Tiny leaks and evaporation put a constant drain on your resources. As discussed in our previous post, From Pennies One Million Dollars Grow, a few cents saved here and there can add up to be a significant amount. Here we offer 101 suggestions for plugging expenditures in various aspects of your life - around the house, in your personal care, transportation, recreation and more. Most of these ideas we currently use or have applied in the past.

101 Drops in the Bucket

Saving on Utilities

• Minimize electricity use during peak hours (weekdays during work hours). Do laundry, use hot water, etc. in the evenings.
• Cook enough for several meals at once.
• Turn off the tap when brushing your teeth.
• Turn off shower when shampooing and soaping.
• Work or read in the same room with family members or roommates to consolidate light usage.
• Take advantage of natural daylight to get your work done. Sleep when it’s dark, get up as soon as it is light (before sunrise).
• Hold off on personal phone calls that can wait until evenings and weekends when rates are lower or free.
• Wash things on the lawn to water the grass at the same time.
• Water the lawn or garden in the early morning or after sundown. Skip watering on windy days.
• Use curtains to keep your house cool in summer and warm in winter.
• Keep thermostat lower in the winter and wear extra layers.
• Don’t separate colors in your laundry; instead, hand wash items that bleed. This way, you can reduce the number of loads. Saves water, electricity and soap.
• Keep thermostat as high as can be tolerated in summer without harming your pets, antiques and musical instruments.
• Drink lots of cold water to keep cool and reduce need for air conditioning.
• Turn off air conditioning in late afternoon, open doors and windows and turn on fans.
• Using ceiling fans in summer and winter (reverse directions to push warm air down).
• For laundry, set a shorter dryer time. It’s better to have to do a touch up instead of using unnecessary gas or electricity. You’d be surprised how little time some clothing need to dry. If taken out still warm, damp things can still air dry quite quickly.
• Cancel cable, purchase a few DVDs a month (which cost less than cable and leave you with an asset) and watch current shows online at Hulu or network channel websites.

Saving on Food and Health

(more…)

Having a whole house to ourselves, Penelope and I often feel like a couple of kids when the parents are absent. We play fetch with the dogs in the hallways and let slobbery tennis balls bounce off the walls. We push furniture around and rearrange the rooms on impulse. We call every meal or break from work “a party.” We have whatever pets we like and don’t make them live outdoors. We are admittedly a bit rowdy and even play the piano and violin in the middle of the night (our house is a little apart from the neighbors). And instead of “birthdays,” we have “birthday weeks” wherein we take a week long holiday from work, feast on our favorite foods, and watch DVD’s which we order especially.

Not surprisingly, we, with the help of our rambunctious dogs (especially during their puppy teething stages), inflict a noticeable amount of wear and tear on our home and furniture and it is lucky for us that the distressed look is so popular nowadays. Nevertheless, we have a cabinet stocked with paints to keep our lifestyle on the romantic side of shabby and away from woefully distressed. We are constantly painting, decorating, patching, repairing, refinishing, and making things for our house. Over the years, we have developed some economical and efficient habits which we would like to share.

Thrift store chairs purchased for $5-15 each that we painted in our favorite colors

• For both home or crafts Buy gallon size un-tinted latex/acrylic paint which costs less per ounce than small bottles of craft paint.
• Mix your own colors by adding colored craft paint to white paint.
• You can also purchase pigment to mix as much as you need for a project instead of buying a whole gallon of a certain color.
• Save food containers with lids (such as yogurt and cream cheese tubs) for mixing and storing paint.

(more…)

Most people inevitably own an innumerable rank of items which are both frequently and infrequently necessary. These miscellaneous items are often all too visible in the form of clutter and frustratingly invisible when they are wanted. The obvious solution is to place things near the location where they are most likely to be wanted and keep them out of sight. This can be done with an assortment of cabinets and containers which can be placed and hung anywhere.

Some objects do not need any modification to take on the new role of cabinet. For example, I have for many years used a faux antique birdcage to store attractive books. I also have an attractive wire puppy crate that is no longer in use which could store and display childhood stuffed animals. Other things can be become cabinets with simple additions and changes. Wooden boxes can have lids attached with hinges or wire. An unused aquarium can be polished or painted with glass paint and given an improvised lid. I have often contemplated the potential of spiral bindings from old notebooks to serve as hinges and have yet to try it.

Because looking expensive is not our first priority, my sister and I have a hobby of making cabinets from pine boards, scraps of plywood, and found items. These handcrafted cabinets can be used alone, stacked, mounted to a wall or placed on shelves and furniture. They add whimsy to our rooms and are ideal places to stash things which would otherwise accumulate on horizontal surfaces. Please allow me to introduce a few of our favorite cabinets.

(more…)

Conversion of a Common Coniferous Conundrum

When we moved into our own home, my sister and I decided to make our first Christmas a memorable one, which included the purchase of a 7 foot tall Christmas tree. Another occasion which came with taking possession of the house was our going to the sanitation office and signing up for trash pickup, at which time we were warned that sanitation engineers would refuse to empty any trash container which was overfilled. To make sure we understood what it meant to overfill a trash container, the sanitation department employee showed us several photographs of a trash container into which a Christmas tree had been rammed with the lid in various half-hearted attempts at closure. Happily, this specific offense we will never be tempted to commit. For why on earth would two practical people like ourselves throw away (or reduce to mulch) a perfectly good used Christmas tree?

Almost as soon as we wrestled and tilted our Christmas tree into a position which passed for perpendicular, I began scheming at the potential uses of this sizable item which would become available as soon as December 26. However, to make the best of the purchase, we left the tree decorated well into January. After divesting the tree of it’s ornaments, we sawed off the branches while the tree was still standing, leaving a few attractive stumps. The branches were easily disposed of without upsetting the sanitation department. We then sawed off the part of the trunk that had been standing in water and were left with a 6+ foot tree trunk.

(more…)

As an artist I am always eager for the creative challenges provided by frugal living and the quest for unconventional solutions. I view limited means and materials as a criteria or assignment and constantly ponder over the possible uses and adaptations of old, broken, or left-over items. My sister and I have always viewed saving money as winning at a game and making something useful out of something unwanted is the same as getting it for free, which is quite a victory.

Even while growing up in very comfortable circumstances, I had a fascination with the potential of objects to be used as they were not intended. This interest may have begun with finding furniture for a doll house from household objects and making clothes for my dolls and cats from old clothing and yarns.

My pursuit of improvisation in furniture and clothes was furthered by literature such as novels by Charles Dickens which portray extreme poverty with infinite charm. There is also a children’s series by Mary Norton describing the lives of resourceful little people called Borrowers who see caviar tins as bathtubs and postage stamps as wall art. In one instance of borrower-like behavior, I used for a drawer pull the steam control knob from a clothes iron which had suffered a fall. Close examination will reveal that the knob bears the words “Max”, “Low”, and “Off”. The other embellishments used on this drawer were 2 pieces of star anise and untidy swirls of hot glue under a coat of paint.

A few years ago, while reading about Commedia dell’Arte, I learned that the colorful look of Harlequin costume originated from the practice of medieval jesters and fools, who were poorly treated and probably poorer paid, to fashion clothing from found scraps of fabric for the simple luxury of keeping warm. The romance of the pathetic significantly increased my fondness for patches and deliberate mismatching. The result is that some of my favorite clothes and household items are made entirely of materials left over from other projects.

(more…)