In this video I discuss my five favourite frugal things and collaborated with five other YouTubers. Links to there YouTube Channels are below: Frugal Jo Claire's Journey Tess at Frugal Living Nicola at Frugal Cottage Shoestring Jane ..read more

Tarps… Life in a French garden seems to involve a lot of tarps. When we first moved to this house the kitchen roof would drip incessantly. I bought two huge tarps, weighed them down with tyres, iron bars and chunks of wood to stop the Brittany wind ripping them off. Last summer the leaks were properly fixed and the tarps removed. They were not wasted though. They were slung across various piles of wood all over the garden. Wood is our main heating and it only burns when its dry so every bit that can be tarped before it goes into a woodshed is a godsend. God bless the tarps ..read more

Wet & windy was the first week of the new year here in France. We decided that January was a no spend month so hunkered down with the wood fires. Jane caught up on quilting, cooed her heart out, helped me re-stack our woodpiles and made sure the birds were fed every day. We only went out shopping for the essentials by checking the cupboards for stock and meal planning for the whole week. Hopefully, next week, there will be a break in the rain giving us a chance to sort out our woodpiles, gather more wood for processing and tidy up our windswept garden ..read more

When we were paying off our debts it felt like forever. We went as deeply frugal as it was possible to go and it still took us two and a half years to pay off the consumer debt that we had. At that time, we only had an interest only mortgage and then we had to change to a repayment mortgage as soon as the debt was gone. We then went into the next storm mode and paid down our mortgage from 217,000 pounds to 177,000 in the next three years so we were deeply frugal for almost six years. We didn’t eat out, buy new clothes except underwear and shoes, we didn’t buy any gifts and we didn’t buy anyth ..read more

The boss says we must stay home. Now, that’s not a hardship for me but if you haven’t got a garden, or you’re not near some accessible open space or you have to work from home and look after your children whilst home schooling them……for the third time, then my heart really goes out to you. Whenever we get the presidential address to the nation, we know he’s not there to read the lotto numbers! Duly noted sir, we’ll do our bit to help out and I have plenty to do. The infection rates are soaring, the people filling the intensive care units are younger without pre existing medical conditions and ..read more

I often get asked about our lifestyle and in particular how we cook and heat with wood. I get asked if we have any other source of heating and if we’re using wood to save money. I’l go into a few more details. In France, cities and some suburbs have ‘town gas’ or gas piped to their houses. Here in rural Brittany, we do not have gas. Some houses have a large propane tank or oil tank in their gardens and a gas or oil boiler in their houses that run the central heating. That is hugely expensive to install and even more expensive to run. An intall can be around 20K euros for an entire house sys ..read more

I was asked - Do you ever get the urge to splurge your cash because you’re fed up? I’ll start by saying I had to look up splurge 1 : to make a splurge. 2 : to indulge oneself extravagantly —often used with on splurge on a new dress. transitive verb. : to spend extravagantly or ostentatiously. So the simple answer to that was no, I never have. I then had to think if I got fed up and yes of course, I have days when I don’t feel very energetic, I have days when I’m happy just to sit quietly and read or just go for a walk to no where in particular. I call that brain dumping, when I just d ..read more

I almost daren’t say this as if I’ll jinx it but it’s been hot today! I got dressed as normal and within minutes realised that I was totally over dressed for the temperature. I then spent the day in a t-shirt. I knew well to take a hoodie to the supermarket at it would be its usual Baltic air conditioned chill zone. I’ve baked today, in this weather so had the windows wide open and then the flies decided that they all had to come into the house. We sat in the garden this evening with a chilled lemonade shandy and noticed that every tree is trying to burst into leaf. The grass seed we’d pu ..read more

My sewing room Money saving March has been all about making do here. I’ve fixed a few things, I’ve made a couple of things and I want to make one more item before the month ends. Mike has done most of the make do and mend this month. He’s done some repairs and replacements in the kitchen. When our new wood cooker gets installed on Wednesday, we’re keeping the cost down as Mike is labouring for the fitter so he doesn’t have to sub contact someone in, which he usually has to do if the cooker is big and heavy, as ours is. We did some make do and mend in our woodland today and I found some little ..read more

Happy Saturday and a big thanks to everyone. We’ve just hit two thousand subscribers and it’s been hard work but great fun to get there. Mike set up the website, he also set up the coordination between our social media channels. He does all the filming and editing of our videos. It’s very much a team effort and at last, we’ve found a hobby that we can do together. It’s very easy to get carried away with a hobby and think that you need fancy equipment and before too long you can spend too much money. I often wonder, especially with craft, if people like doing craft or just buying the stuff so ..read more