Free Fridge From Freecycle

Our Snake Bean Community Garden group is looking at getting chickens very soon and also swapping produce with each other. As many of us garden at different times of the day and week some of us rarely (if ever), see each other. So we discussed trying to find an old fridge from somewhere - anywhere as to store eggs to buy, fresh produce to swap and stock fundraising sell-ables.

As all good things tend to come my way when I keep my mind and eyes open that is just what I did. Oooh Lucky Lucky me, I spotted a giveaway fridge on Freecycle within days of the group's discussions. So I emailed the lovely Lyell (Thank you) and was thrilled to be the lucky recipient. And even more lucky... The fridge was just a 3 minute drive from the garden so 2 of the staff headed out to collect it, as there is no way it would fit in my little city car.

Cleaning Racks and Compartments - Dolly Eating Malabar Spinach.

Today being Sunday, Dolly and I went to the garden with our eco cleaning products (bicarb, vinegar, eucalyptus oil, water and old rags). We cleaned it thoroughly and now have a gleaming working fridge waiting for it's 1st lot of goodies. Can't wait for the other gardeners to see it, another happy jiggy dance :-)

Will Be Loved By Many - Not Destined For Landfill.

Waiting to be Filled with fresh Produce.

I love Freecycle it keeps stuff out of landfill and allows you to take and give from like minded people. Tomorrow I'm giving away Dolly's porta-cot to a Freecycler. I've had an amazing week with lots of really good happenings, have a couple of Giveaways in the pipeline and have lots and lots to tell you. But for now I'm signing off and off to bed. Goodnight :-)

Did anything good happen to you this week?

Long Lost Finds.

Once Dolly is in bed and asleep The Rambling Expat and I have been cleaning and sorting every night for 40 minutes. It's making a huge difference in my life. I feel much happier and motivated as the messy clutter slowly finds a place and the dust is swept away. I am also finding long lost documents and feeling much more in control. I also feel that the housework is now becoming more evenly distributed between our gendered divide.

We started this when our Parisian visitors were going to have a sleep over at our place. Once they left for France we pushed ourselves to continue with the nightly routine and it's paying off and saves some more of our hard earned cash. For example I found a pair of sneakers I had forgotten I own. So I don't have to do the big sell on Ebay to pay for them.

Long Lost Sneakers.

Six years ago I had a pair of sneakers for a job serving ice-creams at a market. I wore them only 8 hours a week for roughly 5 months while serving customers. As I didn't wear them much, there was barely any wear or tear. They got caught up in some muddy water when our home was flooded 2 years ago and placed in a  box with other grubby shoes to be forgotten about. With this cleaning and sorting action I stumbled upon them and washed them in the washing machine to see how they would turn out. They look fabulous and now I no longer have to fork out money for new sneakers to go on walks with my neighbour Mr T.

Have you ever found any long lost treasures?

Did you click on the Book link above and read the blurb on Found? - It looks really interesting, unfortunately it's not in my public library so I will hold off buying it until it comes my way in an op shop.

Family Crashing in Our Bedroom

My cousin, her daughter and friend came to our side of the world from France. To keep costs down they stayed with my mum in her tiny 1 bedroom apartment and (only) one night at our slightly bigger home due to me having to go to work most days. We freshly washed the sheets and had them drying in the sunshine all day so that they could sleep in sunshine smelling sheets; a treat they don't get in Paris.

I tried to have my messy cluttered home cleaned up before they came for the sleepover - I forced myself the tidy up 30 minutes a night for about a week - but I'm a little piggy and have a bad bad habit of dropping stuff at the nearest point instead of where it belongs. So I tidied and dropped, tidied and dropped. Our home also has very limited storage space for our STUFF. (I've been watching The Block to get DIY renovation ideas.) So it looked better but was still not clutter free.

The Parisian girls slept in our beds, in our room while the 3 of us squatted the office/clutter room and squeezed in on a smallish mattress. Dolly even fell out of bed in our home camping trip - luckily it was a thin mattress on the ground.

We Happily Gave Up Our Beds

And We Slept Amongst Our Clutter

Cousin Love Makes it, Worth It.

Our neighbour Mr T lent us the mattress that we slept on, that way we didn't have to sleep on the ground. I was going to go out and purchase one as I will need a new mattress for a long term guest in the near future. However purchasing in a limited time frame and under pressure usually means a fantastic deal is passed by for an expensive choice. So I was happy to borrow and will search around for a new mattress/bed calmly in the few weeks.

Do you have guests come and stay? Where do you put them?

Eco Cleaning My Bathroom

There is nothing I dislike more then cleaning as I feel it eats up my precious time where I could be having FUN. But tonight I read a few pages on cleaning with Bicarb, Vinegar, Salt and Eucalyptus oil from one of my Library books. After which The Rambling Expat and I emptied the bathroom and spent one and a half hours scrubbing and wiping over every tile and surface because my lovely but Fussy cousin is arriving from Paris in a few days.

Clean walls and surfaces.

We then replaced all our bathroom stuff. When doing so I realised I have an excess of personal care and beauty products that Couchsurfers and Helpx travellers leave behind as they head towards Asia. I just don't use them up fast enough even though I have stopped purchasing any more personal care and beauty products until I fully run out of an item.

Clutter in Place

After we cleaned, I noticed that The Rambling Expat didn't have the usual asthma attack whilst we cleaned. So Eco Cleaning is good for the environment, pocket and our health too. Yay!

I purchased the green kitchen bowls yesterday from an op shop for $3. They are vintage retro Bessemer made in Australia from 60's/70's and in fantastic condition. I was going to sell them on, but I love them so much I decided to keep them for now. I transferred all of Dolly's hair ties from a small cane basket to the funky containers which will be easier to deal with, in the morning rush of hair styling.

Retro Bessemer

I Love Them.

How do you clean? Do you think it's harder to clean with vinegar and bicarb compared to bleach and spray and wipe?

Chaotic Mess Reigns In Our Home

I've always been a very messy person. My mum is a super tidy freak. She has clutter but it all has it's place and the floor is always spotless. I however am a drop and go type of gal. Drop it in the closest place and go go go... onto something more fun, exciting or important. But due to this I waste time looking for important documents, letters, keys, glasses and on and on goes the daily searching for stuff.

In the past 3 months I made a small change. I designated a new place for my keys, wallet and glasses. And I have found I stuck by this place about 80% of the time making a huge difference in my life. Immensely reducing my stress levels in the morning dash.

In the past week I have tried much harder then usual to not drop and dash. Eliminating any further mess and have also tried to concentrate on clearing up one tiny area each day. I feel I am making a little headway but the problem is nothing lasts with me. My bad habits are hard to overcome. However if my very bad spending habits have been eliminated over the past 4 years then maybe there is hope for me yet, to become the organised person I would love to be.

This is my chaotic lounge room today.

Disaster

I hope to have an after shot latter in the week of a much nicer looking room. But in the past I have tidied it all up to just make a mess again within 2 weeks. Why am I like this... I'm just too frustrating for words!!!! I wouldn't want to live with me, so how can my family cope?

The spare room is worst. The bedroom looks like a cyclone hit it. The kitchen has been a work in progress in the past 2 weeks and starting to resemble a kitchen. The hallway has a pile of children's books that the shelves can not house (time to declutter kids books).

Anyway due to my disorganised clutter I missed a very important annual Bodycorp meeting, where we make financial, maintenance and improvement decisions regarding the building. Only 1 person turned up out of the 6 units. To me that shows slackness in general, but on my part by not turning up I am not looking after my family's asset or maximising the potential of increasing our asset's value. That is wasteful and definitely not frugal. Aaaarghhhh.

How are you with your most important assets? Increasing their value with good care and maintenance?

Decluttered a Little

I told my family this morning "Before we do any of the fun stuff we are going to spend an hour tiding and cleaning the lounge room for 1 hour". We were too slow and didn't get as much done as I wanted. The lounge room is one of our main dumping grounds for our busy lives and is pile high with stuff on all available surfaces most of the time.

However we did prepared 9 bags for different people and did a day of visiting friends and drop offs.

1. Dolly's school got candles, stickers and desk calendar.
2. Merle and Stephen got a bag of candles and slightly ripped clothing made with lovely fabric for repurposing.
3. Kelly got a bag of preloved magazines - mostly home decorating ones.
4. Little L (Dolly's friend) got stickers and 3 sample mobile phones to play grown ups.
5. Super R (Dolly's friend) got stickers and one of the lovely 2011 calendars from the op shop as they are just too pretty to cut up this year.
6. Maleluca Refugee Centre got 5 booklets from my uni days on refugee issues.

We ran out of time and we still had:

1. A return for Bunnings - gardening stuff that was not suitable/wrong size.
2. A bag for the op shop.
3. A few items for the Botanical gardens permaculture group office (In trays and making submission guides).

This will be done in the next few days. The lounge room is still cluttered however it's looking much better and I feel much more motivated. Isn't it amazing the amount of "stuff" that comes into our lives cheap or free. And it takes up valuable real estate in our home and fills up our brain. I stand here guilty as one of the worst offenders of accumulating STUFF.

You may enjoy watching this HERE.

Did you do any decluttering or are you always on top of it?

10 Days Off - Day 4 Monday 25/4

Another day of holiday. My list of things to do is long and I can't seem to get them done as I procrastinate and dream and do everything else that is not on the list.

Today I went to Boss Lady's Office for an hour or so, for one last clean up ready for her bond collection. A bit of wall scrubbing, a bit of eucalyptus oil to take off any stickiness from tape and a vacuum. The place was looking sparkling in no time.

My basic cleaning tools. The vacuum cleaner was Freebie from a bin.

Then Dolly and I picked up her best friend "R" for 2 hours play at a local playground. Kids nowadays seem to miss out on just having simple imaginative and active fun at the playground. So many of us fear them on their own and we are so caught up in the business of our lives that the playground seems to be the last thing on the To Do list. I try really hard to make sure that Dolly has playground time every week. Plus it's FREE, how good is that!

Dolly's friend "R" has a frugalistic classy mum, who prepared a lovely picnic for the girls to take: Cheese, bread, olives, cherry tomatoes and salami. I had a big bunch of green grapes to add to the picnic.

I forgot my camera at home so no pics. I also forgot my wallet at home - so the day was spend free.

Bartering Domestic Help.

Hello Hard Workers,

Every once in a while we take in Helpx travellers to give us a hand in exchange for a place to sleep and a evening meal. We don't do it all the time only when we are in the mood or someone is in desperate need as our flat is cramped.

We live in a small touristy city. The gateway to Asia, so there is a lot of coming and going. A dorm bed in a noisy backpackers is $26.50 a night which is very pricey for people trying to travel on a super tight budget. Knowing this we joined Helpx and have travellers of all ages stay with us for 3 to 7 days. They don't have to fork out $$$ for their accommodation and we don't have to fork out $$$ for domestic help - plus we get to meet some extremely interesting people!

However we are also careful; we check references, we never leave anyone in our home when we go out, we don't give out keys, we don't have valuables and our daughter always sleeps in our room (her bed is next to ours), so she is NEVER EVER alone with strangers. Our profile also states clearly what we want and don't want.

In the past 2 years we have had about 100 Helpx and Couchsurfers stay with us. We have barely had problems. A few broken dishes and a couple of sponging slackers but they are in the 3% minority. We have the luxury to pick and choose our guest/helper carefully as we receive numerous requests each week.

We try to never exploit people,we ask for a maximum of 3 hours help in the late afternoon and they have the day free to visit our city. We try to make their stay as comfortable as possible. We see it as an exchange and aim the exchange to be equal benefit to both us and the guest.

Earlier this week we had lovely young man from Hong Kong. A uni graduate who has spent 6 months in Melbourne working and is now ready to do some tourism before heading home again to his family, girlfriend and his chosen career path.

Our "guest" on the fold out couch/bed.

We loved having this particular Helpx. He was calm, respectful and a great helper! He watered the garden, helped with dinner preparation and played with Dolly. And while I went to bed unusually super early with Dolly, he washed the dishes, cleaned the kitchen floor and hang out the laundry without being asked. In the morning I woke up to everything looking sparkly clean and it was a great start to another crazy hectic day.

The Rambling Expat and I both work full time and Dolly is super energetic, so this gives us time to give our daughter quality attention after busy work days.

Would you take in a travelling helper too?

Stephanie @ Frugal Down Under.