Feather your Nest Friday, 30th December 2016.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!  We went to the farm and it was beautiful. I love this time of year. The days between Christmas Day and New Years Day are wonderful to me. It is a mix of reflecting on the year that is just finishing up and planning and dreaming about the new one.
For me that includes what I will write and the blog for next year as this year was quite different from the last.  I have a lot to think about!

Here we have had heat followed by a massive storm (again) and thousands of homes without power (also again...) and whole towns without power for days (also again!) and quite a lot of hardship coming out of this. We have been so lucky and our electricity has stayed on. My uncle has not been so lucky and has lost all his food in the fridge and freezer plus suffered through some pretty terrible weather.

Some of the ways I saved money last week included:

I picked Bay Leaves to bring home and dry. I use these myself and for gifts. They are 50c per leaf in the supermarket!

On Christmas Day I collected up all the ribbons and bows, gift bags and boxes and saved them.

When we came home Mum sent us off with turkey and all kinds of left overs. I didn't cook for two days and it was beautiful and like a holiday! And yum.

Despite the mess of the storms the rain has been wonderful and the garden is soaked.

I have been following the catalogues. From this I found that the usual pain killer I keep on hand is $33 cheaper per 90 tablets if bought in a bulk pack vs the small 20 packs.  I was surprised by this amount. So now I have a massive supply and a big savings!
The same applies to vitamins. I take Vit B and Magnesium. Without them I have restless legs and a weird thing they apparently call "burnt mouth syndrome" for which they say there is no cure but simply taking these fixes it. Bulk packs save a fortune and better yet bulk packs on special from the discount chemist. Huge saving.

I did a shop at Aldi. There is a new one a bit closer to us. The prices on meat were amazing compared with the main supermarkets.

Also in the sales I got beautiful sheets at half price. I love good sheets and the way they feel when you get into bed. So this is how I buy them.

I made most of my Christmas presents overall and it was a success!

Mum's Garden. Very peaceful. There was a deer standing down at the bottom but she gets mad when they get into her garden!

We had a lovely week and I have felt tired! We ran toward the finishing line getting painting completed and lots of other things that were almost done. It has been a big year. 

Tonight I am adding up my Vicky Challenge. I know our savings were pretty big as the painting alone would have cost a small fortune to have done professionally.  When I declared I was painting the house last January it seemed a ridiculously daunting task to do myself.  But divided up into months it was better. January I did the laundry and then doors and windows.... each month was a different area.  The best bit is driving down the street.  I still turn my head and go !!!! how nice does our house look! It is so much better!

How was your Christmas?  I hope you are pleased with all of your saving and nest feathering for the year. Thank you for sharing so much of it with me and everyone here. We encouraged each other a lot!  This helps so much.  

Thank you for all your comments, friendship and support. It has been wonderful. There were some problems shared and a lot of prayer,  a massive amount of gifts made and pictures posted. This earned us a lot of nicknames, one was the Crafty Prayer Warriors! 

I feel we got  a lot done, made major home improvements ourselves, added to our emergency fund and significantly improved our preparedness. One thing was buying a generator which has been a great thing and it has been used in a power outage already. 

Learning new skills helped a lot and was so much fun! I only had to have a refresher course to make soaps and Nanna Chel got me started in sour dough bread. This is such a saver. I have dough rising right now.  

I think I learned a lot. Sometimes one little discovery is such a big help. I love a light bulb moment that changes everything!

Mum's Mulberry tree.

Looking back over the year there are so many blessings to count. I will post on Monday my plans for the new year. I am going to keep some things the same and some will be changing!  We have work to do!  But first have a little rest and enjoy the weekend! xxx