Fighting my Frugal side with Small Joys and Replacements

As most of you guys know I’m a pretty hard core penny pincher and frugal chicka. I can’t help it… I just hate waste. I come from a long line of women on BOTH sides of my family who would live with something working horribly forever… as long as it was still technically working. I’m not quite that bad. For example, the faucet we have in our master bathroom works great but it also splashes the heck out of the wall. After seven years I was ok with finally replacing it even though, technically, it worked fine. Sometimes even if something works AWESOME, it doesn’t work great for us and that’s where I really have to fight my frugal side.

I have weak wrists and hands.

I definitely inherited it and I’ve also made it much much much worse over my life.

Years on our family’s golf course, hours a day golfing and mowing all summer long, meant endless sports injuries to my hands, elbows, wrists and shoulders.

Tennis elbow is no joke.

Working here on the house, taping and mudding all of the sheetrock throughout, left the joints in my fingers “stuck” many days in position.

Those days my grip was non existent and I dropped things so many times without even realizing I dropped them until it was too late!

(Yay the many drinks spilled all over the floor I “thought” I had a good hold on…)

So my grip strength is still pretty crappy so anything heavy in my day to day life really annoys me.

Case and point, the biggest fight against my frugal self in this post, a whole set of really nice glass mixing bowls and another whole set of equally nice glass storage containers.

I hated them all.

They were all HEAVY.

We rarely used the storage containers anyway, we just pop whatever pan holds the leftovers into the refrigerator with a lid on it because: WHY DIRTY ANOTHER CONTAINER?

So I had no problem packing up and donating those practically-unused-and-taking-up-space containers.

The glass mixing bowls though made the frugal girl in me very grumpy as they were actually quite nice.

But I just couldn’t stand them…

That big heavy stack of glass that I’d have to pull out, unstack to find the right size bowl and then wrestle it back into the cabinet was just such a pain. (I at least had moved them to a lower cabinet instead of killing myself getting them out of an upper cabinet…)

But after years of this I just decided I deserved better.

I boxed them up and took them out of this house forever.

This is what I purchased to replace them and I love them so much!

They’re a set of six 10 inch serving bowls and they cost less than $15. They’re dishwasher safe and microwaveable and they also weigh practically nothing. Why on earth didn’t I do this for myself sooner?!

I HATE THAT ABOUT BEING FRUGAL.

Once I finally bite the bullet I wonder why I let myself suffer for so long!

Fortunately I had already solved the storage container problem years ago.

Se most of our big holidays we hold here at Grandma’s house which means lots of relatives and lots of leftovers which meant lots of our pans and bowls leaving the house for awhile before getting returned.

I went looking for “to-go” containers that my relatives could just keep.

At only $20 for a count of fifty of these black containers with lids its just an awesome deal.

They don’t last forever (which makes my frugal side really cringe because I hate even more plastic crap going to the land fill) but they are microwaveable, dishwasher safe and reusable for a very long time.

Once I convinced them that they didn’t need to be returned (I have very polite relatives) they’ve all commented on how much they like them and use them all the time.

They’re a very handy size, they weigh nothing, they stack and, of course, the fact that they have a lid is nice.

Fortunately we’ve always had a stack of them in our cupboard so when we started making some of our dog’s food I had a good way to store it in the freezer and their size is about the perfect serving size for Annie twice a day and little 20 pound Spud eats about half of that.

(We still feed them both the Farmer’s dog food about half the time besides. Here’s a link to get a discount on your first farmer’s dog box of food.)

Moving on with fighting my frugal self with a couple of small joys.

We get free coffee at my day job so there’s no reason I need a cup of coffee at home before I go to work… but I do it anyway. I take 20-30 minutes every morning to wake up, have a little sit and a cup of coffee before starting my day.

It might cost us as much as $20 a month which is seriously over $200 a year!

Still though, it helps keep me sane!

Another small joy is that we try any new frozen pizza we come across.

ITS JUST GOOD FUN

When Lodi first moved in I told him about it and he thought it was fantastic. Because seriously, even most “bad” pizza, is still pretty good!

And I’ve found most of us never really think about what they “always” purchase every time they go to stock up their pantries and freezers…

Years ago I went to grab the same frozen pizza we always got when I was a kid and I swear the sky opened up and angels sang when I looked around at all the other options.

(IMO any time we buy already prepared food we are seriously not being frugal but this is a rare treat for us.)

So far we’ve tried every brand of frozen pizza in town though we haven’t tried all of the toppings. We always start with the basic just pepperoni and cheese and that tells us whether we want to try other toppings.

Lodi and I share the same love for thin and crispy crust so that’s narrowed down our selection process a lot.

So far the winner for us of the best all around basic lovely pizza is: Luigi’s thin crust.

Strangely enough though they also make a “pub style crust” pizza that is so bizarrely not great and totally different than their thin crust pizza that I wouldn’t have thought it was even the same brand…

The “worst” pizza I think we’ve brought home so far was a peanut Thai style pizza… it wasn’t terrible but it was just too weird and sticky lol.

We also learned (unfortunately for our diets) that any frozen pizza can be improved by about a thousand if its cooked on a grill…

Yes, maybe it is kind of silly…

Yes, we enjoy it immensely!