Save a ton of money on home furnishings!

One of my favorite sites to drool over is http://www.homedecoratorsoutlet.com/

They are the outlet store for Home Depot. On their website they have a section called "What a deal". In this area they have items for 50% to 80% off the original Home Depot cost. I have ordered two items so far from this site and was absolutely delighted with both. The first item I bought was a Tiffany style lamp which was originally $135. I paid only $40. The second was a set of white bunk beds for my girls. These beds can either be bunked or left seperate. They came complete with headboards, footboards, rails, and the "bunkie board" for support underneath the mattress. This set originally sold for $499 and I got them shipped to my home for 80% off; I ended up paying $169 for the beds, tax, and shipping.

This chair was $269 and now it is $94.

This rug was $765 and now it is $265.

A new take on creation (a joke!)

In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth and populated the Earth with broccoli, cauliflower and spinach, green and yellow and red vegetables of all kinds, so Man and Woman would live long and healthy lives. Then using God's great gifts, Satan created Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream and Krispy Crème Donuts. And Satan said, "You want chocolate with that?" And Man said,”Yes!" and Woman said, "And as long as you're at it, add some sprinkles." And they gained 10 pounds. And Satan smiled.

And God created the healthful yogurt that Woman might keep the figure that Man found so fair. And Satan brought forth white flour from the wheat and sugar from the cane and combined them. And Woman went from size 6 to size 14.So God said, "Try my fresh green salad." And Satan presented Thousand-Island Dressing, buttery croutons and garlic toast on the side. And Man and Woman unfastened their belts following the repast.

God then said, "I have sent you heart healthy vegetables and olive oil in which to cook them." And Satan brought forth deep fried fish and chicken-fried steak so big it needed its own platter. And Man gained more weight and his cholesterol went through the roof. God then created a light, fluffy white cake, named it "Angel Food Cake," and said, "It is good." Satan then created chocolate cake and named it "Devil's Food."

God then brought forth running shoes so that His children might lose those extra pounds. And Satan gave cable TV with a remote control so Man would not have to toil changing the channels. And Man and Woman laughed and cried before the flickering blue light and gained pounds.

Then God brought forth the potato, naturally low in fat and brimming with nutrition. And Satan peeled off the healthful skin and sliced the starchy center into chips and deep-fried them. And Man gained pounds.

God then gave lean beef so that Man might consume fewer calories and still satisfy his appetite. And Satan created McDonald's and its 99-cent double cheeseburger. Then said, "You want fries with that?" And Man replied, "Yes! And super size them!" And Satan said, "It is good." And Man went into cardiac arrest.

God sighed and created quadruple bypass surgery.

Then Satan created H M O s!!!!!!!!

It's the 25th of July. Only 5 months 'til Christmas!!!

I don't want anyone to freak out but officially there are only 153 days until Christmas. It will be here before you know it! Have you started planning for Christmas yet? If not, it is time. Trust me, you'll feel better about yourself when you are one of "those" people who have Christmas under control and can gloat that your gifts are wrapped and under the tree by December 1st. If you know me well, you know that I love Christmastime. It was my dear departed mother-in-law's favorite time of year, and I try to recreate that good memory for my husband by decorating to the nines. Last year we had 5 trees in the house!

So, what do you need to do first? Most people think the first step is to make a list of people you will be giving gifts to this year. But, the absolute first thing is to make a budget. Do you have a Christmas club account where you have been putting money all year? If so, then you know your budget. But if you are like most people you don't have a dime saved for Christmas so you need to start now. How much can you save each month for August, September, October, November and December? Be realistic.

Now that you have an amount, make a list of the people for which you will be buying or making a gift. Allocate a certain $ range to each group of people. For example, for teachers of your kids or co-workers $5-$10. Your frugal goal is to spend less than that amount be shopping wisely. When you find a great gift at a great price, buy more than one! When my daughter Christin was in Kindergarten, Lenox China had an awesome summer sale which included Christmas items. I bought 8 "winter berry" pattern cake stands for $4 each. The retail for each was $30. I have since given them filled with Krispy Kreme donuts or homemade sugar cookies to Christin's first, second, and third grade teachers and Caleb and Ciarra's preschool teachers. Last year I bought those "at home socks" from JC Penney for free after a coupon and gave those to my co-workers. They even knew they were free for me but they still wore them and they still kept their feet warm! The cost of the item does not lessen its usefulness!

So, I want you to have a budget by August 1st! Trust me, getting started now is the BEST gift to give yourself!

New Free Samples

Today, I have had a free sample day. First, I washed and conditioned my hair with a free sample of Pantene. I freshened my breath with a free sample of scope. In my dishwasher I am using a free sample of Electrasol and I am cooking soup in the crockpot with a free sample of Reynold's crockpot liners! All free!

Here are some new freebies you can sign up for:
Ziploc Steam Bag

Playtex Sports Tampons

Hallmark Connections Greeting Card

Dove Hair Care

Soy Joy Nutrition Bars

Tena Serenity

Degree for Men

Morning Survival Kit

Nestle Crunch

Dove skin care

I'm in a cooking rut!

I am now officially tired of cooking, fixing, finding, serving, inticing food for my family. Being that we're all here together all day long I have to creatively fix breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday. No wonder I've been craving a big, fat quarterpounder with cheese. I wouldn't have to fix it. Just eat it.

Being frugal and all, I know that one of the ways the families flitter away their money unnecessarily is by eating out. Besides the cost, you really don't know who prepared your food! (Have you see Ratatouille?) And I've heard that fast food restaurants' ice machines have far more germs and bacteria than do the toilets! Yuck!

So, in order to spend my food budget wisely and know what I'm putting in my mouth I try to prepare all our meals at home. But, as I said at the beginning we're in a rut. My kids and my dh (dear husband) all think we don't have anything in the house to eat if it doesn't meet their requirements: 1. You can grab it and eat it without any preparation and 2. It is something they have seen before and liked before.

I've been using the following websites to get some new ideas and help in menu planning. Sometimes I just need to be on auto-pilot and prepare what the menu says without having to think too long.

www.thepioneerwomancooks.com This is the amazing cooking and recipe blog of Ree, who is a ranchers wife, homeschooling mom, and absolutely funny woman. Her recipes use real ingredients that I usually have at home and are easy to prepare. Well, except the cinnamon rolls! I've made the orange muffins, corn casserole, chicken spaghetti, and both of Marlboro Man's favorite sandwiches. They were all to die for!

www.menus4moms.com This free website gives you a dinner menu for each day of the week and a shopping list! She posts two weeks at a time. One thing I really like is that she uses some freezer cooking aspects and cook once, eat twice type meals. For example, this Friday is BBQ pizza, using leftover bbq chicken from Wednesday's menu.

www.savingdinner.com This a not a free site but her stuff is fabulous. I have bought and downloaded her freezer plans and have only had one recipe that we didn't like. She has free samples of her menu. The best thing about this site is it gives you the shopping list, recipes, how to prepare and what to serve with each recipe.

www.topsecretrecipes.com This site has copy cat recipes from famous restaurants. Many of them are free. I love the Applebee's oriental chicken salad and the Soup Nazi's cream of sweet potato soup! So now when I'm dying for a restaurant meal, I just check this site and make something I would buy at Outback, or Applebee's or Panera. It even has Sonic's cherry limeade recipe! Yum!

Finally, a new post!

It has been a long 15 days since I updated my blog. Sorry! I've had major computer issues and finally just ended up wiping the hard drive (twice) and starting from scratch. Every time I went to a website about 40 popups would arrive and start trying to download spyware software to get rid of the pop-ups. They were creating the popups and then they wanted me to buy their software to get rid of them!!!!! So frustrating! Neither ad-aware or spyhunter would get rid of them!

So what have I been up up to? Not much of anything. Mostly staying home, staying out of the heat, and sleeping in until 10. I am so thankful that school is starting later this year! Normally, I would have only 1 more week until I head back to school but yippee! I have 4 more!!!!! Of course, I'm broke because the school board is not paying us until August 31st instead of our normal August 15th.

Look for an update later today for some good deals at CVS. If you've already been to CVS this week and got something cool for very little let me know. I'll add it to my list.

Good deals at Walmart

Good deals on grocerys have been far and few between lately. Thankfully, there are still a lot of good deals on other household items. So I figure if I pay little to nothing for all the other stuff, then I can spend more on actual food.

At Wal-Mart:
1. They have the old style bottles of Pantene shampoo and conditioner clearanced at $2 each. Last week in the P&G insert from the Sunday coupons there were coupons for Pantene: $5 off 3, $3 off 2, and $1 off 1. I am only going to use the first two coupons but I have two sets of newspapers. So buy 5 bottles, give them the $5 and $3 coupon. You pay only $2.00 for 5 bottles of Pantene! That makes them $.40 each.

2. Tide and Downy 100 ounces are on sale for $5.00 each. Use the $.35 coupons and pay $4.65. This is the lowest price I've seen for Tide in 3 years! Tide is awesome at getting stains out of little kids' clothes.

3. Outdoor furniture is on clearance. They have the white front porch rockers marked down to $27 from $49. Lots of other stuff marked down too.

How was your 4th of July?

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July. We spent the day with family, swimming in a pool, a watching free fireworks. No money spent yesterday! After watching Jay Leno the other night when he was asking people why we celebrate the 4th of July and most of them had no idea, we decided to ask our kids. We began with Ciarra, who is 6. She said it was to celebrate the colors of the flag- red, white, and blue. Caleb, 7, said, "I think it has something to do with old people from a long time ago." And Christin, now 10!, said, "It because we fought that war and now we have freedom." Wow! That was pretty good. So I asked, "Who were we fighting against?" Her reply, "Tokyo, I think". LOL!! Well, my kids actually got a lot closer to the truth than the adults interviewed on Leno.

Saving on Back to School Shopping

We officially began "back to school" shopping today even though school is 47 days away. But who's counting????????? This is a longer summer than usual thanks to the state of Florida making school start later in August. Usually the kids go back around the 7th but this year they will return to school on August 20th.

We began our quest for clothes at none other than Toys R Us. That may seem like an unusual place but they are currently having a great sale on their name brand clothes. They only have sizes up to 6X so I bought some things for Ciarra there. I found the racks marked clearance. Their sale is 50% off the lowest ticket price. Here's what I bought there:

Nike Sandals $8.70
2 piece outfit $3.10
2 denim scooters $8.30
2 print t-shirts $6.45
1 licensed shirt $3.45
1 khaki capri $4.65
1 shirt dress $2.40
3 t-shirts $5.85
3-piece warm up $4.40
adidas tennis shoes $11.25
total spent: $58.55
original prices: $152.23

Next we went to Old Navy! I just love their commercials. They are currently clearancing most of their summer clothes. Since we live in Florida we can usually wear summer clothes year round. They have red sticker prices on the stuff that is being clearanced. There was an entire wall of girls' jeans stickered at $5.99 each. The best part of this sale is knowing a little secret about Old Navy. Lean close to your screen and I'll tell you.

Starting Friday, July 6th all red stickered items will be an additional 50% off. Now here's the second part of the secret: Old Navy will do price adjustments on any item for up to 14 days. So I bought everything I wanted today and will return the receipt to them Friday and get half of my money back. This means going to the store twice but once the entire world knows that the sale is on, the selection will be a lot less. I spent $180 today but will get $90 back on Friday.
Here is what we bought at Old Navy:

For Caleb:
2 pair jeans, 1 pair khaki pants, 1 pair khaki shorts, 1 pair navy shorts, 10 print t-shirts, 3 striped polo shirts

For Ciarra:
2 pair slim jeans (hard to find!), 1 pair gauchos, 1 print t-shirt

For Christin:
2 pair jeans, 2 pair capris, 1 pair gauchos, 1 summer dress, 8 shirts, 2 pair shorts, 1 warm up suit

Total spent (after price adjustment on Friday): $95.70
Original prices: $327.56

Both Old Navy and Toys R Us run this sale twice a year. The next sale will be in February.

Total spent on back to school so far: $154
Total budget remaining: $146

Let's clean house!

On Mondays I will be posting my schedule for cleaning up my house. I definitely need to post this sort of "to do" list otherwise I become too distracted to get anything done except watching reruns of "The Price is Right"!

Here's my list to do this week. You may want to do these things too, especially if you are of the easily distracted type like me. I tend to follow Flylady.net's cleaning schedule but I don't do everything she has on her lists.

Daily to do's:
make up the bed
clean the bathroom sinks
load/unload dishwasher
keep kitchen tidy

Weekly to do's:
vacuum
empty bathroom trashcans
clean bathrooms

Special Instructions for the Week:
sweep front porch/landing area
clean spider webs from porch ceiling
get the frog poop off the front door (there are tons of frogs that live outside my house)

clean the dining room: dust the window sills, dust the baseboards, dust the ceiling fan/lights, polish table, get new table flower arrangement, dust everything and make everything pretty!


Mini-missions: For those 5 minutes you have to clean
Monday- clean the top of the refrigerator
Tuesday- clean bathroom mirrors
Wednesday- 4th of July
Thursday- clean all of the light switch plates
Friday- throw away those nasty condiments that you don't have any idea how long they've been around

Goals for July

Oh, the wonder of a brand new month. I just love the first day of the month; such promise; fresh beginnings! If you've been putting something off, now's the time to do it. Just ask me how I know. I have big plans for July! 31 wonderful days! Here are some of my goals for the week:
1. clean out my kids' clothing drawers to get ready for new things for school
2. take the things that they no longer wear or can wear and give to Goodwill.
3. steam clean my carpets- the whole house!
4. plan for Christin's birthday party this Friday!
5. make a menu plan for the month
6. plan my class for July- rising 2nd thru 5th graders welcome! July 16-19
7. make a schedule for posting on my blog.

I love blogging, but I think I'm too random and spatial to do it without a plan. So here is my blog schedule:
Sunday- Plans for the week
Monday- Housecleaning for the week
Tuesday- How to save money in specific areas
Wednesday- Good deals at the grocery store
Thursday- Getting ready for Christmas
Friday- Recipes, etc.
Saturday- Open

So, what are your plans for the week? Let me know, in case it sounds better than what I'm going to be doing!