The Homestyle

Note from Liz: This was originally posted in September, 2011. I’m reposting it, because I’m working toward having another garage sale sometime between now and the middle of June. I’d love it if you would join me!

This week’s Combat Clutter mission is a bit different from the norm. Instead of focusing on one area, we are going to try and do a quick sweep of the entire house and then… have a Garage Sale! This is a two-part post, so be sure to read the second half next week.

I know that the idea of having a Garage Sale can be daunting. But stick with me. Let me tell you why I think we should all have one this fall.

One of the biggest reasons that people continue to feel disorganized and overwhelmed even after spending time decluttering and cleaning is that they don’t actually get rid of any stuff. As you take the Combat Clutter challenges each week, you have likely come up with things that you realize you no longer really need or want. When you come across those items, ask yourself if they fit the standard set by 19th Century designer, William Morris:

Have nothing in your home that you do not believe to be beautiful or know to be useful.

 

If you don’t love that lamp in your living room, and if you don’t truly need it… get rid of it! You will feel better having your house decluttered, and once it’s truly gone, there’s no risk that it will sneak back into your house.

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Another great reason to have a Garage Sale is to make a little cash. Ok, so maybe that seems a little obvious, but I mention it, because I think we should remind ourselves of the benefits while we are doing the work to set up and run a Garage Sale.

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Once you have all of your sale items accumulated and priced, make a guess of how much you think you could make at this sale. Obviously there are a lot of factors that could change how much you actually make, but try to guess. Then, decide what you will use the money for if you reach that goal. You could even give yourself three “if – then” scenarios. For example, during our garage sale this Spring, Brian and I decided:

• If we make $50 we will go out for a nice dinner as a family.

• If we make $100 we will go out for dinner as a family and then have a date just the two of us.

• If we make $200 we will go on a multi-day camping trip as a family.

We actually ended up making $217 after a weekend of selling things we had ruthlessly purged from our home! So, in August, we borrowed my parents’ RV and went on a 5-day camping trip to a lake. We had a blast! Plus, it was so freeing knowing we were paying for every cent of the vacation with cash!

Knowing our goals before we started the Garage Sale was great motivation. First of all, it made it feel so much more worth it to get rid of stuff we had been holding onto for years. It was easier to part with that chair in the living room I didn’t really like, knowing it was going to help me have an awesome vacation. It also motivated the kids to let go of some of their toys, knowing that they were basically “cashing in” on something better.

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Second, it made the work so much more worth it. I kept reminding myself how fun it would be to have a “free” date with my husband or go camping as I cleaned, organized, and priced. Once the garage sale started, every customer brought us closer to the goal.

So, now that you know why we should have a garage sale, stay tuned for help with How To Pull of A Successful Garage Sale.

Let me just start this recipe off by adjusting your expectations by the following:

• This is not a glamourous recipe.

• This recipe was the result of completely forgetting to start dinner on time one night and scavenging my pantry desperately for ingredients that would go together at least a little bit.

• I’m sure that this recipe could be improved by making your own cream of {whatever} soup, but that would completely defeat the point that this is a lightening-fast, pull-together dinner.

Now that your expectations are appropriately altered, here is the recipe. My Picky Eaters actually really like this recipe, especially when I used multi-colored rotini noodles. I personally love to stir steamed peas into this dish (as pictured below), but no one else in my family likes that combination, so I always serve the peas on the side and let everyone decide for themselves how to eat them.

Also, if you are on a tight budget, this is a GREAT meal for feeding the whole family! I usually buy pasta when it’s on a rocking’ sale, so I try not to pay more than $0.50 per box or bag. When I can get it that low, I buy as many as I possibly can. I also recently got chicken breasts for $1.77 per pound. I think the one I used for this dish was probably about a pound. The peas were $0.99, and I used half the bag. The cream of chicken soup was on a great sale a couple of months ago for $0.49 per can. So, by using items from my pantry that I bought at the lowest price possible, I was able to make this meal (which feeds all 5 of us with a little bit leftover) for $3.26 plus tax (and a penny or two for the spices and oil). That’s just about $0.66 per person. Nice!

Ingredients:

1 pound pasta (any variety) cooked to package instructions

1-2 chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch cubes

1 can cream of chicken or cream of mushroom soup

1-2 Tbsp. olive oil

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 tsp. thyme

Salt and pepper

Directions:

1. While the pasta is cooking, cook the cubed chicken breast in the olive oil in a large pan, seasoning with the garlic, thyme, salt, and pepper. Cook, turning, until chicken is cooked throughout.

2. Drain pasta and place in a large bowl. Dump chicken into bowl and stir in the can of cream of chicken soup.

3. Serve warm with some type of vegetable.

Last week I got the opportunity to attend a recipe exchange between moms. The hostess asked that we try to shoot for meals that cost as close to $6 as possible and choose recipes that could feed approximately six people. (Yes, you’re doing the math right – that’s a dollar per person! If that doesn’t beat going out to eat, I don’t know what does!)

We were asked to make the recipe we would be swapping, so that everyone could taste it and grab a printed out copy of the recipe if it seemed like something their family would enjoy.

I decided to make my Chicken Apple Chili, since I’ve never met anybody who doesn’t like it.

The evening was a wonderful success! There was such a great variety of dishes – from soups to bar-be-cue beef to pasta – I got some really delicious new ideas that I think even my Picky Eaters will like. I was stuffed from all the sampling that I did.

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The best part of the evening, though, was enjoying some good laughs and some beautiful heart-to-heart conversation with some amazing women.

If you’re new to the world of coupons (welcome, first off), this week and next are a great week to start building up a stockpile with rock-bottom prices on some great pantry staples.

Each week, when I build my grocery list I always use the information provided at Springs Bargains. This week, I will be doing the bulk of my shopping at King Soopers (a Kroger affiliate, for those who live outside Colorado). I’m looking forward to stocking my pantry and freezer with chicken breasts, canned tomatoes and tomato sauce, salsa, and more. To connect to the direct link to this week’s King Soopers ad click here.

If you live outside Colorado, Money Saving Mom has a great page with links to tons of pages featuring grocery stores from all around the country and their best sale prices.

Last year, when we went through the Combat Clutter challenge, I tried really hard to find intentional places for everything in my home. Sometimes that was easier than others. For example, clothes clearly belong in the dresser or closet, even if my kids seem to believe they belong in large piles on their floor.

But other things were tricker – like what is the best system for organizing the toys in the playroom? Add on top of that the fact that we don’t have a lot of money to go drop on an expensive organizing system, and I had to get creative.

Then I found this article by Positively Splendid with instructions (easy instructions!) on how to cover diaper boxes to make them look like nice, lined canvas bins. 

Here’s a picture from her blog:

Aren’t they adorable??

So, I gathered lots of the empty diaper boxes we had around the house (we have a LOT!) as well as a few other boxes of other shapes and sizes. I am attempting to cover one box per week with scrap fabric from the local craft store. I’m on the look out for patterns that will help my non-reading kids be able to easily distinguish what type of toy belongs in each bin. So far, I’ve made a box for Will’s toy cars and a box for Ryah’s baby doll supplies.

I LOVE them! Not only are the pretty durable (Will is in the stage where he enjoys kicking boxes just for fun) but they make our play room look more fun and inviting. Plus, I just like the happy feeling of knowing I made them.

I have shared here before about my family’s financial road over the last year. Here’s the abbreviated version:

After several long and extremely tight years, we felt ourselves tottering on the edge financially. Our third baby was born, and I was at a loss as to how we were going to make ends meet. It was the first week of November 2010, that a friend of mine sent me a link to a website with information on how to save money on groceries. It was like having a life raft thrown to me in the middle of the ocean.

I spent hours over the next few weeks, gobbling up all of the money-saving advice and tips offered on this website. At last I had discovered the secret to saving money on our groceries! I set a goal to slash 25% off our grocery budget by April. Within a matter of weeks, I had already met and exceeded that goal. I kept on learning and trying out the principles I was learning. We are just over a year since I first discovered this resource, and I average 45-55% off what I was spending on groceries at this time last year. Beyond that, we are living within a budget for the first time in our marriage. We have SAVINGS (something I didn’t think we could accomplish until our kids moved out!) and have discovered that with a little planning we can afford to do some very enjoyable things as a family without sacrificing the necessities.

I believe with all my heart that God sent the connection to that website at just the right time. I am so thankful to have been able to learn practical ways to help my family save money and live better. I have even had fun saving money over the last year as I have implemented these principles, as well as tried my hand at making more things from scratch. (Like my recipe for the Best Homemade Sandwich Bread, or tips for making your own fruit and veggie wash, laundry soap, or Reusable Chemical Free Disinfecting Wipes!)

The website my friend sent me last year is MoneySavingMom.com. If you have never checked this site out before, be sure and visit it today! The author of the site, Crystal Paine, provides SO much practical advice and wonderful encouragement to those striving to use the money they have wisely.

I was recently selected to preview Crystal’s new book The Money Saving Mom’s Budget, which will be released on January 12, 2012. When I received the book in the mail, I have to be honest: I was curious to see if it was just going to be  a reprint of the Money Saving Mom website. Don’t get me wrong – I love her website! But I was wondering, “Will people want to pay for a book, when they could get all the information for free on her website?”

I must tell you – this book is a must buy! While some of the information is on her website (this is what her passion is, after all!), it was organized in a fresh, book-like format. The other wonderful benefit is that it is much easier to find what you are looking for when there is one book in your hands, rather than trying to dig through a very popular website with thousands of entries. As I was reading, I thought, “I could have learned this so much more quickly if I’d had this book last year, instead of spending hours on my computer!”

And finally, I was happily surprised to find quite a few sections that I have never come across on the Money Saving Mom website. I am excited to be armed with some new ideas for saving money in areas like optometrists, clothing, and vacations. Plus, I gleaned a few more grocery-saving tips (like carrying a calculator with me in the store and moving toward shopping only once or twice a month) that are helping me to shave a little more off our grocery budget.

In this current economy, it seems like every week I talk to someone who is struggling intensely to make ends meet. Prices are rising, but paychecks almost seem to be shrinking. It is hardest for families with young children. So many of my friends live in constant worry of how they will have enough money to pay the bills and get food on the table. Others aren’t quite as close to the edge, but struggle with that constant nagging worry that they aren’t using their hard-earned money the best they can. If this resonates with you, I cannot recommend enough that you get your hands on a copy of The Money Saving Mom’s Budget when it comes out in January.

If you want, you can preorder this book through Amazon by going here. Or………………

You can enter to win a FREE copy from me! To win a copy of this book, just leave a comment telling me in which area of your life you most want to save money. This giveaway will end on Saturday, December 17 at 9:00 p.m. (MST). The winner will be contacted by email and will be announced on Monday, December 19th.

Good luck!!

Yesterday I blogged about a racetrack giveaway. Today I’m letting you know about a giveaway going on at Raising Olives. This one is for some of the Crayola Pop Art Pixies products.

Last Christmas we bought some of the Pop Art Pixies mosaic photo frames. The kids had so much fun decorating them! They were SO easy, made very little mess, and turned out beautifully. Then the kids gave them to grandma and grandpa, as well as aunts and uncles. Everyone loved these beautiful handmade gifts with a picture of the three cutest kids inside!

The giveaway at Raising Olives is offering SIX packets of “goods!” These would a perfect gift for an artistic and crafty little girl.

Click here to enter. Good luck!

What’s that? Make your own laundry detergent? Has this woman gone off the deep end??

Well that may be, but this was a very fun, easy, and inexpensive experiment! 

My friend Angie came over this weekend, and we made a double batch to split. We used the recipe from Organized Simplicity by Tsh Oxenreider (which, by the way is my absolute favorite book I read in 2011!). The recipe is so basic, and the ingredients were easy to find and inexpensive to buy. Here’s what we used:

The recipe called for an entire bar of Ivory soap, shredded up. I had asked Angie to bring her hand-held cheese grater, because all I have is my food processor. I use that thing almost every day, and I’m sad to report that the motor is on its last leg. I wasn’t sure if it would handle the soap very well. However, when we opened the bar, we felt like it was soft enough to give it a try. Wow! Am I glad we tried that! In about 4 seconds, we had a perfectly shredded bar of soap:

However, as Angie and I stood there talking about how much this shredded soap looked like mozzarella cheese, she pointed out that it didn’t seem very likely that these skinny strips of cheese – I mean soap – would blend very well into the powdered ingredients. So, we decided to switch to the chopping blade and run it again. I pulsed it a few times, and it turned into tiny dots of soap. This looked more like what we were wanting!

Next, we mixed up a cup each of the washing soda and Borax. Not familiar with these ingredients? I wasn’t either before this weekend. Both ingredients can be found with the laundry products in your grocery store or large retailer (like Target or Walmart). I found these next to the stain removal products. Washing soda is not the same as baking soda (they actually have different chemical compounds). You can read more about washing soda in this article, if you’re interested. Borax (the other powdered ingredient) is a chemical compound used for about 101 purposes. There are some interesting facts and uses in this article, or you can read the back of the box when you buy some. (As a side note, I really want to find out what crafts people are using Borax in!)

So we mixed them up, and then stirred in our chopped up bar of soap. It looked pretty good to us at that point, but then Angie had the brilliant idea to further mix it by pulsing it in the food processor one more time. The result was a very uniform, very well-combined laundry powder:

We were getting pretty excited by this time! We had the calculator out on my phone, figuring out how much we were going to save with this amazing new experiment. We figured that each batch cost us about $1.25. A batch filled up about 3/4 of a large yogurt container.

That might not seem like that much until you consider that you only need about 1-2 Tbsp. per load of laundry. I estimate that I will be able to get about 30-40 loads of laundry out of this one batch. I try to buy commercial detergent (the 32-load size) when I can get it between $3 and $4. So if this works, I am looking at saving over 50% of what I had previously been spending on laundry detergent! Woo hoo!

I started using my new laundry soap right away, and so far I am really liking it. My clothes feel and smell very clean. I actually don’t notice much difference, which is probably a good thing. I am interested to see over time if the color-fading factor is better or worse than commercial laundry detergent. I will keep you updated how it goes!

One of my favorite blogs “Life In A Shoe” (which chronicles the happenings of a very active family of 12) is hosting a fun giveaway this week. They are offering a racetrack made by Blu Track. These versatile tracks have the reputation of being virtually indestructible, while offering hours of fun.

If you’d like to enter, just click here to read how to join the contest.

Good luck!

One of the fun ways to deal with picky eaters is to let them cook alongside you.

And sometimes – SOMETIMES – it can help them get over some of that pickiness. Sometimes.

And sometimes it makes it worse. I remember once when I was a {picky} kid, my mom had me help her make baked beans. I was absolutely horrified to find out that she put mustard in those sweet little beans I had once loved. Never mind that I had always loved baked beans before I knew they contained mustard. That day I resolved to hate those mustard-filled baked beans.

You will be happy to learn that I now love baked beans AND mustard, so all’s well that ends well, right?

You will also be happy to know that I’ve also experienced many positive results from cooking alongside MY picky kids.

Several years ago, Naomi was at the height of her picky eating years. She refused to eat most types of meat, cooked vegetables, anything whole wheat, beans, mushrooms, onions, spaghetti sauce, most cheeses, and anything that involved foods combined together. Dinnertime had become generally unenjoyable as she loudly proclaimed everything she disliked about our meal (complete with tears and fake gagging scenes).

Brian and I talked quite a bit about this, and one idea we had was to give Naomi the responsibility to make dinner for the family one night each week. She was responsible for every single part of this dinner. She had to plan out the entire meal, go with me to the grocery store and buy all the ingredients, prepare the food (mostly on her own – I was there to supervise more than anything), set the table, and clean up afterwards.

In addition to nice benefit of having the night off from dinner preparations, we also noticed that Naomi began to realize how much work really went into the food on the table each night. It took some time, but one night as she was loading the dishwasher she said, “Mom, how do you do this every night? This is a lot of work!” I told her that I do it because I love our family and I love taking care of everyone. But even though I enjoy cooking, there are nights when making dinner is more of a headache than a joy. Sometimes we sacrifice in order to put others in the family first and care about their needs and wants. Later, we had the chance to talk about how it feels when you put something on the table and hear complaints in return for your hard work.

It was a good experience and we saw improvement.

Another benefit to cooking with picky kids is that they learn exactly what is in the food they refuse to eat. Sometimes kids are picky because they are afraid there is something gross hidden in that casserole. I remember once my mom brought dinner to a friend and her kids. Her toddler flat out refused to eat the brownies my mom had brought. She insisted there were onions in the brownies. (There were no onions. No nuts or chocolate chips either!)

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Pulling up a stool and helping to brown the hamburger, pour in the tomato sauce, and boil the noodles can help a kid realize that lasagna is just layers of foods that individually they love.

Another great reason to cook with your kids is that it’s a great teaching opportunity. Cooking incorporates all types of real-life learning lessons. You can easily work with your preschooler on counting or help your elementary-age kid understand fractions in a hands-on way. Stories of countries on the other side of the world come alive when kids get to see, smell, and taste how kids in other places eat. Since I speak Spanish, I also enjoy cooking in Spanish with my kids. It’s amazing how many words they pick up when they are experiencing the language, rather than me making them memorize words from a workbook. Even if you’re not fluent in a second language, you can likely employ your Dora skills to at least count how many cups of flour your bread needs.

Finally, if you are needing anymore reasons to invite your little ones into the kitchen, let me tell you how just plain FUN it is! Sure, the floor gets coated in flour and we all need a shower when we are done, but getting messy together in the kitchen is one of the best pastimes I can think of to spend with my kids.

So, as a thank you to all of you who are supporting me in this little blogging endeavor, I’m giving away a copy of our favorite kids’ cookbook. Naomi picked this cookbook out several years ago at a school book fair. I was skeptical at first, because the recipes definitely didn’t carry the “Picky Eater Seal of Approval.” But she insisted, so we let her buy the book.

I was so pleasantly surprised to find that this book inspired her to taste lots of foods that she otherwise would have rejected at first sight. The sisters featured in the book give lots of fun and helpful tips to kids in the kitchen. I also love that the book lays open so nicely, making it easier to use it in the kitchen workspace. Our favorite recipe has been the “Bunny Salad.” It was so cute!

So, to be entered in this giveaway, just leave a comment below telling me what your kids’ favorite food is. This giveaway will end on Sunday, November 13 at 9:00 p.m. MST. I’ll post the winner on Monday morning. Good luck!