Getting your coupons...

First thing you need is coupons.  There are a few ways to go about this.

One is to check with your local papers and ask if they have a special subscription for couponers.  Around here I pay $20 a month and I get the daily paper Tuesday through Saturday, and then 5 Sunday papers.  You may wonder why I get 5. The reason is because the more papers you get... the more coupon inserts you get... meaning when there is a sale instead of getting one item for free or cheap, you can get 5.  You could also ask your neighbors or friends if they have any coupon inserts from their paper they are going to throw away.  Or maybe even ask the person who delivers the paper in your area and see what they do with their extras.

The second way to get coupons is to dumpster dive.  Yes I have indeed dumpster dived... well sorta.  Rexburg has recycle bins in the walmart parking lot. So one is full of newpapers and I can reach in with my feet firmly planted on the ground.  So I guess I have really dumpster reached.

The third is printable coupons from the internet.  There are many sites that you can print coupons from.  My favorites are...
www.coupons.com
www.smartsource.com
www.redplum.com
www.bettycrocker.com

The main benefit of getting the sunday papers is the Twice the Value coupons for Albertsons.  Albertsons is the main store I shop at because of these coupons they put in the paper.  It gives you the availability to double any coupon that is 1.00 and under up to 1.00.  For example if you have a .50 coupon it becomes 1.00 off that item.  If you have a 1.00 coupon it becomes 2.00 off that item.  More on that later.

This is the first and most essential step in becoming a coupon master.  I will post what to do with the coupons once you have them next post.

Haylee's Room

Well as you know our house is old... and with old comes lots of wallpaper.  By lots I mean layers and layers of wallpaper in almost every room.  It has been a process but one by one we have tore down the wallpaper, textured, and painted.  Here is what Haylee's room looked like when we bought it.

I know I know you are thinking why would we ever take down such beautiful wall paper, and take out such an awesome blue carpet.  We started the project one Sunday afternoon by removing the wallpaper.  This was the third area we removed wall paper in and we were starting to get the hang of it.  The trick was to wet down the wall paper and let it sit for a minute.  Then starting at the top to pull down at an angle toward the ground.  These next pics are a disaster...

So after we stripped all the wall paper off, next was texturing the walls.  We like to use our own personal method which we have mastered now.  We do not own a hopper or a air compressor so this type of texturing is much more practical for us.  All we do is take a putty knife and spread some joint compound on the wall.  You don't want it to be too thick or too thin so figure out how much of a texture you want.  Next you wad up a plastic bag from your last grocery trip and dab it on the wall... and walla you can texture your whole room in no time.

After hours of scraping wall paper, and texturing we were ready to paint.  We went to Home Depot and picked out what paint we wanted.  We decided on a light purple and white room.  Here is our finished product....

My husbands sister had given me some spare fabric she wasn't going to use and my crafty amazing mother sewed some adorable curtains to match.  Her dresser didn't use to be that cute.  I got a dresser given to me from my mom that had seen better days.  At one point it had nice stickers from Journeys shoes all over it.  This was the dresser before I had painted it or sanded it.

  

I had removed the older handles and stickers and was ready to sand.  After sanding, I used my free paint I got from Ace hardware one day.  They hand out free paint quite regularly and you can get any color.  I painted it, bought some handles, and her dresser was complete.

I made some wood blocks with her name to go on top of the dresser in the colors of her room.

Painted a frame and added some vinyl flowers for the wall

And Hand painted some white canvas's for the other wall and finally I felt like her room was complete.

Well thanks for checking out her room.  I will post pics of Kades room tomorrow.

Spending less while building food storage

Some of you may say how can you spend less each month for a grocery budget or maybe even spend the same and build a food storage?  The answer is COUPONS!! About a year and a half ago I looked at our monthly spending on groceries and saw we were anywhere between 300-400 easy.  None of this was going into food storage and I realized something needed to change so I taught myself how to coupon.

At first couponing seemed overwhelming, but the key is to take baby steps.  Don't think you will learn everything at once, or even pay little or nothing on your first trip.  It takes time, but once you get the hang of it you will learn that there is no other way.  When you leave a grocery store with a cart full of food for penny's on the dollar, or sometimes they even pay you, it is such an amazing feeling you will never want to go back.

Today I am just going to share some of my shopping trips, hopefully my trips will inspire you to become interested in couponing.  In later posts I will explain all the details of how to coupon.  A lot of people say you can't get coupons for healthy stuff...  what if I told you I have gotten hamburger, and chicken completely free.  I've also gotten fresh fruit, frozen smoothies, yogurt, and milk for free.   Personal hygiene items such as toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, feminine hygiene products, air fresheners, and razors are all things I have gotten either free or 50 cents or under.

Here are a few of my shopping trips...

 

The picture above would have cost $135.35.  With coupons I ended up paying $19.14.

The trip pictured above was about 2 weeks ago.  I ended up paying 30.14 cents.  The stay free pads, glade plug ins, and oranges were free.  The Velveeta shells and cheese actually was a money maker and I made .89 cents for taking them out of the store.

This past Monday I was able to score 24 rolls of paper towels for free.  That is right completely free.  Everything above cost me $16.27.

Hopefully you can see why I have become obsessed with coupons!  If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I will answer it.  I plan on explaining how to do this in the next few days.

DIY cheap kitchen makeover

Okay so a few months back my husband had a Monday off from work.  So we woke up that morning and decided to remodel our kitchen.  Yes we are a bit spontaneous.  Yes we are crazy. And Yes we are still working on our kitchen 6 months later.  We bought a old 1910 home with lots of character.

Unfortunately the kitchen did not have the best character.  In fact it was extremely ugly.  It had some nice brown and orange kitchen carpet, blue walls, and nasty brown painted cabinets.

Don't mind the good looking white gas stove... that was not there when we purchased the home.  Instead we had an outdated stove that didn't even turn on.  Don't you love the carpet? Tearing out the kitchen carpet was the worst project.  The previous owners had decided that brown and orange carpet glued on top of the original hardwood floor would be the best update for the home.  WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!?   Well let's just say it was extremely outdated.

After hours of priming, painting, scraping carpet, and tiling, the kitchen looked great but it seemed like something was still missing.  In no time we knew what we needed...an island.  However, our kitchen is quite large and looking into it we would be spending about 900 dollars to get one that fit.  So we got creative.  My husbands sister was moving and gave us a dresser...

Definitely not the best looking dresser, but it would look great when we were done.  We picked up two stools that were pretty beat from a local thrift store and went to work.  We began by taking out the drawers and sanding everything down.  Then my awesome husband built the support for the top of our island, added legs, and shelves, I painted, added a stain piece of oak for the top and walla we ended with this...

All for just under $150.

A little bead board on the back to add some character.

All together for our kitchen renovation we were under 1000 dollars.  We got 3 new light fixtures, painted the walls, built an island, painted the cabinets, put in 20x20 tile, new lightswitches, and painted the radiator heaters. Well thanks for checking out our kitchen renovation.  Stay tuned for the next post.