Five frugal things to kick off March

Welcome to this week’s five frugal things post. It’s March already!

I am absolutely loving the spring weather, even if it’s not consistent. It’s also nice to come back from our dog walks without us all being covered in mud or soaked by cold rain. 

It has given us both a boost and we have been busy, both in the house and the garden. Anyway, without further ado, here is my weekly round up of five frugal things.

It’s like a jungle sometimes…

I finally got round to repotting all of my houseplants and potting up all of the baby pilea that happily appear to give me plenty of freebies.

Annoyingly, house plant compost comes in tiny bags that are quite expensive compared to the potting compost you can use outdoors. It is also harder to find. They don’t seem to sell it in the discount stores such as B&M or Home Bargains, so I had to pop into Homebase for a couple of bags.

I think I will risk using the usual outdoor stuff in the future, as I am sure I did years ago when I had lots of house plants. In fact, I am not sure they even marketed soil for indoor plants at that point. Does anyone else have experience of this? I am assuming they have sterilised the soil in some way so that it is free from pests.

And more plants…

Still on the subject of house plants, my new obsession, I was amazed to find a selection of large plants at Lidl on Wednesday. There were plenty there and they were very healthy, so I think they must have just arrived. They were £4.99 each, which is a fantastic price!

I treated myself to a rubber plant, and also picked up an aloe vera for just £2.99. We had one years ago, but somehow managed to kill it off. I think I moved it into the greenhouse temporarily and then forgot about it.

I really need to stop buying plants now and focus on growing my own. This was just too good a bargain to resist.

Home made moisturiser

I finally got round to making my home made moisturiser, using this recipe from Root & Revel. Because I have really dry skin, I love it. I often wake feeling like my skin needs rehydrating, but when I use this as a night cream it is perfect.

However, if you have oily skin, I don’t think you would want to use it on your face. Also, because it has quite an oily consistency, I put it on a good 20 minutes before I put my makeup on. Otherwise I think it would slide off!

It’s also lovely and rich as a body butter, particularly on super dry areas like feet, knees and elbows.

I will write a blog post all about it, so watch this space! (And yes, I did use an old Marmite jar to store it in – it’s perfect!

The decluttering continues

I finally finished the declutter and tidy of the large shed at the bottom of our garden. A few weeks ago I showed you it mid-tidy, but now it’s so much better. 

We actually have empty shelves! I have moved some of the decorating stuff into the old sideboard that is stashed in there. Despite being useful storage, we had blocked it up with boxes and furniture so never actually used it.

This has given me a lot of satisfaction. It has been on my list for ages, but I struggled with my fibromyalgia symptoms a lot last year and could barely keep on top of the usual cleaning, let alone do anything extra. I’m not sure if it is the better weather after such a cold, wet winter, but I have so much more energy at the moment.

It is one of my five frugal things because we found so many rollers and paintbrushes, sandpaper and filler, I don’t think we will ever need to buy any of them ever again!

For more good reasons to have a spring clean, and to see my decluttering goals for the next few months, check out this post.

Making do and mending

The bulk of our DIY efforts in the hallway were completed early in February. However, we still had to sort the carpet. Because I have pledged to buy only second hand during 2021, I didn’t want to throw out the current carpet, even though it was quite damaged in places.

Mr S came up with a plan for the upstairs hallway. He used a piece of thin, white PVC to seal the edges where the cats had clawed up the edges (which were then made even worse by the dog!).

I ripped the carpet off the bottom large sections of stairs and painted them black. This looks so much better!

There is no point in spending lots of money on a new carpet that the pets would, in all probability, destroy again anyway. It just shows what you can do with a little creativity and compromise.

It wasn’t easy painting them with a naughty puppy about, hence the stairgate. This is when I was at the mid point, but you get the gist.

So those are my five frugal things for the week. What have you been up to? Please share your achievements in the comments, or come and join the chat in my Facebook group, My Second Hand & Frugal Life.

Until next time!

I’m linking up with this Cass, Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Frugal Friday’ linky.