Blueberry Goodness

What do you get with 2 cups of your own fresh handpicked blueberries after a night in the kitchen?

Hopefully it will be as delish as it looks! I will patiently wait to slice into it with our friends tomorrow evening for dinner before FPU.

Down on the Farm

We just got home from a wonderful weekend at our friends family farm. (Can you tell we enjoy the country life?) Maybe someday we'll get to be out a little farther and own more than a half acre place, but until then we'll make due with getaways to the countryside. Usually we're crazy enough to camp this time of year and have faired pretty well, but I have to admit with the temperatures so far this summer I am sooo glad for the AC and indoor plumbing we got to enjoy this weekend.

We enjoyed great food since everyone shares in the meal preparation. We ate watermelon non-stop, which Baby T probably enjoyed the watermelon the most, so cute! Each family served one meal the whole weekend. I spent the last couple of weeks getting ready for the trip in advance, because it's no fun to be stuck in the kitchen all day when you're on vacation. This time I decided to be budget friendly and shop from my pantry trying to use what I already had on hand. The meal I prepared was vension BBQ, homemade buns, slaw with creamy homemade dressing and with fresh pickles and carrot sticks.

I really like to make our own bread because really it's pretty easy, far less extra stuff in there and it taste's pretty good too, if I say so myself. Here is a pic from Bowman Bakery the day O made the buns. I threw these in the freezer for safe keeping until the we would make the trip down.

When these come out of the oven it is so hard not to eat at least one!

The meal I planned was little bit bold since I don't usually spring venison on people without warning but, I figured this group was adventurous enough to handle it. After all we had 6 families consisting of 12 adults and 5 children into this cute old farmhouse. I think the venison BBQ went over pretty well. I know it's definitely a different taste on the pallette and it's taken me getting used to it, but I have to say that I'm enjoying the venison more now and I'm glad for the lean meat option as well as the budgetary benefit of using it.

Front of the house.

Check out the tree!

During the weekend we enjoyed fishing at the pond sprinkled with a few fire ants otherwise I think that there might have been a bit more fishing going on. The men fired off several rounds of shot with clays and completely killing a stack of wild boxes sitting at the edge of the soybean rows. They did their best to keep the women and children safe. Even a few of ladies fired the shotguns, but not me. I'm interested to maybe try a handgun sometime, but no more shotguns unless well, hopefully I'll never need it. The ladies made a trip the town junk shop. We looked around and were hard pressed to find many deals because the prices were a bit steep for our frugal minded group. However, I think we were all jealous of the vintage Liberty of London silk scarf for $1.50 that J got. I guess I didn't take a pic because I was too jealous. Oh well! I did however make up for the lack of bargains by picking over 10 cups of blueberries, fresh, ripe beautiful blueberries! We all scored big on that one. I can't believe how loaded the bushes were! We also came away with a far greater appreciation for the price of blueberries since we had to climb all up in the bush to score those beauties. I will baking a bit this week and will have to share some pictures of the results!

Later in the evening the kids got to do a tractor ride. As usual the kids were great.

The kids having fun in the wagon.

My buddy for the weekend, little J.

Ah well, the weekend is coming to a close and we've got to get back to work here at home. Hopefully, we'll get this room together this week and be able to move on to our bedroom finally! All this while living on a budget. We've almost survived a whole month living by the budget. I'm feeling pretty accomplished. We've got to keep it up though.

Painting in progress.

Have a great week!

Missing the mountains this weekend

So we had a super fun and busy Father's Day weekend. I wanted to talk about it all week before we went out of town, but I resisted temptation in an attempt to not let the world know that nobody was home. You gotta be careful here on the world wide web, just in case, ya know?

Anyhoo. We left town at 3:30 straight from the office to hit the highway. Normally I would have been feeling super happy to be leaving work early, but I had received a call from Uhaul to let us know that sorry they didn't have a truck available for us to pick up in Tazewell on Saturday. So why did I bother making a reservation? I'm not sure. That meant between wrapping up my work and trying to make a reservation with Budget Truck Rental, I didn't quite make it out of the office at 3:30. Oh well. We were off and enjoyed the ride.

The rest of the weekend was a blur, between picking up the rental, dismantling a barn to salvage the wood for projects around the house, going to a Birthday party, visiting relatives, going to a family reunion, packing and loading the truck, rescuing a kitten, the drive home to Richmond and returning the rental by Tuesday morning. Whew. I'm tired thinking about all of that again! Here's a few pics from our action packed weekend.

One of the barns Rennie's Grandfarther built that got blown over this past winter. A connection to a piece of Rennie's past is coming home with us in the wood we salvaged to make some things around the house and yard.

Rennie working to pull the boards down from the side.

Bobby D's birthday party. I think he got about 50 t-shirts!

MIL with new farm kitty! We're calling him SweetPea of course that's subject to change since Rennie says it's not masculine enough.

I love going to the mountains. I hate leaving them behind me. Someday maybe we can own a piece of the mountains. A girl can dream, right? Until then this is the drive home taking furniture and memories of the mountains with us.

Buy what you need; want what you have.

I have long been a fan of Mary Hunt of Everyday Cheapskate, her free email newsletter. In her newsletter on June 7, 2010 the thought for the day was this, “Buy what you need; want what you have.” This phrase she says is the key to living below your means. This was a good reminder and inspiration article for me, as me and the hubs have just started Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University (a.k.a. FPU). I know what both of these people teach is pretty basic and “easy” to do. In fact up until purchasing our home a little over a year ago we were debt free and had a small savings started. We were ecstatic to have paid off consumer debt and school loans in record time. To quote Dave Ramsey we accomplished this with “gazelle intensity.” For us paying off the debt was relatively easy.

We have since becoming debt free gone into debt to purchase our home, which even most of the conservative financial guru’s will tell you is okay. Regardless of their approval I still felt/feel sick to my stomach with the amount of the debt. Here is the hard part for us, a year later and never having successfully created a budget that we could live by we hadn’t really seen our savings account grow. This has been frustrating. Plus these two selfish sinners (me and the hubs) “try” to share money it doesn’t always go so well. We are different. First off you know the whole man (just do it) versus woman (plan it and talk it through) way of thinking, combined with different experiences and attitudes about money.

So this summer our church is finally hosting FPU, hooray! While I have to admit I’m a little bummed that we are in summer school because we have failed to come up with a passable grade on the budget, I know that with a commitment to pass and work together we can whip the budget into shape and move on to the next grade (or baby step according to Dave). Today is our second class and we’ve already put a ton of thought and effort into the simple budget, probably a little more than was required at this stage, but that’s been our sticking point.

All this time, we’ve been married five years, I realize that I’ve been pushing so hard to make the numbers look good and add up fast on paper that our budget hasn’t been realistic. This has made for many accusations on my part directed toward my hubs about his reckless spending. Meanwhile I haven’t even managed my own behaviors to get a passing grade on the “outlined” budget. I’m am so sorry. It’s not me against him. We’re in this together. At least that’s what I promised, for richer or poorer.

I’m glad to say we’ve got the start of our budget, a real and livable budget. I’m sure that the farther we get into this that I’ll realize we’ve missed a few details or things will change (a.k.a. the cost of things will most likely go up) and we will readjust. I don’t “like” the way the numbers add up on the budget anymore now and it looks like it’s gonna take forever to get some sizeable savings now. It’s gonna take us a long time before we take any big vacations or get those beautiful hardwood floors I’ve been dreaming about since buying our home. We’ll have to see how things take shape of course, but I see it now we’ve got several options.

Be patient and usually I am not. I will go to the opposite extreme and often to the detriment of other important things. In the past I have worked so much that I neglect my home and even worse important relationships—not recommended. This also means waiting until I have saved every penny needed to make that big purchase—this is really hard too!
Create more income. I used to work part time and the hubs is already working regular overtime each month. I might have to really get creative here, but I’ve always said that I’ve wanted to have my own business and dream of my creative outlet that just happens to net an income.
Learn to live with less. The budget I am speaking of still isn’t glamourous so I definitely think that this will be challenging. This aspect will also hopefully inspire creativity so that we expand our knowledge and skills. I’m seeing lots of furniture making projects in my future.
Buy what we need; want what we have. In a word be content with what the good Lord has already provided. He has already supplied us beyond our needs. So we can live on less than he has provided. The logic is there. It needs to be practiced.

So hopefully in the coming weeks and months I’ll be able to share our successes and hopefully not too many failures.

Keeping it real here is test number one for me. I just got a fab new haircut and color just this past Thursday. Of course the new do “requires” a flat iron to get it just right. Well, since I failed to plan ahead on that front, I’m gonna be saving up for my flat iron and waiting for it to go on sale. In the mean time I’ll just have to be patient and be happy with current set of beauty tools. I want to stay debt free more than I want this:

…so I will wait probably until my next hair cut before I buy this. So if I don't look totally together I'm blaming it on my lack of proper tools (although I should blame it on myself for failing to plan ahead). I'm learning.

Happenings...

Well this blog is still here despite my neglect of it. Funny how that sort of thing happens to me all to frequently. I get all excited and geared up to go and promptly lost heart once I realize how much work it takes. I enjoy reading other people's blogs and I even enjoy writing so I thought this blog thing might be for me. Well, I'm not giving up yet sorry to disappoint you. I am going to challenge myself to make regular posts though and hopefully even with trying to get back on the project bandwagon that won't keep me from writing about what's been going on here in our lives.

One of the reason I make excuses for not blogging is not having any pictures to show for all the happenings around here. While my writing might entertain me (slightly) I know it's really all about having some good pictures to illustrate your point.

So here's to a renewed effort to document our lot in life and maybe there will be a few pleasant sightings and stories along the way!

Look what I found hiding in my garden:

Fruit Harvest at Lot 31

Strawberries are coming in already and it's not even May! Here's the first bowl. The six I ate yesterday that didn't fill the bowl as I was too eager to sample to think of taking a picture. Looking forward to more in the coming weeks....

Hopefully we'll be getting back on the home improvement bandwagon soon, but just in case you thought we weren't doing anything. I wanted you to know we've been keeping busy. We've got swiss chard, lettuce and snow peas in the ground (as long as the squirrels don't uproot them looking for their nuts).

Januaray Projects and Goals for Lot 31

So, I'm trying to get some projects actually accomplished so perhaps at some point this year we'll have our two guest rooms actually furnished and acting in that role.

So for January these are the projects that we'll attempt to get checked off the list and help get us back into the mode of moving forward in the home improvements. These smaller projects have been waiting a while to be done and will buy me a little time to really decide on the upcoming projects.

January's DIY List:
Finish the Guest Bathroom:
Paint the small bath cabinet and hang (done 1/18)
Hang artwork that I purchased months ago (done 1/18)
Touch up a few spots on the walls
Replace Bath Rug

Living Room:
Paint the mirror (started)
Attach new hardware and hang

Office:
Convert closet to office (done 1/18) Will reveal in future post.
Get wireless network back up
Organize office

Master Bathroom:
Repair leaky toilet (this is Rennie's job, but I'll be there for moral support and runs to the hardware store)

My next dilemma is to finally make a decision on colors for the two guest bedrooms and our master bedroom suite. One of the guest bedrooms will someday, Lord providing, be a childs room so I want to keep that in mind. The other guest bedroom will also double as the craft room for any creative arts that I would like to explore (the possiblities are endless!). Our master bedroom will include a big closet reno, but on a serious DIY budget. Hopefully we'll have an efficient closet so that the only furniture we'll really need in our bedroom is a bed and sitting furniture for our personal quiet space.

Ukrops Double Coupon Wednesday!

I'm loving Ukrops double coupon Wednesday, however I do wish it wasn't limited to Wednesdays. Maybe someday not too far away that will happen, we know there are lots of changes in store for Ukrops and I'm hoping that's one of them.

So here's finally a picture of my sales stash for the week. It's not overflowing, but it was definitely a good value for my money. Here's the breakdown:

4 Cans Hanover Kidney Beans .66 ea (-1/4)
4 GM Cheerios 2.50 ea (-1 Savings Spot, -.55/1 IP x 4)
2 Halls Cough Drops .99 (-.50/1 IP x 2)
1 Chobani Greek Yogurt 1.00 (-1/1)
2 Yoplait Smoothie 2.50/ea (-1.50 Savings Spot, - 1/1 x 2)
4 Hormel Naturals Lunch Meat 80z 2.50 ea (-.75/1 x 4)
1 Steamfresh Mixed Veg 1.00 (-.50/1)
-.15 Bag Credit
Total OOP = 12.75
Total Savings = 17.40 or 57%

I will have to go back next Wednesday since they were out of the Johnsonville Sausages. They are 3.48 through 1/30 (I think) and with the internet printable from Hormel's website that makes is 2.38 a pack. Too bad I missed out on this .05 Bonus Fuelperks though!

Also another tip, stock on your vitamins. Ukrops has the Naturemade Vitamins 50% off combined with $1/1 coupons and Naturemade has a program to log their codes to collect points toward a $7/1 coupon. I think that is also good through the end of the month.

Hope that helps someone out!

Trying to maintain self-control in the name of saving money

Happy New Year! I've been missing here at Lot 31 lately, but I'm trying to get back onboard with what's going on over here.

2009 wrapped up way faster than I could have imagined and to boot January is approaching that half way point ALREADY! Time sure flies whether you're having fun or not. Work for me has been BUSY since the beginning of the year, which I hope is a good sign. It does unfortunately mean that I anticipate bringing some work home here to Lot 31. Oh well, I guess paying the bills is somewhat important and I couldn't get as many grocery deals either.

Of course I'm like many who start the year off with great intentions and high hopes for change for the good. I think that one of the most important changes that I need to make is to reign in getting all of these "super deals". Don't misunderstand me to say that I don't believe in stockpiling, because I do. My good intentions to save and get the best prices I think has gotten a little off course. Some things that I have to remind myself is that deal is only good if (a) I need it (b) it's budgeted and (c) I have my cash with me. I am so guilty of letting myself fall prey to the line in my head that this is a deal that is too good to miss because I will be saving so much money, right? WRONG! Mary Hunt wrote recently in her column that when you buy that good deal you only save money (truly save) if and only if you take the money that you didn't spend on that item and go put it into your savings account. In other words that money that I "saved" when I bought the super deal will just get spent somewhere else.

So this is the question I have to ask myself. Do I need/want more stuff? If the answer is yes then that's okay to get more stuff. My problem has been that I want a bigger savings account as we look to the future. So there's where I am drawing a line in the sand. Okay grocery budget I get the point now and I will listen and behave myself.

Have you had any revelations about the money you are spending or saving?