A Frugal Wife has been doing a '£2013 in 2013' challenge, and I thought I'd join in. I know I'm coming late to this, as we are already halfway through the year, but I think it's doable and will spur me on with my eBay adventures and might even make me do a boot sale later this year. I might not get to £2013, but it's worth a try.
I have a bit of a head start, as this week I collected together my old gold - broken necklaces, odd earrings, that kind of thing. My parents gave me a few bits as well, and I sent them off to Tesco's gold exchange, hoping for £50 or £60. I was delighted to receive £520! There's a decent start to my project, then. I also have a bit of money put aside that we've earned through cashback sites, so we've £598.01 to start off with, as you can see in the nifty little widget over there on the right. I'm hoping this goal will encourage me to have a sort out and start listing things on ebay, which I've been putting off forever.
I will be counting money made from:
- Selling my old gold and silver (I have some more gold I don't want that I actually couldn't find. I know, how disorganised am I if I can't find my jewellery?! When it turns up, I'll be selling that too)
- Ebay/Amazon sales
- Cashback sites
- ironing and cleaning work I'll be doing
- Anything left in our budget envelopes each month
- Money made from the boot sale I might get around to doing!
- Anything else I can think of
I have just coloured my hair. I have managed to get splotches of dye on the wall and on my hands and arms as usual, and I don't like the resulting colour of my hair. I don't know if I picked up the wrong box (I couldn't remember what I usually have) or if the formulation has changed but I think it's too dark, and looks flat. I am so fed up with colouring it.
I started going grey in my early twenties, and now, at 45, I believe I am considerably grey, underneath all the layers of dye. I am so grey now it is difficult to cover it all, and last time I paid huge sums of money for the hairdresser to do it, she did a worse job than me. I've been colouring my hair so long I can barely remember my natural shade. I do it every four weeks, and for ten days or so I am happy with it, then the white stripe down my parting appears and gets wider until I colour it again. I hate that and would rather be grey than look like a badger for three weeks out of every four. What's the point? I'm not prepared to colour it every ten days and it's not as if I'm fooling anyone, when the whole world can see the badger stripe more often than not.
I wish I could wave my magic wand and get rid of the hair colour overnight, but I know it's likely to take a year or so to grow it out, and how to deal with the ever-widening white stripe during the process? I have had enough of the mess I always make in the bathroom (and on my skin!), the cost of having it done at the hairdresser, the ever present stripe, the nasty chemicals, not liking the result. I've. Had. Enough.
I just have to come up with a strategy to see me through the process of growing out the dye. I could cut my hair short, to make the process quicker....I hate my hair short, but it's a possibility. I could wear headbands and hats! That might be the route I go down, I think. Watch this space.
I made laundry liquid yesterday. The kitchen was awash, I managed to burn lumps of soap on the hob, drop a tea towel into the dog's water and break my mini chopper (I knew I was optimistic thinking it would cut up soap, but it cuts up carrots and soap can't be much harder than that, can it? Turns out it is.)
On the plus side, it cost me more or less nothing to make 9 litres or so. For a while I've been saving little ends of soap in a jar, I had just enough to make almost a cupful of grated soap and I used half a cup of washing soda. Boiled it up on the stove with a couple of litres of water, poured it in a bucket with another 8 litres of cold water, decanted it into various containers, et voila. Laundry soap, enough for quite a while. I've hopefully saved more than a new mini chopper is going to cost me.
One thing I am going to miss is Ecover fabric conditioner, I love the scent of it, but I do know that some white vinegar in the rinsing water does just as good a job of softening the washing, is far cheaper and doesn't leave a smell behind. Once I can source some cheap white vinegar, all my washing will smell of nothing except fresh air from being hung outside on the line.
