August Frugal Accomplishments

 August didn't seem like an especially frugal month, as I ended up purchasing a bushel of cucumbers to make pickles out of since my cucumber crop (and most of my garden this year) was a bust.  However, when I looked at how much I spent ($56 in cucumbers, roughly $4 in dill and less than $6 in vinegar) to end up with 36 pints of dill pickles and 24 pints of hamburger dills compared to how much similar size jars of pickles at the grocery store cost, it was still a frugal win.  And it's nice to have all that down in the cellar instead of having to worry about running to the store when we are in need of pickles.

We did harvest a couple peppers and cherry tomatoes from the garden, and I got a tomato, a green pepper and two cucumbers for free from a local roadside free veggie stand someone puts their extra garden produce into for community members to take.

As always, we ate mostly from the freezers, pantry and cellar.

I gave DH a hair cut.

During a trip to Goodwill (in which I dropped off some items no longer needed at this little place here) I scored 4 mini casserole dishes for just $1.99 total.  I'm hoping to try making some personal size casseroles or deep-dish items in them this Fall.  My theory is that with four of them I can make a normal size recipe, divvy it up into four dishes for cooking, maybe have to slightly adjust the cooking time, and end up with a meal for me when I'm alone plus three more to go in the freezer for future use in DH's lunchbox on the days he has to go to work in person.

DD2 came over one day while the Olympics was still underway and enabled me to watch some of the streaming Olympic coverage (specifically the equestrian events) with her using her Peacock service via her laptop connected by an HDMI cable to my tv.  In exchange, I let her use my washer and dryer to do some laundry while we watched.

The city about 9 miles away had a series of free outdoor concerts once a week this summer, and DH and I attended two of them; a polka band and a folk/rock band.  Both were very good somewhat local bands, and the concert series is something we are going to try to remember to check into for next summer.

I bought from a friend a complete dressage bridle with bit and the exact style of leather reins I've been lusting after for years, plus an additional headstall and headstall/cavesson combo, all barely used, for about half the cost of the reins alone if purchased brand new by themselves.  I really don't need another dressage bridle but for that price with the reins I've been dreaming of. . .

I mended: 

• two pair of riding gloves, 
• a cornhole bag that a seam was coming loose on, 
• a sports bra the bottom of the zipper had come unstitched,
• two pair of DH's socks that had small holes in the toes, 
• a doll of Faline's (that had belonged to her mother) whose cloth body had given out at one side seam (did a 'skin graft' with a patch made of muslin) and the stitches holding one plastic leg to the body had broken (superglue to the rescue!), 
• and a favorite Minnie Mouse tutu of Faline's that the stitching on one tier of tulle had torn free.

DH bid on and won from a local online auction a wooden workbench/cabinet with drawers and a Formica top plus all the contents therein for $25.  It is definitely worth a whole lot more than that and it was fun to see what treasures it held--a drawer full of wrenches of all sizes including some homemade specialty ones that had been welded together, a drawer full of snap-ring pliers and other pliers, sockets the size for working on tractors and large equipment (which he doesn't own and had been sort of making do without), a 6-ton bottle jack and a bunch of tools I don't remember off hand.  There is also a small sink in the top which can be covered over with a matching piece of the Formica, the whole thing is on casters for easy moving.  Plus in one drawer he found an interesting vintage wooden item that I identified from the far reaches of my childhood memories to be a pipe stand (my paternal grandpa was a pipe smoker when I was very very young).   Doing some googling told us the pipe stand could probably be resold (after a cleaning and some polishing of the wood) for at least what DH spent on the entire workbench.

As part of an ongoing project related to the building of DH's shop in 2022 and getting our barn finished off for horses in 2023/2024, we worked on prepping to extend our driveway to go past the horse barn and reach DH's shop so that both building are easily accessible by vehicle all year long.  This included extending the culvert that runs under our existing driveway.  Rather than hire that work out, we decided to DIY-it.  The existing culvert had been damaged on both ends over the 22 years since the driveway was built, and in the process of digging it up to a good point we could attach the new extension to we found it also had been squashed in the center section (probably the weight of cement trucks turning off to deliver to the barn and shop. . . ).  So we just replaced the entire culvert while we were at it.

Burying the newly lengthened culvert required dirt to be brought in, and we were able to 'reallocate' quite a bit of the needed dirt just by taking the topsoil off the route of the new driveway to the barn and shop.  There's still some more fill needed, and we'll more than likely grab that from the area I've been referring to as the outdoor riding arena since the topsoil needs to come off that too before bringing in the sand footing for there.

All in all, I guess August wasn't without some frugal wins.