my spending mostly under control.  Like I'm always grateful for being debt free.  A bad day at work is less bad when you know you COULD stomp out in a huff and not come back and still not lose your home.  So far that has meant I did not have to stomp out because I had a better perspective on things.  It keeps me on track.

55  Everything is a choice.  You are not a victim of your debt, your costs, your job, people/charities begging you for money, any loans you've given.  Everything you've done, including inhaling, was a choice.  So, move on.  Make a new choice.  Choose to pay the debt off.  Choose to forgive the loans you handed out unwisely or to openly ask for the money back or to sue the bastards.  Do it.  Choose to learn boundaries and enforce them with money.

56  Free Fruit!  Nice segue.  Or not.  Fruit is getting ripe right now.  Time to put the apple picker in the car and the eyes peeled for random fruit trees along the road, in people's yards, in parks.  Always ask if the tree looks like someone owns it or in a town park.  And be mindful of pesticide and herbicides that might be on them.  People spit pits out windows for generations so lots of apples and pears along highways, old RR beds, trails.  Many are delicious.  Some are crap.  Taste them if you feel comfortable.  If it looks like the area has been sprayed (lots of dead veg and/or few bugs) then I pass it up.  But often I pick them.  You get pesticides on grocery fruit too.  Wash it.  Make your own choices (see #55).  A friend has a cherry tree and calls people to pick each year.  I go and I share out the fruit and eat some.  Spent yesterday evening picking serviceberries (which are late this year) and eating them.  Some went into vinegar which will preserve them and flavor the vinegar.  I'll get more for several evenings in a row here.  Other berries are getting ripe.  Pick them.  When someone offers you their home grown fruit say yes, and thank you and enjoy and share something back sometime.

57  Free meat!  I help a friend butcher chickens and ducks and will help her butcher whatever comes up next.  I learn something and always get a bit of free meat with the new skills.  Sometimes I invest in meat with her, like when she bought ducks so grow and butcher.  I paid in for some of the ducks and helped with the meat production.  That wasn't free, but was cheap.  Some people grab roadkill. I haven't yet, but I'm all for it and someday hope to run across a fresh kill when I have my knife and something to put it in.

58  Free veg!  It's zucchini time here.  When someone asks if I want some, I say yes and take it.  Fry it, eat it raw, dry it, bake it, put it in soup.  It's good food.  Eat it.  If you have a freezer, shred it and freeze it.  Drying is my favorite because it becomes differently delicious in soups later.  Also just eating it as dried chips is good.  Don't forget mushrooms and other wild food you can gather beyond the berries noted above.  I know mushrooms aren't really veg but I didn't want to do another entry on this.  Enough already.

59  Grow some flavor.  A pot of herbs or an herb garden, some onions, garlic, peppers, or other flavory things in the garden or a pot will help with all that free zucchini.  And with flavoring that potato soup or other cheap food soups.  Herbs and spices are expensive, buy some seeds or learn to start them from cutting.  I hear you can root bits of basil from plant cuttings.  Maybe.  I have thyme, chives, tarragon, oregano, fennel, horseradish, radishes, 2 types of sage...no 3 types of sage, garlic, walking onions, sorrel (wild and garden), and probably more that I'm not thinking of.   Those all really help when I am grabbing a handful of greens to fry up or make salad.  Grab the herbs or garlic tops or an onion leaf (are the green things on onions leaves?  Blades?)  Anyway, it's cheap and healthy.  I have so much thyme I can dry it for the winter and have tasty soup all year. 

Coop 3.0: Another Adventure in Crapentry

So, I've got those new hens...Brittany, Suzanne and T-Bone.
They are hilarious and do weird sh*t all day when I'm home...and probably when I'm not home.

They had been in a really crap coop that forced them to sit in...well, crap.
SO, I decided to remodel and upgrade and reuse bits of the old one, some really excellent pallets I'd found, and some bits-n-bobs from elsewhere.

Design upgrades:
1) Bigger. It needed to be bigger.  The old one, coop 2.0, had room for 3 hens, but NOT for me to access it easily for clean out.  And 1 more hen or a rooster would put it over capacity.

2)  Easier access.  The old one I had to crawl around and reach in through the door for the chickens.  Awkward and meant chicken sh*t on the knees of my work pants.   Not all that much fun.  Really hard to rake the poo out or get the eggs.  But, it had been empty since Eula Goodnight finally croaked...the last hen from last year's misfit chicken ranch.With the new more active chickens, it wasn't great.


SO...I mentally designed and redesigned for about a month.
Then, I grabbed the bull by the pallets, and gave it a shot.

I had a 6 foot long, nearly 4 wide pallet with almost solid decking!  One missing board.
This ended up being the north wall.  I moved the decking boards around to make the one missing board area at the right height for the laying boxes.  Managed to carefully pry a board off, move it down a bit, and screw it back on.  Worked great.

I pounded a couple of t-posts in the ground and put that nice pallet up on them.
Then I added the east and west walls...regular size pallets I had around the property.  Each is anchored on a t-post, and screwed into the north wall.

For nest boxes, I took some 3 gallon plastic buckets, 2 actually, and screwed them, bottom to the north, open end to the south, onto the north wall pallet.  With my reciprocating saw I cut out most of the back side of the buckets.  These are lined up with the gap in the north wall pallet.

I used an old 2x2 to run horizontally across the bottom of the south, open, end of the bucket next boxes so the straw I put in there, and any eggs the ladies leave me, won't roll out.  Cut to length with the trusty reciprocating saw and screwed it on (I like screws because you can take them out and redo things as you change your mind).  It goes fully east to west and the boxes only take up half the east-west distance in the coop so there is about 3' of it the hens can roost on.

A few serviceberry branches that had come off bushes in the winter were added at odd angles here and there inside for more roosting.

I used my reciprocating saw to cut the north end of the east/west walls down to the level of the north wall, leaving the south sides a few inches taller. 
Onto this I hoisted (at great risk to my back...) an 8 foot long pallet I found behind bicycle shop about a year ago. It slopes down toward the north wall and was a bit "short" north to south, but that sorted itself out with the roofing...more anon.

The south wall was just open at this point.  I wanted to be able to access the entire inside through that wall if need be, AND I wanted the floor to be the bottom part of a car-top carrier that I found at the recycling center a year ago (it had been the roof of Coop 2.0)  The 6 foot long pallet, minus the widths of the east/west pallet walls was just about 8" longer than the car-top carrier, and the width was close enough to the width of the east/west wall pallets.  I made sure the east wall of the coop was moved in to match that which gives the hens a small sheltered area just outside their door, which is cut into the east pallet-wall (with the reciprocating saw...of course).

SO...I took a board off my wonky wood rack for the pick up (needed upgrading badly anyway) and screwed it along the top part of the east west wall pallets.  Another board from the wonky wood rack was screwed on at a level that would allow the car-top carrier to be a removable floor and slide out, poo and straw and all, under the main wall.  Like a trundle bed of chicken poo!  I put  few mini pallets (from my sawdust logs I buy for the wood stove) under the car-top carrier for better slidage.  Triple checked the height of the lower south wall horizontal board and added more screws and a few support boards.

I had made some crap panels of cedar boards salvaged off a discarded fence gate I found in an alley last year down in Moscow.  They were about the right height to make a passable south wall for the coop!  I trimmed the 3 panels down to the right height...actually, they are about 1/4" too tall but I will sort that out one of these days.

To make the south wall an access for getting into the coop for cleaning, I used cedar fence slats I got free off of craigslist to make the horizontal south wall boards into little slots for the panels to slide in.  Once I get the panels trimmed up, I will be able to slide them out the east and west ends and rake out any nonsense the hens put in there.

Finally, I used a few of the cedar fence slats to make runners for some scrap boards behind the nest boxes in that missing-board area of the north wall pallet!  I just slide the board to the west and grab the eggs without having to get in the coop.

Then it was on to the roof.  My builders for my future imaginary house let me have 3 pieces of salvaged metal roofing.  They just fit the roof.  One is a bit long and makes an overhang on the south side which will eventually use to accidentally poke my own eye out.

Finally finally I used the rest of the cedar fence slats to side between the slats of the pallet on the west wall and east wall, and to make a chicken ladder for the door (which the hens didn't care about)  The ladder gets picked up at night and jammed into the pallet gap to close the hens inside.

I contacted the cedar slat guy and he had some more.  I got those a few days later and they are laying in the hen-yard waiting to finish up covering some gaps in the siding if I get to it.

Over all, I really like how the coop works.
The slider thingy for egg access gets a bit snug when it rains, but it was free and easier to deal with than lining up hinges.
Sliding the poo-tray out works well.

I had to trap the hens in the coop with food and water for a couple of days until they laid their eggs in there (once the eggs appeared they were cut loose) just to get them in the habit. 
There are 4 eggs in this picture because I'm leaving 1 egg in the laying box as bait...it's marked so I don't eat it.  It's getting OLD...

They had been just pooping eggs out whereever they happened to be and they roam over about 15 acres.  Now 2 of them (T-Bone and I think Suzanne) consistently lay in one of the buckets.



The hens didn't care for the ladder and tore the little steps off it so now it's just the door.
And, the south wall panels need trimming so they slide better.  The hens seem happy enough in it.  It's somewhere they can relax and take a break when they are sick of digging up my gardens.

Will It Wipe? Testing Coffee Filters

REMEMBER: DO NOT FLUSH COFFEE FILTERS.  Also, don't drink bleach.

WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS with soap and water for 20 seconds.  The suds strip the virus of its greasy outer layer and kill it.

And now for our 7th Contestant!

Coffee Filters left over from an old coffee pot at work that no one uses because there is a 1-cup type maker now which is producing enough plastic waste to bury that layer of disposable diapers in the landfill...but I digress.

Coffee Filters...I'm using this style for a 20 cup basket:



PREP:
Bit slick, and yet, not smooth.   I find 3 or 4 are a good number and crunch them up a bit.

SCRATCH FACTOR:  3.5/5
Surprisingly NOT scratchy!  I thought they would be because the paper is stiff-ish.  But not bad at all.  Good scrubbing power without scratching.

EASE OF USE:  3.5/5
Don't need any rubbing between hands to soften up, just scrunching and separating into individual filters for more fluffiness.

PAPER-CUT SAFETY:  4.5/5
I can't picture how someone might cut themselves on these, but I also couldn't imagine anyone thinking you could drink bleach to cure a virus...so, assuming SOMEONE could figure out a way to do it, I cut a half point here.

ABSORBENCY:  4.5/5
REALLY good!  Surprisingly good.

CLEANSING POWER:  5/5
You will be clean.

AVAILABILITY:  4/5
Since lots of offices have switched to the single cup brewers with the stupid plastic cup thingies that you have to throw out ...don't tell me they make refillable ones, no one actually uses those in a group office setting because Steve leaves it in there until it's moldy...most offices have a bunch of these stuck in back corners of supply closets and kitchenettes.  Just look around!  If you don't work at an office, I suppose you could buy them but I have no idea how the price compares to TP or other options, but last time I was at the store, there was no limit on the number of coffee filter packages you could buy.  TP, paper towels and napkins were limited to one package per customer.

Coffee Filters COMPOSITE SCORE: 25/30

So, more suggestions please.
Or perhaps someone disagrees with my assessment?