Fugality and the Art of Spending Money

Origannly written Oct. 4, 2012

Being frugal is not about being cheap.  It's being economical, carefully spending and saving money so that a quality of life can be achieved. It's living better for less.

  Here is an example. Our refrigerator. It's way too small. It's hard to work with especially on holidays and harvest times. I've often wished for a second old refrigerator just to hold the drinks, harvest or the turkey that defrosting. But we've do with it. Oh did I say that the refrigerator is very old. It has scratches on the door. The gaskets are ripped. But we still made do. Then last weekend the little shelf that held up the meat/cheese door cracked off. Ok I guess now it's time to buy a new appliance.

I'm the family cook. I like to cook and the kitchen is my domain. I have much too small galley kitchen which makes it challenging to cook all the home-made from scratch meals that I do. I was planning to replace said appliance with one of similar size because I could not see giving up even a few inches of precious counter space for anything large. Walt and the rest of the family wanted one with an automatic ice/water dispenser. ( That would get us drinking more water - right?) So when Walt and went shopping at our locally owned applence store we first found a scratch and dent that seemed to fit the bill, only it was at the top of the dollar amount wewere willing to pay. A little bit bigger for me. I liked the layout and it had the water option Walt liked. We double check to see if there was anything cheaper. Not really, the others were more more apartment sized or had flimsey shallow trays in the dispenser. Then we say it. There on the wall near the big expensive models.  This one had closeout pricing that made it a real deal. Still it was hundreds more than the model we had almost decided on. We measured and measured again. Open and closed door multiple times. I even said that I would allow Walt to cut off three inches of my presious counter if we bought this.

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Do you see what we liked about this one? It's the seperate snack dawere.  With a houseful of young adult hungary and on differend schedules. It was getting hard to find something to eat among everything else I have there. Now there is a define snack and leftover section.                                                                                           ..

Comments

I, too, have a small galley type kitchen with little usable counter space. One way around this is to build or buy a separate cabinet and put it on rollers to use as an island. You can roll it out of the way when you're not using it plus it has extra storage underneath. I had one of these when I had a bigger kitchen and I miss it. Most all prep work can be done there as well as sandwich or snack making.
I love your new refrigerator. I considered buying one with a freezer drawer on the bottom like that.
Mama Bear

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