Super Savings Saturday

We're saving this week by skipping the grocery store and eating from our freezer. Last week I got some good markdown deals and had to rearrange the freezer to stuff it all in. Time to start eating from that stash!

We're also going to be having company soon, and have finally decided to break down and buy a guest bed. We've been having our poor guests sleep on a questionable air mattress. Until we bought the house, we moved so often and lived in very tiny spaces, so having an extra bed was out of the question. Now we have a whole house, but we rent out our unused space. We have a house four bedroom home, we're still living in a two bedroom situation.

Since we are not moving anytime in the foreseeable future, we decided to find a solution to our guest bed quandary. Our first though was to buy a high quality futon for our tiny upstairs office.
However, we were looking at futon prices and realized we could get a decent mattress for that price. So we measured and pictured how we could rearrange. This website helped with the visualization. We concluded that we could fit a mattress in our current office, so that's what we're going to do. We think our guests will appreciate being able to sleep on something that does not slowly deflate overnight. :)

Go here for more Super Savings Saturday posts, via MoneySavingMom!

Bathroom Makeover: Upstairs Bathroom Version

I finally got around to redoing our upstairs bathroom. It cost a little more than our downstairs bathroom redo, but I went a little more wild with new hardware upstairs. Overall, it cost $55, which is not too bad. I picked colors that went with our current shower curtain and decorations, so that saved us some money right there. Clearance sales, oops paint racks, and using what you have already can go a long way!

Here's some before shots. The people who owned our house before us loved their frogs. The entire bathroom was painted a lovely blue, and it would have been just fine, had it not been for the frog theme. The frog wallpaper was cute, but not me.More frogs! And the top of the wooden medicine cabinet. And a wood toilet seat.

Most of my time was spent scraping down the wallpaper. It took FOREVER. It just did not want to come down, so some of my budget had to be spent on that special wallpaper remover stuff. I don't think it worked much better than water and scraping to be perfectly honest.

We painted the walls a lovely purple shade that I got off the oops paint rack at Lowe's for five dollars.

Most of my budget was spent on new hardware. Here's one of our new towel racks. I just did not like the wooden ones that they had, and although I was just going to repaint them, I saw these Simply Shabby Chic ones on clearance at Target and could not resist.

I was not able to scrape off the wooden frogs, so I replaced the faceplate with the one I took down from the roommate's bathroom when I redid it.

I hated that wooden toilet seat, so I replaced it with this one. I also bought a new toilet paper holder to match the towel racks.

My sink area...not much new going on here. I do want to replace the boring mirror someday with something more fun, but so far the ones I've liked have been INSANELY expensive, so I'm waiting for a better deal.

Another view of the shower curtain, new paint, and new towel bar.
This picture used to be in our bedroom, but I thought it looked really good in the bathroom, so we moved it. I'm thinking of painting the frame to match the newly painted cabinet.
Here's the cabinet. I painted it a pale yellow with a small pot of paint that I got on the oops rack for .50 cents. Fifty. Cents. That's good even for oops rack prices! The little drawer thing is something that I picked up at Goodwill not long after we married. It's been many things, but now it is painted and holds my husband's electric razor and assorted odd and ends.

Using What You Have:Inexpensive Vegetable Lasagna

I love fresh vegetables and fruits, but this is one item that can really cost me a fortune if I don't pay attention. One of the ways I get around that is by picking up just about any random marked down produce items if I like it and the price is inexpensive enough. But what does one do with a pound and a half of zucchini, two pounds of mushrooms, and bargain carrots?

One of my tricks is to use them to replace meat. You can add vegetables and use less meat, or replace the meat entirely. Yesterday we had vegetable lasagna using some of those bargain carrots (.69 cents for a huge pack), mushrooms (two pounds for .99 cents), and zucchini (five good sized ones for .49 cents).

Here's how I made the lasagna using my bargain produce. Including the noodles, sauce, and cheese, this dish cost about three dollars to make. I still have tons of mushrooms and zucchini left, but there are many other dishes that I can make with these things.

First I cut up the mushrooms and grated the carrots and zucchini. I then cooked the vegetables in a little bit of butter. After they were done, I poured a jar of bargain spaghetti sauce over it. I poured about 1/4 c on the bottom of my lasagna pan first, before I added it to the veggies.

Then I got my "ricotta" (cottage cheese on manager's special that had been in my freezer for awhile) and mixed it with some garlic powder and oregano. I also added an egg and mixed it in well.

Next I layered sauce, noodles, ricotta mix, and cheese until I reached the top of my pan.

Ta-da! A yummy meal that will have lots of leftovers for my family. Lasagna freezes well and is also an excellent lunch to take to work, if you have access to a microwave.

The 40 Dollar Bathroom Makeover!

I've been wanting to paint the downstairs bathroom ever since we moved in. It was not a bad color, but it was very sterile and boring. I decided that I wanted some color in there! I did not want to spend more than fifty dollars. Here's what I was able to do for forty dollars.

Before

The walls were a beige color. It was nicely painted, but very blah. The roommate had a lavender bathmat and a black shower curtain, but I removed those before I took the picture.


After
I painted the walls a burgundy color. The previous owners of this house left that small carpet, so I moved it to the bathroom to be used as a rug. The small cabinet was in our upstairs bathroom, but we had been meaning to bring it downstairs for the roommate as he does not have very much bathroom storage. Since it did not really match, I put a piece of black fabric on top, and that helped pull the look together. The paint was 20 dollars at Lowes with my 10% off coupon. All the other money was spend on two new "brushed nickel" towel racks and face plates at Target.

If you look in the before picture, you'll see red towel racks. They're wooden, and I was going to paint them black with a pot of dollar paint I found on the discount paint rack. However, I happened to see these things at Target on clearance, so I went for it. I love how you can see the old paint under the new paint. It looks kind of weird in this picture, but the effect in the bathroom looks nice.

Frugal Fridays: Use What You Have

I have been watching others talking about curtains at Crystal's blog the past few days, and ideas on how to make them. Yesterday I thought that I would finally get around to making some for our living room windows. I was excited by this, but did not want to spend more than ten or fifteen dollars.

After puttering around Hobby Lobby and Wal-Mart, I could not find any fabric that I liked for less than 3 dollars a yard. I was a bit bummed out. I was not going to have nice curtains like all the other ladies were making and showing on their blogs right now! I went home and resloved to be patient and to wait to see what I could find later on at yard sales and thrift stores and Freecycle. I frequently see fabric for next to nothing at all three of those sources, so I figured I could wait.

While I was fixing lunch, I had an epiphany. Um, I already had curtains. I've had them for years, and they had spent a lot of time getting dusty in a drawer, for someday. I usually don't keep things around, as I hate clutter, but these were one thing I had kept. I pulled them out, washed them, and hung them with curtain rods that the previous owner of the house had left in the utility room. Ta-Da, and it cost me nothing to do, except the gas I spent looking at fabric. When you want something, poke around your home- you may already have it!

My nice reading corner, now with curtains!