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Do your pillowcases match?

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thDespite the no-kissing rule I imposed last week, DF has come down with the same crud I’ve still got. Maybe it was inevitable, which makes me grumpy when I think about all the kisses I skipped.

He went to work for a couple of hours the day after Christmas, saying he planned to wash the sheets when he got back. Sort of like locking the barn after the horses were gone, really, but he thought a good dose of Clorox might help get rid of some of the cooties.

Feeling generous, I put the sheets in myself after he left – including the pillowcases even though they aren’t white. In fact, they’re five different colors. Suddenly I realized that this would never have happened when I was a kid or a young married woman. Sheets and pillowcases had to match.

Guess what? I no longer care. How about you?

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How I saved more than $100 last night.

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thWe’re in the middle of a project to turn a giant three-sided building into a smaller shed, a greenhouse and a deck. When I say “we,” it’s the royal we. DF and one of his sons are doing most of the work.

He’s reusing wood from the original structure plus some boards another DIYer had given him. DF also found a great deal on paint at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore and an even better deal at the “free” section of the city landfill.

Yet certain purchases — cedar boards for the deck and something called Suntuf clear PC roof panels for the greenhouse — can’t be scrounged. The roof panels are on sale at Home Depot but even so cost almost $25 a pop.

The final tally will be about $750, a figure that made us both gasp – and sent me straight to GiftCardGranny.com, an aggregator site for discounted gift cards.

Within three minutes I’d determined the best deal and ordered it. Total savings: $107.30. Wish I could earn at that rate every day.

 

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Gardening on a small scale.

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thIt’ll be several months more before DF and I can put any plants in the ground, but we’re definitely looking forward to seeing green rather than white outside. My desire to play in the dirt was exacerbated by the arrival of a media kit from Renee’s Garden, purveyor of more delicious-looking seeds than you ever imagined.

Or maybe you can imagine quite a lot – especially in light of the particularly ugly winter weather in much of the Lower 48. Maybe you’re dreaming of things like Peppermint Stick Chard, Lace Perfume Dianthus, Black Cherry Tomatoes, Baby Snack Peppers and Heirloom Chocolate Daisies.

If so, now’s the time to plan those dreams into vases and onto your dinner plates. Not everyone is able (or willing) to care for a giant backyard spread, but why not consider container gardening and/or edible landscaping? Even condo dwellers can harvest small versions of greens, vegetables and herbs, and food crops can do double duty in terms of visual interest and palate pleasing.

Put another way: You can even grow zucchini in containers. Honest.

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10 uses for those ubiquitous canvas bags.

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thIf you’ve ever run a race, donated to a charity, attended a convention or been a supporter of public television, you’ve probably got at least one tote bag in your life. Maybe multiple bags. Obviously they’re good as reusable grocery sacks, but that’s not their only use.

My friend Linda B. uses them to sort recyclables. Bags hanging from a railing hold newspaper, mixed paper, tin cans, aluminum, plastic bottles and glass. (And yes, I know they’re not “tin” cans. I also call it “tinfoil,” because I’m old.)

Linda keeps hats, gloves and scarves in a tote bag. In the winter the bag lives in the back of her car and in the summer it goes into the entry closet. Sounds neat and tidy to me – and here’s hoping she never gets stranded somewhere and needs to suit up.

How else to use these bags?

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6 reasons spring cleaning can save you money.

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Last month several dozen personal finance bloggers collaborated in a Valentine-themed giveaway sponsored by Rather-Be-Shopping.com, a site specializing in online coupon codes. The contest generated so much response  that site founder Kyle James decided to do it again.

This time the theme is “spring and saving money.” The prize remains the same: $500 cash via PayPal. [Edited to add: Although the giveaway is over, the information below can help you with your spring cleaning. Read on!]

 

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An anomaly worthy of praise.

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I’m sitting near a blazing fire watching Chamber of Commerce snow fall. The flakes are fat and fluffy and seem to dance on their way down, the way the bits of white inside a snow globe frolic back and forth before settling.

The house is perfumed by the corned beef simmering in a Dutch oven and by a batch of kale and sausage soup (heavy on the potatoes, moderate on the garlic and with a judicious amount of Frank’s Red Hot pepper sauce). If I concentrated, I could probably scent the last of the homemade yogurt that I drained through a cloth-lined colander a little while ago.

But the dominant fragrance is of freshly washed laundry hung on racks set up between me and the fireplace insert, which is cranking out so much heat that the clothes and towels may be dry before I finish writing this.

Domestic contentment – made even more delightful by the fact that it is shared domesticity. When DF got home from church (he’s the cantor for 8 a.m. Mass) he dove right into chores: two loads of laundry, putting the corned beef on to cook, cleaning the tub, general tidying. I can track his progress by the whistling or occasional scraps of song he emits while moving from job to job.

Where was I? Cutting up soup ingredients, placing some vegetable scraps into the freezer for making stock later on and relegating others to the compost, putting the yogurt into a container and storing the whey in a jar. Oh, and smiling. Smiling.

I love a man who whistles while he works. And I especially love a man who doesn’t regard the domestic arena as expressly female.

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5 frugal trashcan hacks.

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First USEME trashcan sighting in Ramoji Film City © by vincelaconte

When I lived in Seattle my under-sink trashcan was quite small. I could get away with this for several reasons: I lived alone, cooked frugally and took enthusiastic advantage of the city’s single-stream recycling program. Generally it took a week or more for the can to fill up.

Being an illegitimus frugalis, I never bought a single kitchen trashcan liner. Why should I, when plastic shopping bags were so ubiquitous? Even though I toted at least one reusable bag everywhere I went, the plastics had a way of accumulating:

I picked them up while walking home. (Once I also picked up some free ice cream this way.) 

People gave me things inside shopping bags.

Sometimes I bought so much (usually from the used-bread, used-meat or dented-can bins that the order wouldn’t fit in my cloth bag, so I’d have to accept an additional plastic one.

I gleaned them while on vacation. My relatives tend to use plastic with happy abandon. Folded-up bags take up practically no room in a carry-on.

Thus I always had at least a few dozen bags on hand. That is, until Seattle’s ban on plastic shopping bags took effect in July 2012.

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Why you need renter’s insurance.

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Water is an incredibly destructive force. I saw this three times during my five-year stint as an apartment building manager.

  • An ice dam on the roof, which hardly ever happens in Seattle, caused water to leak into a couple of  units.
  • A flash flood caused by days of heavy rain and a sewer-system failure dumped five feet of muddy water into the underground parking garage.
  • A backed-up toilet overflowed for about three hours, leaking into several apartments and the basement laundry room.

None of these situations could reasonably be anticipated. Then again, most of us don’t get hit by uninsured drivers or diagnosed with rare illnesses — but most of us consider car and health coverage to be necessary evils.

You also need renter’s insurance, to cover that which comes out of the blue — or from the apartment upstairs.

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Turf wars.

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Here’s the only thing I learned this week that’s worth remembering: If the sun is out, mow the damn lawn. I was so embroiled in deadline that I somehow felt I couldn’t take 45 minutes off to cut the grass at my house-sitting job.

“Later,” I kept saying, until “later” turned into “tomorrow.” Except that it rained that day.

And just about every other day, until the house was the only one on the block with a prairie view. At which point it rained again.

 

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