Frifty Foughts...

Apologies for the title - perhaps I have worked too long amongst small children and French people, few of whom can pronounce the sound 'th' successfully... So, here are some 'Thrifty Thoughts' (please enunciate like Her Majesty the Queen).
Anyone who's been reflecting on the subjects of my posts recently (although probably no one has) will have noticed a definite lack of spending. We have messed around and done some crafting with things we already have... (See my last THREE posts on the subject of my slipper with a hole in the toe!)We have begun Advent with some handmade family traditions.

We have scoured highways (unsuccessfully)...

... and byways (more successfully) for freebies.
I have also MADE some money by finally getting my litte blog shop up and running, selling lovely French Vintage finds I picked up this summer.

But all in all, Tif's Challenge of the Utmost Kind has come at a perfect time for us. See the sidebar if you want to know more about it.When we had the work done on our 'about to collapse' patio roof, we had a choice between getting a big, long-term loan for the whole amount, or getting the smallest, quickest loan possible and just stumping up the rest of the cash from our current and savings accounts. We decided to go for the latter, and therefore had a very lean month in November: very lean indeeed!

I was already reflecting, at the end of October, that the Challenge of the Utmost Kind was beginning to affect how I thought about spending money - I was less prone to think: 'Here is a problem, how can I spend money to solve it?' and more likely to drift into a longer-term, more enjoyable but less 'quick-fix' solution. What good timing, indeed, when we faced a month of basically not spending at all!One useful thing was that I took the time to defrost the freezer and inventory its contents. A bit OCD? Well, perhaps, but ever so handy and money-saving. We barely needed to buy meals, I had so much in there, which only required a bit of thinking ahead for defrosting and recipe ideas, often using the SloCooker (Crock Pot) for the cheaper bits of meat. See the category for 'mysterious pork meat'? That's still in the freezer...
I don't want you to think I'm polishing my halo (and grabbing my pipe-cleaner harp) or that I'm telling you that anyone can live on virtually no money - some financial problems are much worse than ours. But what I am reflecting on is that the mental shift caused by Tif's Challenge has made it easier for us, and actually rather fun, to Make Do for a month, and we think it will actually stand us in good stead for reducing future living costs too.I'll leave you with a photo of the last thrifty thing I bought before we had a Shut Down on spending - the ornate red and gold mirror, 2€ at Veti Relais, as a start of a whole collection of small mirrors we want to hang to brighten up a dark wall in our living area. Finances are jiggling themselves back to normal now, but we have learned, we really have, that thinking you live in a thrifty, environmentally-conscious way, and actually doing it, are two different things, and sometimes it takes a shock to make you realise that!