@longprime I do non know macadam, but have a belt sander for taking roughness out of the oak boards. Thinking cushions would be a nice idea.
We rinse our dishes to remove all the food before we put them in the dishwasher, then use a quarter of the soap in only one of two soap dispensers.
We rarely use the home air conditioners. When we do, they are set to 80F.
We run the heat at 68F in the winter.
I replace my car oil by the book (7000/7500 miles) or when the OLM gets to 10% to 15% on the cars that have them.
I do regular maintenance on my cars to extend their life. Our Silhouette is 11 years old, has over 150,000 miles on it, and there is no end in sight for it. A neighbor bought a Montana at the same time. They had to replace it with a Venture, and it is on its last legs. Oh, and while they still have the Chevy, it was replaced as their family car a couple years ago.
macadam=blacktop. Youâre getting fancy and not being frugal if you use a belt sander. There are probably a million miles of paved roads that can remove the feathers of rough saw lumber used for pallets.
âI like asemasterâs comments about delaying turning the heat on. I used to make it to November 1st. But in recent years Iâve learned the value of turning it on (earlier) when my wife wants it on.â
Even today with a nice house and kids we keep the thermostat at 65, rolls back to 62 when weâre not home or sleeping. Saves energy and money.
I use Windex and newspaper to clean my windows. Hard to beat.
" . . . guy who wore his work clothes . . . to his daughters wedding . . ."
Did the daughter ever talk to him again?
Were they at least âfreshâ work clothes?
Or greasy?
One thing about pallets is they are white oak and very low quality. Youâll have a heck of a time getting them apart and working the wood and theyâll splinter and split like crazy. Plus, youâd better have a nail gun.
I clean the dishes too before I put them in the dishwasher but because I donât like dishes with food on them sitting in the dishwasher and growing bacteria. Plus from a quality control standpoint, I donât have to check every item when unloading to make sure they are clean.
better to be thought a quiet fool than open your mouth and provide extra proof to your detractors. not going to say anything about my frugal ways.
I would rather eat nothing at all than eat powdered eggs.
âI use Windex and newspaper to clean my windows. Hard to beat.â
You can do just as good a job, and save money to boot, if you simply make your own mix of ammonia & water, rather than buying Windex. The difference in cost is nothing short of amazing.
Just save an empty Windex spray bottle, place ~ 1/4 cup of ammonia in it, and fill to the top with water.
@Barkydog I once worked for a company that received a lot of equipment in wooden crates. At that time we bought our first house, which was not landscaped and had no fence. The company paid to take all these crate planks to the dump. I got them to deliver a truckload of the boards to my house, and built a neat picket fence from them.
The wood was not super quality, of course and over time some of the boards developed strange curves. But it was free and I only had to paint it.
When I was working on the army base, we would replace the wood planks on the trailers when they rotted out
There was a welder that would take them home to burn in his fireplace
The only problem was that they were painted standard US Army green . . .
Apparently being a cheapskate outweighed possible brain damage from inhaling the burning paint
Yeah, my father used to bring home every piece of scrap wood he could find and burn it in the fireplace. You canât do that with treated wood anymore, and he probably shouldnât have back then.
When I was a kid in Hudson County, NJ, a lot of people used to haul creosote-coated wood from the shoreline in order to burn it in their coal furnaces. I wonder if this is part of the explanation for some of the health problems in that area. It certainly didnât help their chimneys.
Back when I was a senior in high school I worked in a full service gas station for a time. Back then gas was 30ish cents a gallon and oil was pretty much straight weight in cardboard containers.
I kept 2 5 gallon cans around; one for oil and one for gas. Every empty container of oil was inserted upside down on a funnel and the the dregs would eventually drip into the can.
One of the pumps had a tendency to spurt out about 5 cents worth of gas (not a small amount at 30 cents a gallon) after the pump was shut off. I used to keep a small container by the pumps and allow the pump hose (when flat) to drain into the small container which would be dumped into the larger one when full.
The residue kept my 4 wheeled beast in gas and oil although granted, the oil was usually a mix of 30 and 40 weightâŠ
Well, time is money, right? Iâll chime in with a way I saved some time. I have a sort of weird neighbor, ex-hippie maybe, in his 60âs probably, retired or out of work for a long long time, who is always tinkering on his car. Itâs a 1979 Ford sedan of some type. Sun-killed paint. Looks really bad. Anyway, he keeps it parked on the street, and almost as if by clockwork, when I go by his house, heâs out there with the hood up, standing there with a screwdriver tinkering. Iâve never seen him remove or install anything. Never seen him flush the radiator or anything like that. Just him standing with the hood up, holding a screwdriver. Iâm not kidding. This has gone on for 8 years!
Seems sort of scary to me, so Iâve always been afraid to ask what heâs doing. Whatâs is he trying to accomplish standing there with the screwdriver? But one day I work up the courage to ask. Big mistake. Heâs not able to actually communicate what heâs trying to do. A lot of talk about not having the right wrench, that stuff is too close together in the engine compartment, everything is too hard to fix, etc. Then he says âWill you help me rotate my tires?â
hmmm ⊠well Iâm thinking Iâm not really in the business of rotating the neighborâs tires, and getting tires rotated isnât that hard of a thing to find a vendor for. And it isnât an overly expensive fee to have an actual tire place rotate your tires.
But I made the mistake of asking him about the screwdriver, so I feel sort of obliged. So I tell him to drive the car over and Iâll take a look. So he parks the car in my driveway, which has a slight slope. I start to get the floor jack out, and some chocks, and the breaker bar for the wheel lugs, crawl under the car to find suitable points to jack and for the jackstands, etc. Meanwhile, heâs looking in his ownerâs manual. And he points to the section about jacking the car. It says âAlways jack the car on level groundâ. I say to him this comment in the ownerâs manual is probably about using the carâs jack to change a flat tire, not for a floor jack for rotating tires, and Iâve jacked my own car on this slight slope many times without problem, just use the chocks and the brakes to keep it from moving.
His face turns red as a beet, says he wonât under any circumstance allow me to jack his car if there is any slope, as it is vital to obey the ownerâs manual, and any tire rotation procedure must be done out on the street where it is level. I tell him the street is too dirty and Iâm not going to crawl around on all the crud on the street just to rotate his tires. And itâs dangerous with cars going by anyway to try to do this on the street.
So he leaves in a huff. Well, like I say, I did save some time. lol.
At the last apartment my son lived at, he and three of his neighbors went together and paid a quarter of the cost of a high speed internet connection, then they all used the most centrally located apartment for the wireless router. They all saved a ton on internet service until the building changed ownership and the new owners kicked everyone out to remodel the place.
I thought it was a pretty good idea actually.
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@ok4450 I once knew a person who worked at a distillery which made bulk whiskey for private label companies. The booze was loaded into a tractor trailer tank car by hose. Like a gasoline hose there would always be some left in the hose after disconnecting it from the truck.
This fellow had found a way to discretely sidetrack this into his own camouflaged container. He regarded this as an informal perk of the job.
In the 60âs at Fort Lewis, the cooks would sometimes use up rations, not sure if C or K. I gottaâ tell you, I LOVED SOS! If anyone here does not know what SOS is, it is **** on a shingle. A piece of toast, and over it goes a gravy, ground meat mix. Love it.
I also love fried Spam when I can get it.
Here in Mexico we get 50 gallons of water a day, which has to do for everything, including construction when we do something. So, we conserve water. We run the rinse water from the automatic washing machine into barrels, and use it for flushing the stools. Also, for some clean up work. And,for cleaning the windshield.
Sometimes if my wife uses hot water to wash (which we donât normally do) she will divert it into a small barrel and for the next load scoop it out with a small pail into th wash cycle of the next load. Thus reusing the hot water.
Washing the car? When God wants my car washed, He sends the rain. And, I definitely do not wash it before driving to the border. I want it looking bad.
When we take a shower, we have a five gallon paint pail, and the warm-up water goes in there. Also, we stand over the pail while we shower so a lot of water runs off us into the bucket. That is good for maybe 5 flushes by itself.
When my wife washes dishes, she heats a pan of water to save the gas needed to heat 60 feet of copper pipe from the water heater. When I am here alone, I wash dishes in the afternoon when that pipe is hot from the sun.
We rinse the dishes in a plastic âtubâ and the rinse water goes in a five gallon paint pail to be put on plants.
When my wife gets her hair cut which costs less than $4 here, a bit more than for a man, she takes a bag and asks the women for the hair laying on the floor. She brings it home and puts it on her roses. Seriously. She read that years ago, and her roses have the prettiest blooms.
We recently had some work done on the house. The builder put up a PVC system which traps water from the roof on the south side, and runs it into a 50 gallon barrel. Even in rainy season there are dry spells, and that water my wife can use for her plants. Later, we will have the same system put on the north side of the roof.
I seldom change my oil the 11 months in Mexico, since my Blackstone oil test showed my Mobil-1 Extended Performance was still good. But, if I do, I give the old oil to a builder who puts it on the boards he uses for concrete forms.
@GeorgeSanJose,
I think I used to live next to that guy when I had an apartment in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Maybe weâre talking about two different guys, but the guy I knew would stand out in the parking area with the hood up obsessing about his car with a screwdriver in one hand and a can of WD-40 in the other. Seriously, every day when I would come home from work, heâd be out there with the hood up, tinkering with something.
I once shared an internet connection with a neighbor, but if you do any banking online, or you do anything else that requires privacy, you should make sure the wifi network has a secure password and make sure your neighbors are trustworthy so they donât give the password to anyone else. That is the only thing that keeps me paying full price for wifi in my home these days.