My Abundant Life: This Week's Frugal Tasks Saturday 17th December 2016

As we get closer to Christmas, our days are getting busier. There are last minute presents to wrap, extra food to prepare for parties, lots of work drop offs for Megan and general tidying around the home and garden. Here's what else we got up to this week -

* Dried most of the washing on the line. A few things needed to be thrown in the dryer.

* Picked approximately 920 grams of strawberries from our patch. Picked a few handfuls of raspberries too.

* Sold two dozen eggs to neighbours.

* Sold a card from my Etsy shop.

* Cut up a cereal bag to use as go between for chops etc.

* Saved the shower water to water our pot plants.

* Saved and washed some plastic containers from cobs of corn given to us. These containers will be handy when I need to take baking to a party etc.

* Saved all the washing machine rinse water for each next load.

* I did the monthly food shopping this week. Because I've been stockpiling for the Summer months on my $200 a month grocery budget, I didn't need to buy too much. The saved money is going into the grocery slush fund.

* I only put in $15 worth of petrol into my car. Petrol prices are so inflated at the moment so I'm just putting in a little bit of petrol here and there until the price drops then I'll fill up .

* Jessica has started present shopping for 2017. She's taking advantage of the sales and stocking up.

* Saved some colored cord from damaged gift bags. I found a tutorial on Facebook that shows you how to make gift bags from wrapping paper. The saved cords will come in handy when I make the bags.

* Started writing out my list of wanted items for the Boxing Day sales.

* Saved the plastic wrapping paper from a bunch of flowers Jessica received.

* Jessica has been busy buying little presents for her friends. He needed quite a few small gift bags to place then in. after ricing them at the shops ( anywhere from 50 cents to $2 each ), she decided to have a look at what we had at home. She was able to reuse lots of jewellery gift bags that were the perfect size.

* Cooked all meals from scratch.

* Cleaned out my garden / household shed and donated some items to the op shop. I received a discount stamp for the goods.