Moving and Recipe Thursday silence

As a result of moving, for a while, I had two kitchens. One without a working oven, and full of paint cans, and tools. And one that I rarely saw, with depleted stores. Therefore, I did not cook much.

My kitchen now is still down a working oven, but a replacement is scheduled to be installed. It is also still full of tools, but I should, in theory, have time to sort that mess out.

Therefore, cooking is still difficult. Unless you count microwaving hot dogs left over from a pitch in a work. We've been spending too much money on fast food. And we can tell. We've also been eating quite a few sandwiches. My kitchen can handle sandwiches!

On a happier note, I have planted a few tomato plants, a lavender bush and a rose bush. I think I need to transplant the lavender someplace with more sun, but the rose bush is growing well. So are the tomato plants! I don't have stakes or cages for them, so some of them are falling over themselves a bit. But, they have flowers on them. I may end up with some home-grown tomatoes! This thrills me. I'm also excited because I bought three different varieties... the names of which escape me at the moment, but I am looking forward to tasting the differences.

So - are you a better mover than I am? Better at the eating-while-moving than me? How about gardener? (I bet you are.) Any advice for a novice gardener with limited tools?

More on moving

We have moved, halfway across the country, more than once. So, you would think that this inter-county move would have been a cinch. Unfortunately, both of us abhor moving. Which is kind of funny considering we have moved residences 6 times since we've married. Five years ago.

Most of the time, when moving locally, we've opted for the slow-move. This being when time in both locations overlap, allowing us to move a carload or two at a time, using our own or borrowed trucks to move the big stuff. We've also done most of the actual moving ourselves, with occasional help from friends or family. When we've had the inter-state move, we've opted for the big moving truck, or a pull-behind trailer because multiple trips were just not an option.

Honestly, the way we pack feels like it is more a lesson in how not to do it, efficiently, economically or ecologically friendly. Like I said, we hate moving. We hate packing. A few easy things get boxed up securely, but there inevitably is a frantic "get everything in a box NOW" period, in which most of the packing is accomplished. This has lead to use boxing up a whole bunch of random stuff, including important papers and less than important junk mail. I don't recommend this. I am minorly dreading the feeling I'll get when we sort through a box, only to find that it is out-dated insurance information, advertisements from three moves ago, and a few books.

Moving can be a great time to clear stuff out, provided you start earlier enough. I recommend that, not our whirlwind of packing.

If I had been a good green-mover, I would have started sorting and packing earlier, and donated a bunch of stuff. Like books that ended up packed and moved, or the bed rails that ended up in the garage. It is still a goal of mine to sort through the boxes as we unpack, and purge as best a pack-rat like me can.

This time, for the sake of time, sanity and gas, we went for a moving truck. We considered renting a pick up truck from a car rental agency, but since the drive between residences is 15-20 miles one way, and just how many books I have, I thought that the rental money saved would be eaten by the number of trips that the pick up would have had to make.  YMMV. (ha! An appropriate usage of that internet short-hand!) Be sure you understand your rental terms. One of the trade offs for using the moving truck for a local move was that we had to pay a dollar a mile. I think that our sanity was worth it.

The only frugal thing about this move is that we did it ourselves, with help from a wonderful aunt. Ways it could have been cheaper: if we had borrowed a pick up and used that, or if we had been more diligent about making food at home to eat (or if we had opted not to move at all!). Ways it could have been more expensive: if we had kept the truck longer; if we had hired day laborers to do the heavy lifting; or if we had hired out the entire job of moving.

There is probably a list a mile long of ways it could have been greener. But I am only human. And now, I have a whole house and yard to slowly greenify!

What are your thoughts on moving? Do you have a preferred way of doing it?

The main reason I've been so quiet lately

Ok, I think I'm ready to tell you now. One reason I've been so quiet is that we've been busy. Because we've just moved. Into a house. That we are buying.

Buying a house may not be the most frugal thing that we have ever done. There are pros and cons to owning and to renting. (One pro to renting is that generally, they clean between tenants.) For us, owning is something that we wanted to do, and it gives us more freedom in our lives. Freedom to do things like garden, have a dog, and hang a picture.

We had some time in the house and apartment overlap, so we used it to work on the house.

Here’s what we did:

-         Ripped up carpet in the bedrooms, hallway, and the living and dining rooms

-         Completely refinished two of the bedrooms (I covered the vents! Husband did most of the heavy lifting here)

-         Removed more wallpaper and wallpaper borders then I care to remember

-         Painted four rooms (with tremendous help from my dad)

-         Removed some damaged drywall in the bathroom and replaced it with cement board and tile.

-         Hired an electrician to upgrade the electrical box, and fix a few things.

Not cheap, but could have been worse. And, of course, there is more to be done, but we are very happy with our house, and what has been done so far.

My husband’s job has him interacting with people all day long, and it proved to be very helpful in finding an electrician, and discovering what we want to go ahead and try to do ourselves. Like the floors.

Over the past month, we have spent more time in home improvement stores than I had in my previous 26 years of life. We got to know the rough tools and such, and were considering redoing the floors ourselves, fully acknowledging the fact that I didn’t think I could handle the floor sander. In preparation, my husband watched the Ask This Old House video several times, but we were still on the fence.

At work one day, he helps a professional floor restorer, and gets a rough, unofficial estimate to refinish all our floors. When he told me, my eyes about bugged out, a la cartoons. Off to the home improvement store we went, our decision made! Since I’m a bit paranoid about putting too much stuff online (Sound contradictory? Yes, but I never claimed to always make sense.), I won’t go into exact dollar amounts, but after renting the floor sander for two days, and buying the other necessary products, we spent less than a tenth of what the professional would have charged us. We aren’t finished yet, though considering the costs, doing it ourselves may take time (which we have), but will save us a ton of money (which don’t have).

All this being said, my husband does have some experience with this sort of thing. Not the floors, specifically, but in general. I recognize that not everyone can do something like this, but we are lucky enough that we can.

Since this is getting a little long, I’ll end with a link to a picture of our shiny bedroom floors, pre-furniture. (Also, mid-painting.)

What home improvement projects have you tackled yourself to save money?