Hi everyone,

I'm still doing well with the £20 food challenge. I spent another £1.25 today and got 8 wholemeal teacakes, a pack of pitta breads and 2 packs of breakfast muffins. Oh and the hubby spent £4 on crisps and milk yesterday too (I told him off!). So we're still under £18 with 3 days to go. Hopefully we will make it on just another couple of pints of milk.

I haven't got much to report today really. I spent most of yesterday evening cooking the massive bag of apples we got from the tree. We have loads of apples stewed in the freezer now, and 2 apple crumbles too. We've run out of custard though, so I will see if I can pick up a mega cheap tin / packet tomorrow.

The kids went to my MIL and FIL today so hubby and I got on with a few things at home and had gorgeous home made burgers for tea (which is why I had a quick supermarket dash for teacakes).

We've been making some travel plans for early next year too, but I'm not going to write about those yet...

Hi everyone,

I've not managed to post on here recently as I've been really busy with work and the kids, but I'm going to try and post on here a lot more now.
I'm back to my normal hours now as work, so hopefully I'll have a little time in the afternoon or in the evening to blog.

The first thing I want to write about it the £20 food challenge! This is part of a challenge set up by Stacey on mortgagefreejourney.com. She has set up a challenge to just spend £7 a week on food. I'd love to try that, but think I need to do it gradually, so for my first challenge I'm going for £20. This is for our family of 5, so just £4 a head for a week. It includes all our meals, so breakfasts, lunch and dinner, plus and supper and snacks. My eldest takes a packed lunch for school too, so this will also be included.

My plan is to have soup for lunch most days as it's both warm and filling, and I will make some homemade bread to have with it (if I have any flour in the cupboard, I haven't checked yet...)

Today I spent £11.32 at the local supermarket. It's not actually the cheapest supermarket, but I thought it would cost more in petrol to go to the one further away. I bought 2kg carrots, 2 courgettes, a huge block of cheese, some chicken thighs and drumsticks, some parsnips and a turnip. This should make enough soup to do lunches for most of the week for me and the littlies.

Yesterday the hubby and I went into the garden and picked the last lot of apples off the tree (it's actually our neighbour's tree, but it overhangs into our garden). We also got lots of walnuts given by my MIL and we picked the last of the cherry tomatoes from the garden too. These will all help with our £20 food challenge.

My aim is to write on here what we have for our meals and keep a running total of food spends. The week runs from Monday 10th Nov - Sunday 16th Nov. Fingers crossed I can keep to budget. We usually spend around £90 a week on food, so this will be an amazing saving of £70 if we stick to it.

Too much stuff!

Yesterday I spent the majority of the day de-cluttering and sorting upstairs. I got down some bags of the kids' clothes from the loft and went  through them all to see which would fit them now. I moved things from T's wardrobe to M's, and M's wardrobe to O's. I also put some things to one side for my niece's little boy. 

M got a new (to us) wardrobe this week, so I organised all his clothes and took out anything that doesn't fit anymore or was looking shabby. I discovered that somehow he has 12 pairs of school trousers! After taking out the ones that are too small, he still has 8 pairs! (At least I can do less washing...)

After working through the boys' bedrooms, I bagged up everything for the charity shop and chucked it in the boot of my car. There are now 14, yes 14!! bags in my car boot waiting to be dropped off at the charity shop. 

My plan was to drop the bags off this morning after going to work, but I'm going to wait til I'm heading that way and just pop in. I'm doing a lot more miles than I used to - I've recently started working every morning - so I'm trying not to use the car more than I have to.

Right, got to go and pick up T from school, but will write more later.
Lorna x

Ok so here goes.....

This blog is to record my journey through saving money, de-cluttering and having fun at the same time. I've been reading a few other blogs and have decided it's time to make my own.

A suppose I should tell you a little bit about me. I'm Lorna, I'm 32 and live with my hubby and our 3 little boys in Yorkshire. I've recently started working part-time after being at home with the children for the past 2 years and I'm really enjoying it.

We've lived in our house for the past 6 years and it's definitely still a work in progress. We have lots of ideas about what we'd like to do with the house, but at the moment we don't have the cash to back the ideas. We'd like to get rid of our en-suite and convert it back to a 4th bedroom so all the boys can have their own room. We'd like to knock the utility room through, so we can have a big kitchen diner. I'd like a porch and all sorts of other things too, but we'll get there one step at a time.

I'm a bit of a hoarder, but am making a real effort to change my ways. I've been gradually de-cluttering one room at a time, and have taken so many bags of things to the charity shop lately that I can't count them! I'm trying to get rid of all the junk that ends up being moved around from one place to another because it doesn't actually have a home.

Well that's my first post out of the way, so I'm going to relax now and watch X-Factor.

Lorna x