You may have noticed, I'm a bit obsessed with cost analysis. Part of that stems from a desire to save save save, and the other part from the fact that I just went from a nearly full time, classroom situation, to working one day a week at my job. We made this change as a family in order to homeschool and allow for me to spend more time with the kiddos. So here are some ways we save money by doing it ourselves.
1) Laundry soap. It takes almost the same amount of time to make as it does to take it off the shelf and at a savings of /load, it's a real bargain. It even takes paint out of clothing!
2) Baking and Cooking. We make our own everything here, bread, pie, cookies...we eat homemade dinners, pack lunches, cook breakfast. I have even started making yogurt (more on that another day.) We try to keep it simple, healthy, and nutritious. At times we don't succeed at this, but we try to keep it good for us at least 80% of the time.
3) Canning, Freezing, Dehydrating. You've seen about many of the different things I've done here from the Rose Hip Jelly to the Applesauce and many others in between
4) Fixing. Mend what needs to be mended, maintain things to make them last longer.
5) Don't be afraid to ask questions, ask for help, and ask opinions. Others have done this before me and I often ask what they think about what I should do. We've saved ourselves lots of problems this way. We are also always open to helping hands!
6) Raising chickens (Country sister does this and more! check out each word) for eggs and occasionally meat.
7) Our garden...our connection to the land, food sources, and lots of tomatoes
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Sorry about the lack of pictures in this one, I gave you links to the archives instead of lots of picts of all this stuff!
What are some other ways we could do things ourselves to save?
What are you doing?
We have a wood stove in our house that we use for most of our heat. We bought the wood off craigslist in the summer (when it's cheaper) and it's so cozy in here all throughout the day. It also helps we had all our windows replaced with double paned this summer -- by a relative who is a contractor, so we didn't pay for installation. That's another way we save money -- we take advantage of the skills of the people around us. Like I said, my uncle installed our windows, my mother-in-laws plumber boyfriend fixed a problem with our kitchen sink recently, and I get free childcare once a week from a retired preschool teacher friend of my mom's who missed having kids around (and she thanks me every time for bringing my daughter over!) Having a good community is a great savings!
ReplyDeleteWow! We're slowly replacing the windows too, but it is really expensive if you can't do it yourself. Plumbing is another item that it's nice to have friends helping with as well
ReplyDeleteI was doing DIY soap for a while, but stopped over my concerns with borax - though I'm thinking of getting back into it.
ReplyDeleteYou use yours in a high efficiency washer? We have one of those now and I've been afraid to use the homemade stuff with the washer.
I've used it in both conventional and front loading. It works great. The recipe that I reworked was a HE recipe- I just changed quantities so I wouldn't have 1/2 bars of soap sitting around.
ReplyDelete