What Can $100 Get You at Trader Joe's?

We had a $100 gift card to Trader Joe's, so we decided to see how far your money can go at a place like that. Before this trip, my opinion of the place was not super - I thought that it was an overpriced market for hippies. And although there were a ton of hippies there (and a ton of Subaru Foresters - we fit right in!), I was pleasantly surprised at how affordable the place was.

We started in the meat department since we wanted to buy some steaks for an early Father's Day celebration with Marko. We settled on a flank steak stuffed with feta and spinach, which actually ate up a good portion of our budget. But it was well worth it! Very tender and juicy and the fillings were great. We also bought some ricotta-stuffed chicken that we have yet to try. My opinion on the meat section: great food, a tad pricey.

Then we walked around the dry section and picked out a few things that caught our eye, including some Fair Trade Coffee (hippies) and some gourmet-looking pasta sauce. The value in the dry section was excellent - some of the stuff was priced way lower than my favorite Fry's.

Then we went over to the frozen section where I really went to town. It was so fun to walk up and down the aisles and see food that I have never seen before in a traditional grocery store. It all looked SO good to me and I had a hard time controlling my urge to put everything in the cart. The biggest scores were ice cream cookie sandwiches (which we gobbled up that same night), some yummy looking gnocchi (I have to learn to make these things!), and chocolate croissants. Although to be honest, nothing that we've tried yet has been anything short of fantastic. Jordan even scored with a bag of jerky treats, which she loves. But to be fair, that girl would also eat cardboard...

Matt had been keeping a tally in his head of what he thought our total would be when we got to the register - trying to keep it as close as possible to our $100 limit. At the register, I suddenly decided that the whole experience was making me feel a little hippie myself and I needed some yogurt-covered raisins. Luckily they were close by and I grabbed a box, putting our total at $102.57. I was very proud of my little human calculator - that math minor is really coming in handy in our daily lives :)

So now that I've given it a chance, I can say that I really like Trader Joe's. Fun finds, gourmet foods, cheap wines. I think I'll even make it part of my regular shopping rotation! My only advice is: don't go on Sundays. Apparently hippies love shopping on Sundays...

Extreme(ish) Couponing

Matt recently discovered a show on TLC (the network that gave us such gems as "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant" and "Freaky Eaters") called "Extreme Couponing." We're always on the lookout for ways to save money, so he dug into couponing a little more and found that there are a lot of resources online to help you out. One in particular is a lady out here in Chandler who runs a blog called Bargain Believer. She matches up all of the deals stores are running that week with newspaper inserts and online coupons to get smokin hot deals.

We decided to give it a try, and signed up for a newspaper promotion that gets you the Sunday and Wednesday (ad-day) papers each week for only $1. Then I bought myself a cute little coupon binder at Wal-Mart and started clipping away. We wanted to make sure that we didn't turn into the kind of people who would buy something for the sole fact that it was on sale, so we set some ground rules for this experiment:

1) Only buy what you would have bought anyways (without a coupon)
2) Don't go too out of your way to get a coupon deal (I struggle with this one)
3) Don't spend too much time looking for deals

I'm sure there are a few more, but those are the main ones we chose to follow. The last one is tricky because it's tempting to spend a ton of time looking for the absolute BEST deal and making sure you are saving every penny possible. But that would require giving up time that we could be spending doing more productive or fun things.

The first couple of times out, it was just to test the waters of this coupon thing. We got a few free things (Matt was excited for the free candy) and a few hot deals, which motivated us to try even harder the next time. I think I've got the hang of it now, as witnessed by my trip to Fry's yesterday. I spent about an hour prepping my list and coupons to make sure I was ready, and then headed out. The best deals of the day:

- $2 off any Ice Cream and $2 off any produce for "liking" Fry's on Facebook
- Free Seattle's Best Coffee with a coupon from Sunday's paper
- Free Nestle Crunch Bar, Free Tic Tacs and Free Carmex Lip Balm with online coupons (Fry's makes all manufacturer's coupons worth a dollar, which is how you get hot deals on cheaper goods)
- $1 off Milk with a Fry's online coupon
- And then the best deal: $10 off your $50 order by using a Fresh & Easy coupon (since Fry's accepts competitor's coupons)

I ended up saving 57% off my order without buying anything frivolous or that I wouldn't have normally purchased. Plus, you get fuel reward points from Fry's that you can use at any Shell and Circle K stations to get $0.10/gallon off gas, so that's an added bonus. I love me some Fry's.

Then... THEN!! If you really want to get crazy (which I do), you head on over to the Wal-Mart and price-match the heck out of stuff that's on really good deal from other stores. While Fry's has the best coupon policy, Wal-Mart has the best (only) price-match policy. So you can cherry-pick the super hot deals from all of the other stores and get them all in one spot without having to drive around. And since we live in the same market as a Food City - which has LOW prices on produce - we take advantage of the policy.

So I walk in with print ads from 5 different competitors and match up the best prices from each one:

- Pineapple: $0.99 each (Fry's - they were OUT when I went there!)
- Sweet Corn: 6 for $0.96 (Food City)
- Red Seedless Grapes: $0.59/lb (Sunflower)
- Strawberries: $0.77 for a clam shell (Sprouts)
- General Mills Cereal: $1.77 each (Albertson's) + my $1/2 coupon from the paper = cheap, yummy cereal!

I'm sure if you really had the time and the patience, you could put together a pretty sweet price-match-up and get EVERYTHING on your list for dirt cheap at Wally-World, but for us that violates rule #3, so we don't.

So that's my experience with extreme(ish) couponing so far. I like saving money, so we'll probably stick with it for some time!

Painting

When it comes to remodeling, you can't find more bang for your buck than PAINTING!! I especially love when the color you are putting up is drastically different from the one currently on there. It is so fun to watch the change roll on and transform the room in a matter of hours. So it's not surprising that paint day is my favorite day of re-build.

On day 1 of painting, we started with the white "pop" pieces. This included the window sill trim, door frame trim, the ceiling, and the linen closet. Matt handled the closet, which turned out to be a giant pain in the neck. Apparently the shelves were too short for the previous owners' liking, so they added some length by nailing 6 inches of board to the existing shelves. Functionally, that worked great, but aesthetically it looked gross and unfinished. So Matt caulked the seams and painted everything white so the shelves looked seamless. He also painted the walls in the closet, which was difficult given the small space and the multiple nooks he had to work around.

I handled the rest of the white trim, which was pretty easy. But it was not without its messes, and I ended up with paint all over my arms. As the day wrapped up, I was also able to sneak up on Matt and take a picture of his paint-frosted hair before he knew what was happening :) Fortunately for us, paint washes off of skin and hair pretty easily - it's the clothes you have to worry about.

Day 2 was all about the blue! We picked a fun color called "Tropical Lagoon" (or tropical dragoon, as we called it) - a far cry from the browns and tans in every other one of our rooms. It's my attempt to be braver at design, and it's a start. Matt did the edging in the room because I don't have the patience or the technique for edging. It's a lot of over-the-head work, which is tough on the shoulders, so my big strong man takes care of that :) Plus, I really like to cover the big areas with the roller because then I feel like I'm making the biggest difference in the room.

While I rolled on the second layer of blue, Matt took the doors out into the living room and painted them blue as well. Once we put them back on the hinges, they will be framed in white and the contrast will hopefully look cool. So there it is - our funky new wall color! The tans in the tile and the dark brown wood in the vanity will tone it down a notch once they're installed, but for now I'm totally digging our bold new look.

Putting Up Walls

Alright - back to the bathroom!! Matt got around to re-building the walls in the bathroom last week, but we're just now getting around to writing about it. Blame our fun/busy long weekend for that.

Anyway - this wall rebuild went very quickly and easily thanks to Matt's handy skills. I'm a little foggy on the details, so bear with me if any of this seems vague... I was not really involved in this phase, but Matt doesn't have time to write about it so I'm giving it a try.

First, he shimmed the wall studs since the cement board is a tad thinner than the surrounding drywall. That involves nailing drywall shims to the wall studs so once you put the cement board on, the wall and cement are flush. Then he put up a plastic moisture barrier to protect against mold and dry rot. Next came cutting the cement board to size and drilling it into the studs to keep it in place. One good learning from last time: he put blue tape where the studs were while the walls were still open. That way, once the cement board is up, you don't need to guess where to drill your screws.

One of the features that I'm most excited about is the shampoo nook that we are building into the shower. The old shower had one that was functional, but not very attractive. This one is going to have some pizazz, so I'm excited! Matt was able to frame it out with cement, which wasn't too difficult since we're just reusing the existing wood-framed spot.

After the boards were up, he put a weird sticky (alkali-resistant, I'm told) mesh tape along the seams and then mudded over them with cement mortar. That formed a nice, seamless wall base that we will tile over later. We left that to dry overnight, then he sanded it down the next day. Then he put some spackle over the sanded area to smooth it out some. Apparently cement mortar is very gritty and looks bad if you don't spackle over it - who knew...

Finally, it was time to texture the walls to make them match the existing surroundings. That involves spraying on a thick aerosol and letting it set, then taking a putty knife and dragging it over the goop to match the "knock down" texture commonly found on walls. He used the same patching and texturing technique for the area around the old vanity (where drywall was ripped out during demo).

And with that, the walls were back up and it started looking like a real room. It's a lot less scary when there are walls - something about seeing the guts of your house is a little unsettling. And that also meant that I could help with the next phase... Painting!!