Savings and Goals Journal #50

There are two things I am certain of at this moment: One, moving is expensive, and two, it is cold here in Colorado!!!!

We are still working away on our home updates and are staying very busy going back and forth from our old home to our new one. Amidst all of the chaos, I’m trying hard to save money on the smaller things, because we’ve had some large expenses lately.

We had a family of deer visit our yard earlier this week. They stayed all morning. Grampy and I were so entertained! One of them laid down right next to the house below the window. I took this picture out my daughter’s bedroom window. They didn’t even run away when my daughter dropped our grandson off for the day. I’m researching deer-resistant plants for my garden. 🙂

In the Kitchen

When my girls were young, I discovered freezer meals. My first experience making freezer meals came from the book Once a Month Cooking. I discovered the book through my Mothers of Preschoolers group, and whenever I am needing to find more time in my days, I go back to making freezer meals. Over the weekend, I spent a few hours on Friday evening and a little bit of time on Saturday morning preparing five meals for our freezer. The amount of time I save on cooking and cleaning up each day makes me happy.

We’ve had two of the meals so far. Here are the things I made for the freezer:

• Wild Rice Chicken
• Ravioli Soup (this was our Valentine’s dinner with salad and garlic toast)
• Chicken Broccoli
• Sausage and Rice
• Sweet and Sour Chicken

With just Grampy and I, we usually have two dinners and a lunch from each meal. Thank goodness Grampy is fine with eating leftovers.

We have a small room just past the kitchen that is really too small to be a bedroom. It also has an entire wall of cabinets. We have decided that the room will make an awesome pantry. I started painting the pantry and the hallway while Grampy was with our daughter watching the SuperBowl. I used a pre-mixed paint from Walmart called Birchwood. It’s a nice greyish color. I’ll be painting the cabinets white and lining all the shelves with shelf paper. I love this pattern, but I buy it at WalMart instead of Amazon.

It seems that the current trend is to have open shelves for pantry items. I think that would drive me crazy. I like the idea of things stored behind closed doors. That way if things get a little messy, I won’t be bothered so much. 🙂 When we are all moved and settled in, I will start shopping the grocery sales more to find things to stock our pantry with at the best prices.

I haven’t changed houses very many times in my life. I tend to get in one place and stay there for quite a while. I find that the thing I struggle with the most is figuring out where things will go best in the kitchen cabinets. I like things to be easily accessible and make the best use of the space I have. So I imagine, there will be several rearrangings of things until I get it just right. It’s tempting to buy all the pretty storage things, but I’m going to try first to use what I have.

In the Garden

Even though there is still snow in some areas of our yard, I am in Garden Planning Mode. My garden may not be much this first year, but I aim to at least get a start on it so that next year, it can start to be amazing.

On the west side of our house, there is what we refer to as the Graveyard of Garden Things. It’s an area filled with planting pots, piles and piles of various landscaping stones, a metal arbor, a couple of wishing wells, and a hodgepodge of other garden things. There are far too many stones for us to use, so I have already given some to our neighbor. On warm afternoons, I head outside and sort the rocks so we will know how many of each kind we have. Some of them have been frozen to the ground, so I’ll be waiting a bit on those.

I think the area at one time had been a pretty little garden, and I hope to bring it back to life. I did discover a couple of planters that had some very determined-to-survive hens and chicks and an area where some snapdragons had survived.

I plan to create a kitchen garden, as well as have flowers and a little area to sit and relax. There are three rosebushes in the front yard that I will need to move, since that is the area I will be using for my daycare play area. The rosebushes will be relocated to the edge of the garden area, far from where the thorns can hurt little hands.

I’d like to refurbish this garden arbor to use as an entrance to the garden.

I imagine at one time this was a cute area filled with flowers and this little wishing well (which I will also be giving a makeover). I’ve starting clearing all the rocks away and then I will build a new border around the flower bed using just the round river rocks, I think. I plan to save money on plants by bringing lots of things from our old house to this one, and planting easy-to-grow flowers like zinnias from seed.

Our climate here isn’t terribly different than at our old house. I will be planting things a few weeks later than I used to. I think this year we may just start with a couple of tomato plants and hopefully next year we will able to grow a bigger amount of garden veggies to help our grocery budget. I plan to incorporate gardening into my child care program. I found a raised bed for children in the clearance area of our WalMart, so we can plant in that this spring.

Home and Family

Now on to the part about moving being expensive. We’ve had a few plumbing issues that we are having fixed. I’d recently put a new water heater in our old house, and it turns out the water heater here needed replaced. *Sigh* Generally water heaters last for years and years, so I shouldn’t have to do that again for a while! We have a couple of faucets that leak, and two to replace completely. Once that’s done, the plumbing should be good to go.

We need to finish painting. And put flooring the the room we’re making into a playroom for the grandkids (so they can have a playspace separate from the daycare) and the room that will be our daughter’s room. I’m glad that there are many things we can do ourselves. Hiring things done adds so much to the cost, so we do what we can ourselves, even though the work goes pretty slowly.

We’d thought we’d have our stuff all moved from the old house by the end of January. That deadline came and went. We’ve decided the end of March will be a good goal. Since we have a grandbaby here every weekday, we mostly have weekends to move our stuff. We are getting there. We will rent a moving van for our big items. I’ll be glad to only be paying utilities for one house! And to not be putting gas in Grampy’s big pickup going back and forth. We fill our little car about once a month and don’t even use the whole tank. Have I mentioned that I love living in town?

Grampy is doing an amazing job dealing with all the snow. We purchased a snowblower, and he says it makes clearing the walks so much easier. So far it has proven to be a very good purchase.

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to spring! At least the last couple of times it’s snowed, it has melted in a day or so. Although snowy days are nice to cuddle in a blanket with a cup of tea and a good book, so maybe I don’t mind so much!