Category: Family

This month in Savings, we were able to save our normal $500, but I also cashed in the change that built up in my coin cup that I keep in my vehicle. I’ve been putting any change that builds up into Savings. Every little bit helps. With that I was able to add an additional…

Since my last post, John and I have made some more progress on our dining room makeover.  Unfortunately, we’re not as far along as I had hoped we would be. Although this is a fairly simple project, the weather in New Jersey has been awful. We had snow on the ground for most of February….

Everyone spends money frivolously on occasion, and we are no exception. John and I haven’t been very good with our extra cash lately. It seems like we are down to a few dollars in our checking account at the end of every pay period. We usually have about $5 left to spare! Looking back over…

Well, this month could have been better, but it looks like we took a loss, collectively, in our Roth IRAs. While we had a big gain in my work 401k, our Roth IRAs did not fair the turbulence as well. All in all we had a gain of over $3,641, so I see it as…

Like everyone else, my feelings about saving money ebb and flow. Sometimes, I am highly motivated. I make frugal and practical choices to save the most money for my family. But other times, I just want to live my life without constantly thinking about money. I want to go out to eat. I want to…

I am in the middle of trying to fix my dining room walls before I paint. I should mention that our entire house is covered in wallpaper. And when I say the entire house, I mean the walls AND the ceilings. It’s in every room, and even in the closets.  The people who lived here…

Continuing with the behind the scenes of our kitchen remodel, this post will go over ripping and installing faux shiplap. When Christy told me she wanted to cover every inch of wall with shiplap, I died a little inside. It sounded like a lot of work. At least I could get it easily ripped into…

Or more accurately, if you give Christy a new kitchen, she’s going to want a new dining room to go with it.  Yes, I want to redo our dining room now. It’s a minor project – just paint, a new overhead light, and maybe some new wall decor. I also wanted to cover our ceiling…

I want to talk about the cost of remodeling a kitchen. Let me warn you – it isn’t cheap! To save money, we had our hands in nearly every project – even the ones we paid other people to complete. Today I am going to tell you how much we paid for various projects in…

This post has been a looooong time coming. I am excited to finally share our completed DIY kitchen remodel with you. It turned out even better than I imagined. We lived with our original kitchen for nearly 15 years. During that time, we became intimately familiar with all of it’s flaws. This was a blessing…