Old Fashioned Frugal Skills You Need To Save Money - #skills #frugalliving #diy #broke #oldfashioned

[Music] hello everybody and welcome back to another video and if you're here for the very first time it's a pleasure to meet you I'm Jane my husband Mike is behind the camera We're British early retirees we've got no debt we've paid off the mortgage and we live a Thrifty Frugal and money-saving life here in Britany and Northwest France and every Wednesday we open open our home and invite you in for a midweek money cheat now this week I was inspired by something that popped up on Instagram or it popped up on Tik Tok and the premise of it was it's okay to be broke unless you suck at being broke and it was this if you are broke and you see it as an opportunity to learn new skills and make the best of things and I'm going to use the example of your home and that you take old things and you fix them up and you make them better and then you can have nice stuff so that's what we're going to talk about this week we're going to talk about the skills that you need to have they're quite old fashioned skills really some people might call them old fashioned skills I've called them old fashioned in the title but we're talking about today the skills that some people have some people bother to learn them they bother to get better at them and it's and it's a way of getting through really and Mike and I have talked about this today we were rubbish at some of these in the past rubbish but anyway let's get going today on our midweek money check about those oldfashioned Frugal skills that you need I share with you to start with that Mike and I have been together for 28 years and in all of that time we've never ever been able to afford a house that you can just move into and it wasn't a dump so it wasn't even livable NE not one house that we've ever bought has ever been livable they've all been the type of houses that nobody else would buy nobody else wanted and we bought them because that's what we could afford so we had to like I said earlier we had to take old stuff scruffy stuff and fix it up one of the very first things that we learned to do was very basic Painting and Decorating so we learned the basics that we needed we needed a paint tray we needed paint rollers we needed paint brushes we learned the difference between uh oilbased paint and water-based paint we always gone for water-based paint we learned the difference between the paints that you needed for wood and the paints that that you needed for the walls we learned how to steam off wallpaper and strip wallpaper we learned how to use small pots of plaster a filler to fill in cracks and to fill in holes we learned how to sand things down so is very basic skills that we've learned and we've never ever paid anyone to do any painting or decorating for us so it's a very basic skill that if you can learn it it will save you thousands over the years I can't imagine how much we'd have to pay cuz like I said every house we've ever bought it's not only it's not even just been not livable it's been a complete dump and we've had to turn it into a really really lovely home so there's the first thing and you can find tutorials for that here on YouTube or you can buy books on decorating or you can get books from the library or learn from that so it's a great skill to have it's the basics of painting and decorating for the upkeep of your [Music] home the next skills that we learned and they're easier than you would imagine actually are very very basic carpentry skools and we've got a really funny story to share with you where we had to learn this like you we had to learn it that day we had to learn it that day we were living in our second house and it was a very cheap house but it was in a better neighborhood than our first house our first neighborhood was really rough and we couldn't wait to get out of it to be honest with you our second neighborhood was a bit better but the house was not in a good condition well it was in a paror state to be honest with you and I think on the second day that we lived there there was a pantry cupboard in the kitchen I opened it up I put in you know a I don't know it was about 10 kilos 15 kilo bag of potatoes big sack that comes from the Milkman I put it in the pantry and it literally went through the floor the floor was completely rotten so we learned on that day that we had to take up a section of our kitchen floor and we had to replace the floorboards so we learn on that day how to drill small holes and screw down the new floorboards and the funny story is that we had no car and the nearest Builders Merchants where we could go and get planks of wood were over a mile away and we had to sort of carry back three planks of wood you know lengths of wood Mike on the front me on the back carrying them home through the streets fortunately we lived in a university town and we we looked young enough then so we said if anyone stopped us and you know looked at us fny we'll say well it's rag week we're raising money for charity carrying these planks of wood around town so it's very basic skills the skills that you could find useful to put up a shelf a put a shelf together you can buy a shelving unit as a kit we learned how to put those together how we would fix them to the wall and those basic DIY skills such as using a drill using a saw screwing in screws it's not as easy as it sounds but you you soon learn when you have to so those basic carpentry skills of can you cut wood can you nail it or screw it together and other basic carpentry skills that we learned pretty quickly because the house that we we bought was an ex rental property and somebody had put a foot through every single door every door in the house somebody had literally kicked through the panels in the door kicked it through so we had to go and get secondhand doors from a Reclamation yard carrying them home one by one or we might have even put them in a black cab and brought them back and we learn how to put hinges on them and hang those doors and also where the the molding the framing around the door was broken we learned how to literally copy it cut wood at an angle with MIT corners and we learn an awful lot in that house because we had to because we couldn't afford to pay anyone so that's another basic skill if you've got it share below did you learn it like we did because you had to let us know so that's another one basic carpentry [Music] skills the next one that will save you masses of money if you can do it or your learning it or you want to learn it are some of the very basic DIY skills we a mentioned for example putting together flat pack Furniture but fixing things are very basic DIY skills you can have a stair tread and it can start to Sag a bit and if you look under the stairs you can simply copy what's there by replacing it so it's usually got piece of wood on either side of it it's got bracing underneath it and we've done that in just about every house we've ever owned of repairing the stairs for example basic DIY skills learning how to drill into a wall checking of course first of all you can get a little device a little tiny device that you run along the wall to see if there are any pipes water pipes or electrical wires behind it cuz we have actually drilled into a water pipe before and made our own water fall learning curve it's a learning curve so you can learn to put pictures on the walls to put shelves up and you progress from that learning how to put up kitchen units how to screw kitchen units to the wall for example and now we've got to the stage in our last property this one where we are now where we fitted an entire kitchen ourselves so basic DIY skills another one from basic DIY skills that is much simpler than you think is tiling walls or tiling the floor mik tiled all our floors here it was back breaking work I remember watching the poor man it was exhausting work for him and he had to learn how to cut tiles and um lots of tiles had many angles of cuts to them unfortunately we only bought cheap tiles because we had learned that you know they do sometimes break and tiling our kitchen lots of you say oh you like our our tiles in the background in our kitchen well Mike did that um so tiling our bathrooms as well might did that but is there all things we've done before in our previous house I tiled the bathroom in our previous houses in the UK I've done all the tiling in the kitchen and the bathroom and it is a lot easier than you would think the spaces that you can divide it with and how easy it is to grout them the adhesive you adhesive the tile you adive the walls you put them up there and you you level it off and it's much much easier than you think so learning any of those basic DIY skills saves you so much money you know you you will have some disasters on the way you know you cannot fear failure you cannot fear failure and even now we always buy a few more Tails or a bit more paint or a bit more wood and even that you might think well is that saving money yes it's still way cheaper way cheaper than paying people to come and do the work for us [Music] I'm going to talk now about basic electrical maintenance and I'm going to put a caveat in here and I'm going to say to you all that don't lose your cool over this we're going to share the things that we've done over time that we had to do because we couldn't afford to pay anybody that we learned through really good research Mike had some really good books on Home Maintenance and wiring and we learned how to do this and a lot of this when it's like for like it's our wires I don't know what yours are like in the country you live in but they're colorcoded so you know which wire goes to which bits and you go like for like so things such as changing light fittings changing a single socket to a double socket obviously look at all of legalities of that whether you are allowed to do that in your country whether it would invalidate your insurance or not and all of those caveats that go with that all the safety protocols that you you do so for example our electrical systems here we can isolate a room or we can turn off the whole lot of the electricity so those things as well that we have learned and as I've said lots of caveats to go with that and and please do not lose your cool over it we have done so very safely we've learned along the way and we followed all the legal procedures it does not invalidate our insurance for example if we change a light fitting or if we change a plug socket so there you go it is a great Savor because just to get an electrician into my house for the day would cost us500 so if they came out for half a day which is the minimum that they would charge just to get here and change a couple of light fittings would be €250 or we can do it ourselves for [Music] nothing the next one's very very simple stuff but it really will save us money and they are great oldfashioned money Savers and it's about having basic maintenance skills for your house things like if you're s blocks do you know how to unscrew and take away and clean out the U Bend if your toilet blocks do you know how to use a plunger properly on it and unblock your toilet do you know how to change your air filters if you have an air purifying system or if you have an air conditioning system do you know how to change the filters if you have a dehumidifier system in your house which is quite common here in France do you know how to change the filters do you know how to clean out the filters on your dishwasher your washing machine your tumble dryer do you clean out your tumble dryer vents it's much simpler than you'd think to literally disconnect your tumble dryer from it and then clean out all the vents great way to do it if you're not blowing it out onto the street I see people do it with a leaf blower blows all the dust out of there I'm trying to think is there anything else I've missed there but basic maintenance on your house on the appliances that you have to look after them because a favorite thing that we used to do was to pick up secondhand Dyson vacuum cleaners because people never cleaned them out they never washed out the filters and they never looked after them so we used to pick them up from groups which were giving stuff away for free saying well it doesn't work but if you can get it going you could and we did we would clean it out clean out all the filters wash out all the filters and lo and behold that Dyson vacuum cleaner would work and then we would sell it on Marketplace and get a bit of money for it or use it and sell off something else that we had so there we go good oldfashioned money-saving skills of basic Home Maintenance we can spend an awful lot of money if we are not careful on making our homes comfortable on making them pretty on making them our place and I think I can rightly and proudly say about Mike andas we've done an awful lot of things over the years to make our house look pretty on a really low budget for example if we go to a charity shop and we see a picture in a frame but we like the frame but the picture's terrible we might buy it just for the frame and then we might find a picture that we can see online that you can buy and it doesn't cost very much money or we see another one in another frame and just swap them out and that's a really simple thing to do I've always bought things like secondhand dining room chairs and I've changed the fabric covers on it it's really quite simple to do lots of tutorials online for that making curtain I remember when we first got together our first house had really high 10t ceilings and enormous great big bay windows and we could not afford any curtains at all so I looked up how to make the most basic curtains and I didn't line them and a basic curtain is an oblong of fabric so if your window is say 5T wide your curtains need to be twice the width same length but twice the width to get the gather and then I learned basically how to sew over each Edge to fold it over twice and just put it around my sewing machine and if you can't sew but you don't have a sewing machine you can buy double-sided adhesive tape specifically designed for textiles that you can fold it over and iron it and I here even do little metal clips that go on top of the curtains just to hook it over so you have the most basic curtains but I learned how to sew a curtain heading tape on I learned how to gather it up and then put curtain hooks on it and hook those onto the the round things that go on the curtain pile which time curtain rings to go on the curtain rings so learning how to make my home pretty learning how to make quilts for example or that would go over my chairs I've learned how to you know buy a secondhand duvet covers from charity shops and turn that into multiple cushion covers cushion cover is a great cheap thing to learn how to do and with that I'm going to mention very basic sewing skills most of it is you cut straight and you sew straight you turn it inside out I I think in the past I wouldn't have even double hemmed it I'd have just turned it over and think like well it's back of the Cur nobody can see it and it's better than having no curtains at all so there's a few basic skills there that we've learned along the way make our house look [Music] nice we're really lucky that I think every house we've ever had even if it's only been quite tiny we've always had a garden and we've always enjoyed making that Garden an extension of our home and making it looked nice but we've always had to do so without really enough money to do it and I think we're in that same vein now really but one way that we really saved lots of money and this is a skill to know is if we've gone out and bought secondhand gardening equipment things like a strimer a bushwhacker weed whacker a weed whacker we call them a strimer and things like that is to go and buy them secondhand but when you get there check that they are called and then to start them and I never have Mike start them I always make sure it's me who can start cuzz we always buy them that you pull them and if they start and start the first time it's a pretty good indication if it starts from cold that it is okay the next part of that is looking after it making sure that when we've got the lawn mower and the strimer and we finished using it that we clean all the grass off it that we clean it all that we oil it that we oil any moving parts that we keep keep it any moving Parts clean to look after our gardening equipment our Spades our shovels our rakes all of those things if we don't look after if you leave them out in the rain the wooden handles rot in there making sure that we clean them put them back in the shed or the basement afterwards and then there's all the other gardening skills that we've learned along the way so we've always done things like finding plants really cheaply usually from C food sales maybe you might call it a yard sale or a house clearance sale or from local markets where people are selling their plants there and we've really learned over the years to do it even even cheaper than that and taking cuttings always looking to take cuttings buying myself every single year a small bag of rather expensive potting compost reusing my pots year after year after year and growing more of these on the next one hear me out on this one you can forage for plants if you live somewhere like where we do where the local Authority the council workers the highway workers go along the side of the road every single year and we have drainage ditches on the side of ours and every single year they have machines that come along and cut the grass right down in them and scour them right down to the soil they cut the hedges right back so I have no problems at all if I am out for a walk and I see tree saplings or shrub saplings and we found Laurel saplings that we have pulled up at the side of the road and as I've said to you I don't have a problem with doing that because the council will come along at some stage in the year and chop them up anyway so if I see little beach trees growing about that big I pull them up I bring them home I pop them on I I bring them on I've got about 10 or 15 trees and little pots in my garden at the moment and I'm bringing them on for the future and I've got lots of my all of my hedge of my Laurels and my roaded dendrons that I'm growing all of those are gleaned all of those are foraged or scrunched other people will say will let you come and pull those up as well well and if anyone wants to give me any cuting I'm always glad of it I'm always giving cuting to other people I've learned which shrubs and plants I can take cuttings from really really easily and grow them on bulia I started off with one budia bush in my garden I've got half a dozen now and they all come from cuttings so there's lots of ways of just a few basic oldfashioned skills there of gardening but but doing it without spending too much [Music] money I saved the most obvious one until last and that are basic cooking skills now not everybody likes cooking and I personally really do enjoy cooking and I also don't like to spend too much money on food food is expensive so over the years I've learned a basic repertoire of recipes most of which I don't even need a recipe book anymore you know making a cake from scratch making pastry from scratch making soup making casseroles making stews making my own stock making my own sauces making my own W and pop meals making our own bread making our own scones those very very basic skills and I'm no Chef I'm a housewife I am absolutely no chef but all of us know having those basic cooking skills saves us loads of money if you're able just to open your pantry or open your freezer and think to yourself I've got this meat or these vegetables and putting something together those basic cooking scills have saved us in the 28 years we've been together probably the most money [Music] thank you so much for watching thank you to everybody who leaves a comment we read every single one of them and we love to hear from you about your oldfashioned Frugal skills that save you money thanks to all subscribers old and new we know half of you who watch regularly are not subscribers so go on hit that subscribe button it costs you absolutely nothing thanks again we'll see you soon goodbye for now love [Music]

Channel: Frugal Queen in France

Views: 12,040

Keywords: frugal, frugal queen, france, budget, money, food, brittany, bretagne, huelgoat, celtic, lifestyle, retired, retirement

Id: UuK5X552nzo

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2024