Category Archives: frugal strategies

Natural weed killer

frugal strategies, gardening

I’ve gotten weary of pulling the same weeds, over and over – it’s the morning glory vines that climb my fence that I’m just fed up with.  No matter how many I pull out, it seems like they reproduce overnight and I have this sense that I’m never going to eradicate them just by pulling them.

So today I decided on a new strategy – to use weed killer!  I don’t use any kind of chemicals in my yard, but figured there had to be a natural solution, and found this suggested on a gardening forum:

Natural Weed Killer

  • 1 gallon white vinegar
  • 1 lb. table salt
  • 1/2 t. dish soap

Heat the vinegar and dissolve the salt.  Add 1/2 t. dishsoap (the soap is to help the solution adhere to the plants).  Put it all in a spray bottle, and spray the plants you want to get rid of.  Be very careful not to get any of it on plants you want to keep!

This is very affordable – about $2 total, and makes over a gallon of weed killer.  I can’t yet say how this has worked for us long term, but many gardeners said it was very effective.  Ds sprayed a lot of our weeds along the fence, and the poison ivy wilted immediately.  I’m looking forward to seeing all the weeds disappear!

Avivah

Carpet for the garden

frugal strategies, gardening

I mentioned that I got some used carpeting a few weeks ago for the garden, right?   But I didn’t have enough for what I wanted it for.  So I put a ‘wanted’ ad on Craig’s List, and someone emailed me to say they had some carpet they had just pulled up that I was welcome to.

Yesterday I went with ds10 and dd12 to pick it up.  The couple I got it from was curious what I would do with it, and when I told them it was for my garden, we got to discussing gardening.  (They want me to email them when I make jam and sell them some – I don’t think that I’ll do that, though.)  And then they offered to give us a tour of their garden, something they said they never did before except for friends.  They had a beautiful bamboo garden and it was really lovely.  There were six kinds of bamboo (it never occurred to me that there was even more than one kind of bamboo) with lots of other plants – he told us about each one as we walked through (call that science for the afternoon).   (And on the way home, we listened to an audio recording of Sign of the Beaver – history for the day.)

I found it especially interesting since he had a yard that was almost entirely grass free, something I’ve been wondering how to do.  It was very tastefully designed – they did all the work themselves on it – and it was amazing to me how they created a feeling of expansiveness and privacy on such a small lot.  However, nothing was edible, and my goal in planting is to use my ground space for growing food.  It’s more challenging to landscape with edibles.  I’m not giving up, though – I have to be patient and accept that a beautiful garden takes time, particularly when done the frugal way.  For now, I have to be satisfied with having a productive garden, because honestly it’s not very beautiful (and with the mower recently having broken, my grass is quickly getting shaggy – it isn’t adding anything charming to the look of things).  

What did I want the carpet for?  Two things.  The first was to use to create paths between the lasagna beds; particularly with little children, I wanted to clearly define the space where they should walk so they don’t trample the plants. But more than that, I don’t have the desire to constantly be weeding the pathways – it’s bad enough to have to weed the actual garden beds.  This eliminated the expense of mulching the paths.  The second thing I wanted them for was to use as a mulch layer for some of my plants, cutting out a hole where the plant could grow from.  But my kids dissuaded me from doing this with our raspberry and blackberry bushes, saying that it would keep the shoots from being able to spread.  I had to agree with their logic, so the carpet is now just on the paths. 

A couple of the kids used a razor blade kind of knife to cut the carpet into the size strips I needed, but the blade disappeared before they could cut the final piece.  When I went inside I discovered what happened to it.  Ds3 apparently found it, figured out how to unlock it, and slashed the kitchen screen while we were busy with the yard work.  Sigh.  This is part of why there’s always something to fix around here.  🙂 

Avivah

Free bikes!

frugal strategies

My kids received new bikes today from their fairy godmother :), and we’re giving away their old bikes.  All of them work fine, though a couple have flat tires.  If you live around here and are interested, let me know – I’d love to know some of my blog readers are enjoying them.  Here’s what we have:

  • 1 – 16″ lavender bike – taken
  • 1 – 16 ” red/blue bike – taken
  • 1 – 20″ red bike – taken
  • 1 – 20″ pink/purple bike (has flat tire) – taken
  • 1 – 20″ blue bike (has flat tire) – taken

Feel free to call or email me privately if you have my contact info, or post below if you don’t.  I’d like to give them away within the next 24 hours (ie, by Monday evening), and will be home pretty much all day if you want to come by and pick up any/all of them.

Avivah

Cost for the bris

frugal strategies, homemaking

>>Do you have any tips for how to make a low cost bris?<<

Well, everyone has a different idea of what they consider low cost, but I’ll share what we’ve done. 

Generally, an important principle in saving money is to look ahead and plan in advance.  If you know you’re having a boy, you can think about what kind of menu you’ll want to serve, and take advantage of sales to buy the non perishables.  You can do the same with paper goods and any decorations. 

But we don’t know what we’re having until the baby is born, so planning ahead isn’t something I can do.  I mentioned a few weeks ago taking advantage of a sale on turkey and commented at the time that if we had a boy, we would use it for the seuda.  We had talked about making a late afternoon bris if it was a boy, and serving fleishigs.  But you know the saying – ‘man plans, and G-d laughs’ – since our bris was on erev yom tov, the late afternoon idea was changed to the typical morning dairy spread and the turkeys stayed in the freezer. 

But what you can do is minimize your costs by doing whatever you can yourself.  If you hire a caterer to do the set up, food preparation, serving, and clean up, it’s going to cost you a lot more than if you do any or all of those yourself.  We do all of the preparations ourselves, and can serve foods comparable to what the caterers serve for a lot less.

 What do we serve?   We had bagels, rice cakes, and whole wheat matza (dh and I don’t eat bread and we have friends who also don’t), egg salad, tuna salad,  hard boiled eggs, cheddar and muenster cheese slices, sliced tomatoes and purple onions, salad, cream cheese, butter, fruit salad, and a bowl of whole fruit.  We put out orange juice, milk, coffee, and herbal teas.  We decided against cake and cookies this time, though in the past we’ve also put out a variety of danishes and cookies.  I considered serving scrambled eggs, but it decided to keep it simple and not worry about how to keep the eggs hot without getting rubbery if they sat in the warmer for a while.  Basically, it’s your typical bris morning spread. 

Food preparation for us was making the egg and tuna salads, cutting up the fruit (pineapple, watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew) for the fruit salad and slicing the veggies for the platters.  The biggest expense was the chalav yisroel butter and cream cheese – we bought way more than we needed and I usually wouldn’t spend more than $2 a pound for either of them.  Because there was a sale last week, the sliced cheese at the take out counter happened to be less than buying a block and slicing it ourselves, but I would have bought it sliced even if it was more.  There are times when it’s worth it to pay a little more and have a little less to do! 

Setting up the room and cleaning up take a solid chunk of time, but it’s not hard and generally it’s the kind of thing our family enjoys doing together.  Because there was a non family member there who was involved and very, um, instructive towards my kids, it made it a lot less enjoyable for them than it would usually be.  But as far as the money saving aspect, that was another way to keep costs down.

We bought paper goods at the local dollar store, so that wasn’t very expensive.  My mother in law took my girls shopping for those items, though, and covered the costs, so I can’t include that in what we ourselves paid for. 

Since my dh did the shopping for the food and I haven’t seen the receipts, I can’t share the breakdown of how much we spent.  It was around $200 for the food, and less than $100 for the rental of the room from the shul (less expensive because we’re members).  We set up for 50 people but could have easily fed double that number (except for the cheese, which was almost finished).  These milchig leftovers came in handy on Shavuos, since people sent food for two of the four yom tov meals, and when an hour before yom tov we realized that’s all there would be, we didn’t have any last minute pressure because we were able to supplement for the other meals with what I had in the freezer and what we had from the bris.  I don’t know whether to consider the extra food costs for the bris as bris costs or my food budget costs, but either way, it all evens out.

We considered having the bris in our house, but felt that space constraints would make it less comfortable for everyone, and therefore the cost of renting the shul space was worthwhile.  But if someone had a large enough home, they could save on that cost by having it all in their home.

The rav/mohel who performed the bris doesn’t charge and refused to take money when we tried to get him to accept payment.  Since we’ve asked the same rav for all of our brissim since living in this city, I don’t have personal experience with other mohelim.  Just last night a Christian women at the homeschool curriculum sale asked me about mohelim and their costs; she was asking for a friend with who wants to circumcise their son ritually though they aren’t Jewish, who had gotten quotes of $600.  I have no idea if that’s standard, though it seems expensive to me.  If that’s actually the going rate, then using the mohel we did obviously was a big money saver, though that wasn’t our primary motivation.

Avivah

Making a poison ivy remedy

frugal strategies, home remedies

My ds10 showed me on Shavuos that he has a very bad rash between his fingers, which was super itchy.  (My kids have a way of only telling me about things like this on Shabbos or yom tov, when I can’t do much about it.)  He said he was sure it was poison ivy.  I asked why he thought so, and he told me he pulled out poison ivy with his bare hands when he saw it growing in the yard.  When I asked what made him do that, he said he planned to wash his hands after he pulled it out but forgot.  I mentioned that we have plenty of garden gloves that would be useful for something like this, but he said it was too much work to go into the garage to get them.  When I said we had pairs right on the back porch, too, he said that would have been too much work, too!

So not surprisingly, he now has a very unpleasant case of poison ivy.  I have a recipe in my notebook for a poison ivy remedy that I’ve never made, and decided that it would be instructive for him to prepare it himself.  The recipe called for just three ingredients: burdock root, plantain, and comfrey.  I have comfrey in my small collection of herbs, and burdock and plantain growing wild in the yard.

His best friend came over early in the day, and I sent them both out to harvest the herbs.  Plantain is easy to pick, but the burdock roots are long and skinny so it’s a bit of a job to dig them.  He discovered that using a full sized shovel made the job a lot faster than using a trowel.  Once they came in with enough of the herbs (I had to send them back out a couple more times), I had ds peel the burdock roots and chop them up, then wash the plantain leaves and chop them up. 

He put a cup of burdock and a cup of plantain into a pot with 1/3 cup of dried comfrey.  (The recipe called for equal amounts of each herb in the dried form, so I figured we should use about triple the amount of fresh herbs so it would be the right balance.)  He put enough coconut oil into the pot to cover the herbs, and then let it simmer on low for a couple of hours.  (You can also use Vaseline, or a combination of virgin olive oil and beeswax instead of the coconut oil, but for simplicity, health, and it’s powerful antifungal/antibacterial properties, I prefer coconut oil.)  After it cooked for a while and the herbs were starting to get crispy, dd14 strained it out (he had to leave for his baseball game, or he would have done this, too) and put it in a small glass jar to cool.  We made about 9 oz of salve.   

When he got home from his game, the mixture had solidified, and he put some on his hands.  Very soon he told me that the itching was much less and the irritated red skin was noticeably less inflamed.  After a couple of hours, I suggested he apply some more, and within an hour he told me it was much, much better.   I’ll have him continue to apply it until the rash is entirely gone; I’m hopeful with the help of the salve that it will be pretty quick.

When I placed my last bulk herb order a number of months ago, I ordered a 4 oz can of herbal salve that was good for general antibiotic use, stings, etc, and paid $16.95 for it.  This was a bit of a splurge for me but it seemed like a valuable item to have around.  And it has been very useful for diaper rashes, chapped skin, cuts – it’s been helpful for a number of things, and I also bought a small 1 oz container to keep in my purse.  Four ounces lasts a lot longer than you might expect – we still have almost half of the container left, even after using it frequently. 

We checked the ingredients in the salve that I bought, and saw that it contained both comfrey and plantain, along with three other ingredients.  We realized that the salve we made can easily substitute for the one we purchased in terms of practical usage (reducing skin inflammation, itchiness, healing cuts, diaper rash).  But this cost us a LOT less – the herbs we picked were obviously free, the amount of comfrey we used was probably less than 50 cents, and I bought the expeller pressed coconut oil in a 5 gallon bucket for about $80 a while back (price has gone up since).  Since there are 80 cups in 5 gallons, and I used a cup for this recipe, the cost of the oil was $1.   I’m not going to figure out how much gas we used for two hours on the lowest setting when cooking it, but let’s say that it cost another $1.  That means for less than $2.50 I was able to make a comparable salve to what would have cost me $34 if purchased retail.  We also realized how easy it would be to slightly change the recipe to make a salve that has the same ingredients as the one we purchased; while it would be slightly more expensive, since we’d need to use other herbs that we purchased in bulk instead of harvested ourselves, it would still be only an additional $2 for the entire batch. 

If you want to make a healing wash instead of a salve, use water instead of oil and follow the same directions.  Use the herbal wash to rinse the affected area periodically. 

It was fun and educational for him to make this and see how easy it is to take care of your own health.  And this batch should last us for quite a long time!

Avivah

Fun aquisitions for the kids

frugal strategies, homemaking

Today I was inspired to declutter and reorganize my basement.  What?    You’re wondering how it could possibly need to be cleaned if it was done thoroughly just eight weeks ago for Pesach?  Well, the reality of my home is that spotless stays that way for about three minutes, longer only if the kids are all sleeping.  Maybe some of you can relate. 🙂

Lest you think that I’m nesting and that’s why we did this today, I was actually inspired by a couple of new (to me!) aquisitions.  A preschool upgraded some of their indoor climbing equipment, and I’m now the new owner of 2 extremely well made solid wood climbing structures as well as one slide.  We put one in the living room – my kids’ idea, not mine – and one in the basement.  (I got the third with the intent to give it to my inlaws, for when my kids go there to play, but they decided they don’t have the space for it.  So I’ll have to find someone else to pass it along to – feel free to contact me if you’re in the area and interested!  *Update – taken!  Enjoy it, M!*)  Because our basement isn’t huge, when something new comes in, something else has to go.  So we are giving away the puppet theater my kids built last Chanuka for a performance they did for a large visiting family, along with some other small things that we decided to pass along when we uncovered them.  And once you start moving one thing, then you end up moving everything else around, too!

The structures are very sturdy – they are made of solid wood and well made.  One is made by Creative Playthings, the other is made by Community Playthings.  They are actually 40 years old and have been used in a preschool all that time, but look like they’ll easily last through my children and grandchildren!  When my dh saw them, he commented that we’re used to thinking of everything as disposable and cheaply made, but seeing something that has held up to significant use for years and still is in great condition is a reminder that things used to be built to last. 

We did a search out of curiosity to see how much things like this are selling for from these companies, and it’s alot!  Of course, the newer models are much fancier than what we got.  But fancier doesn’t mean better, and when we got home, ds10 exclaimed over what a great toy it was.  He said the mother of a friend of his has the exact same thing for her daycare, and though he and his friends are much older and bigger than what it’s intended for, they climb all over it and it’s very strong. 

My ds15 wanted to know how we were able to get them, since I told him what the woman in charge told me, that they had 40 responses in a very short time, and I wasn’t the first one.  Here’s the answer – I took the initiative to call them.  There was no phone number in the post, but based on the email address, was able to make a pretty good guess what the name of the preschool was and looked it up.  When I called yesterday, the person in charge had left for the day, but the secretary told me there were so many emails that they were overwhelmed and hadn’t answered any of them yet.  I asked if it would be okay if I called in the morning, and because she said ‘yes’, I did.  I got the woman I needed just a few minutes after she got in to work, and she was very glad to have me come over right away and take them home with me – she said it saved her having to call people, leave messages, wait for someone to come (or not), and just generally drag the process out.  She was really a lovely person and told me how happy she was to see them going to our family.   

My little ones are already enjoying them so much!  My ds20 months is particularly a climber, and he was very excited when he woke up from his nap and saw the climbing structure in the living room.  And he stayed busy on the slide in the basement while we were reorganizing.  Surprisingly, the kids ages 6 – 12 are really enjoying it, too – they think it’s a great place to sit and hang out.

Wasn’t that a good reason to reorganize the basement?

Avivah

Quick and inexpensive shoe repair

frugal strategies

Over the years, I’ve noticed two areas that are the first to go on my kids’ shoes: 1) the heel; and 2) the sole begins to separate from the top.

As far as the heel getting run down, I don’t have any inexpensive solutions – getting taps put on can cost more than you’d pay for a pair of used shoes, though it’s worth it if you’ve bought an expensive pair of shoes at top dollar.  (But I only buy good quality shoes at low dollar, lol!)  So my choice is when the heels are run down, I retire the shoes to the circular file.  But today I fixed my dd8’s Shabbos shoe that had a separating sole, and thought I’d share my very easy solution!

The answer is Shoe Goo. Shoe Goo is a transparent glue that you can buy for just a few dollars in the shoe department of your local Walmart.  It can glue leather, rubber, vinyl, and canvas.  You can use it to seal your boots, reattach a broken heel, and to reseal the sole and upper when they begin to come apart.  You just spread a little glue on the area that needs repair, and hold it closed for a few minutes until it holds the seal.

Since I’ve often found that the shoes can begin to separate when they are otherwise in excellent condition, this has been very valuable in extending the life of shoes around here.  It takes just a small amount of Shoe Goo to fix a shoe, and a tube contains over 3.5 oz and can last for a lot of shoes.  I’ve also found it useful for sneakers, to reattach the rubber tip at the top that begins to detach – that’s not a problem that affects the functionality, but fixing it keeps sneakers looking new longer.

Avivah

Buying more canning jars

canning, food preservation, frugal strategies

I haven’t bought any canning jars since last year, but I keep my eyes open on a regular basis in case I can expand my collection at a reasonable price.  Though I didn’t use all the jars I already have this year, I attribute that to it being my first year canning.  Over time, I think I’ll use more and more of them. 

But since October or November, used canning jars are getting snapped up very fast (I’ve read that new jars are also selling at a much higher volume than in the past).  This is interesting since the winter is the time of year that no one is usually buying jars – the summer is prime time canning season.  It’s markedly different than what I saw in the summer months immediately prior.  It’s amazing to me how fast the public has decided that something they once never paid attention to is now worth buying.  The interest in canning is intrinsically tied to the financial insecurity that people are feeling now, just like the huge increases in purchases of vegetable seeds.

Now on one hand, I think it’s great that people are getting interested in back to basics type skills like canning.  On the other hand, it means that suddenly used canning jars are commanding top dollar prices and finding a good deal is much harder.  A month or so ago, someone posted a large lot of used jars, and said she’d take the best offer.  I emailed her my offer, and explained what it was based on.  It was a reasonable offer, at a price that has been accepted every single time in the past.  She emailed me back to say that she had received a bunch of responses, that my offer was right in the middle, and someone was coming to buy the lot, which I had offered $60 for, for $150.  This floored me – in my opinion, no one in their right mind would pay such a high price for used jars that didn’t even have lids or rings, because it was significantly more expensive than buying brand new jars that had the lids and rings included.  (The additional purchase of a set of lids and rings at about $3 per dozen would be necessary for the buyer to have what he needed for canning.)

That indicated to me totally irrational buying – it’s obvious that the people buying now are those who don’t know the value of what they’re buying.  They just see canning jars and feel they need to get them because somehow that’s going to protect them from the bad stuff coming down the economic pike.  So that doesn’t leave much room to negotiate with sellers!

Last night I saw an offer for jars, and though it’s higher than what I’ve paid in the past, I felt it was in the realm of reasonable, unlike a lot of ads I’ve been seeing (like $22 for a dozen quart jars from a private seller – which you can buy for under $8 at Walmart).  Turns out I was the first person to respond, but the seller told me that after my response last night, there were three more responses, and then another three as soon as she opened her inbox this morning.  She said she didn’t think anyone would be interested – they were her mother’s jars, and she’d tried offering them to family members for free, but no one wanted them.  She was taken aback at how many responses she received in such a short amount of time. 

Anyway, I took four kids with me to pick up the jars – it was a nice 40 minute drive there, but they asked if they could come, and I was happy to bring them along.  (It was ds10, dd8, ds6, and ds3.)  She gave me the code for the electronic gate, and when we entered it, I was initially discouraged because it seemed to be a mini community of several homes, and none of them had addresses – there was only one address on the outside gate.  Turns out it was all one private property, and what looked like two homes was actually one huge home, in addition to one home for their parents who had recently moved away (hence her selling the jars), and the other was their garage.  At first we couldn’t find her, just the jars she had left in the driveway as she said she would (though she didn’t tell me there were several driveways, all independent of one another – the jars weren’t in the main home’s driveway and I had to drive around until we found them).  After we got the jars, we circled back around to the main house so we could pay her, and found her the second try.  She told me she found another dozen jars for me, and while my ds was putting them in the van, I was shmoozing with her and my other kids all got out of the van to play with her dogs (they loved dogs but as much as they’d like one, it’s not going to happen for us at this point in life).  She said she used to help her mother can tomatoes and green beans from their small but prolific garden in Brooklyn Park, and how the kids hated picking berries for jam because it took so many berries to make a small amount of jam. 

After talking for a while, she commented on how good the kids were, and offered to let them go onto her private dock behind the house and hang out there.  (Good behavior is it’s own reward! :))  You’d never know there was any water anywhere near there – the entire property was very expansive but also very private – but there was actually a private lake behind their home.  Then she mentioned that there was a large trampoline on the way down the path to the dock, and the kids might feel like they wanted to jump on it when they went by – so they should feel free to jump all they wanted!  She had to leave soon afterwards, but even though it meant leaving us there alone on her property, told us to feel free to stay there as long as the kids were enjoying themselves. 

It was so generous of her, and we had a lovely time on their beautiful property.  I was so glad that every one of them came along – it would have been a shame if they had missed the special outing it turned out to be.  The kids had a great time on her trampoline and on the dock, and enjoyed looking at their motor boat, canoe, rowboat, and kayaks, along with going on different parts of the dock (they particularly liked the floating dock). It was fun for them to be able to explore a different kind of place than we’d usually have access to.  The private lake didn’t have any entrance for public access, and the home itself was kind of hidden away, with the only access through their private gated entrance.   It was so relaxing on the dock, though less than it would have been if the kids weren’t there – I was pretty vigilant about watching them all every single minute – but there’s something about water that is so calming and peaceful. 

When we got home my ds10 organized all the jars, and it turns out that instead of 7 dozen for $30, we got 11 dozen for $30 (5 dozen quarts, 5 dozen pints, 1 dozen half pints)!  Which means that it ended up not only being a really nice outing with the kids, but a super deal, too!  And something I like about used jars is the sense of history that comes with them, as many jars were made by companies which no longer exist, in colors and sizes that aren’t made any more.  It just goes to show that even in a hot market, if H-shem wants you to have something, there are bargains to be had, unexpected though they may be. 🙂

Avivah

Extend your dishwashing liquid

frugal strategies

A while back, I wanted to see if I could inexpensively extend the amount of time my dishwashing liquid lasted, as it seems that we just blow through it.  Part of that is that my kids do dishes, and they aren’t conservative about how much they use.  And since they wash dishes, I’m not going to complain that they’re using too much soap. 

But still, making what you have last longer is an inherent part of saving money, so I was thinking about options.  One was to make my own dishwashing liquid, an idea I’ll eventually try but haven’t done yet.  What I did start doing several weeks ago was the following:

Take a bottle of the dishwashing liquid you buy, and then empty half of it into another bottle.  Fill the bottle with the liquid 1/4 of the way with ammonia, and the remaining 1/4 fill with either water or vinegar (I used water but vinegar would have more cleaning power).  Give it a shake, and use it the same way you’d use your regular dishwashing liquid. 

I was very happy with this mixture, since it cuts the grease much more effectively than the store bought stuff, and I needed to use less to get the dishes clean.  I mixed up a new batch of it tonight (this takes literally a few seconds), which reminded me to share this tip with you!

Avivah

Replacing the front door

frugal strategies

On Purim day, my kids announced to me that our front door was cracking.  I took a look, and sure enough, the narrow edge of it where it locks was beginning to splinter.  Since it’s the original door and this house was built 70 years ago, it’s had a good long life, and it can’t be expected to last forever, especially with all the coming and going it endures with our family.  I mentioned it to my dh, but things were then busy with Pesach preparations and other things he had to take care of, and it wasn’t really urgent.  So it wasn’t until three weeks ago when it got so bad that I couldn’t lock the door that I strongly urged him to take care of it. 

Taking care of it meant replacing the door, no small quickie project, and one that he admitted he really didn’t want to do, the real reason he wasn’t getting around to it.  So off we went to Home Depot to order a door and pay someone else to do it.  Once there we learned that to replace our current door with the least expensive door and to have it installed would be around $400 – $500, and it would take another six weeks until they could do it.  I really didn’t want a door that didn’t lock for another six weeks, and that seemed like way too much money just for a simple door.  So back home we went, without ordering the door!  Dh started reading about how to replace doors, and a couple of days later, brought home a brand new preframed door from a building supply place for 50% of Home Depot’s price, for the exact same door – just $80 including tax.

Buying it was the easy part.  The big part of the project was putting it in.  So a week and a half ago on Friday (Friday is his day off which isn’t the best day for big projects, but that’s when things happen around here), the kids pulled the frame of the old door off with a crowbar, and he spent the rest of the afternoon installing it.  By the time Shabbos came in, I was relieved that we had a new door in place – sort of.  Our door frame isn’t a standard size, and the standard size door is two inches shorter than our frame, which means he needed to build the frame down to properly fit the door we bought (the alternative was custom ordering a door to fit the space, which was much more expensive).  So the door was in, but there was still a 2 inch gap at the top.  Fortunately it wasn’t very cold and it wasn’t hot enough to have to worry about mosquitoes, but still, it’s not the kind of situation you want to have long term, you know?

But it stayed like that until the following Friday, and then he built the door frame down.  Now there was no gap, and it looked a lot better, but it still didn’t look finished because he needed to insulate the door, paint the woodwork, and replace the molding on the inside of the door.  Well, we’re getting close to having it done – it’s now well insulated, the molding is on, and all that’s left is to paint the frame.  Oh, and I want him to put the little viewer thing and a mail slot, but that’s kind of extra. 

One thing that’s nice about doing your own repairs, aside from the money you save (and that’s not unsubstantial – if it was the same cost he’d rather have someone else do it!), is that you can often do a better and more thorough job than those you would pay.  My dh added in a security feature he read about to make it harder to break in, and the insulation he added should keep out cold air leaks in the winter.  (Leaks around windows and doors let in a surprising amount of cold.)

To keep the costs down, he reused as much lumber from the original door frame as he could, turning it over so that the unused side was facing out. He also reused the original molding.  It got a bit chipped in the process of removing it, but once it’s touched up, it will look fine. Using two strategies – ‘do instead of buy’, and ‘shop at home’ (ie, see what you already have that can be used before going to the store) have so far saved us around $400 on this one project alone, so I’d say his time was well spent!

Avivah