My Attempt at being a Frugal Homemaker

This week I worked on some ideas to help reduce costs and be a little more thrifty around the house.

First was our grocery shopping which I cut drastically and got pretty creative with so that I could purchase only the most necessary things and plan meals around food that was on sale versus the quick and easy pre-packaged or frozen meal options I usually would grab.

Now that I have the time there's no excuse not to go homemade, right. ;)

Well, some of you may think I've jumped off the deep end by the end of this post, but I'm finding it pretty rewarding to be more careful with what we use and spend.

 (I'm also realizing we had been doing a lot of wasteful things before, and it feels good to change that.)

For this month, instead of buying sandwich meat for lunches and frozen chicken for many of our dinners I decided to use what we had on hand and thaw a ham that we had in our garage freezer and cook it up to use for much of this month. I was able to make Tuesday night's dinner (with left overs that lasted the next few days) and packaged up 5 portions of ham to thaw later for sandwiches or to cut up and use in a caserole or other dish. Then I cut every last piece of meat off that ham bone and chopped it up in my little electric chopper to make ham spread for sandwiches, one portion for the next week or so in the fridge and another container to freeze for later. Finally, I used the ham bone with it's last bit of meat and wonderful flavor to cook in a big pot of black eyed peas (also for dinner and left overs). Yay! As it turns out, a spiral cut ham can go a long way..... and it's a LOT more cost effective than buying sliced ham in the deli.

Next, I was on to doing something my sister has already been doing for quite a while, making my own laundry soap and fabric softener. There are several recipes on the internet for doing this and with the prices of laundry soaps these days I was definitely willing to give it a shot.

(winds up being about a penny a load when you make it yourself, awesome!)

So with a huge pot (that used to be my grandma's) and a few basic ingredients I started mixing and boiling my own laundry supplies.

 The laundry soap recipe made around 3 gallons and the fabric softener made 1 gallon, which I split with my sister because she shared ingredients with me. :) Thanks sis!

I think this will last a while.

I've already done one week's worth of laundry with my new soap and so far I'm pretty pleased. I'll definitely keep using it. :)

If any of you have other "frugal homemaker" tips or things I could try I would love to hear from you.

Oh, and if you want to try it out too the laundry soap recipe came from http://www.thefamilyhomestead.com/ and the fabric softener recipe was from http://www.thefrugalgirls.com/ .