• This Pillowcase Dress Tutorial at a room somewhere makes me want to go look through our mismatched bedsheets in the linen closet.
• I very likely might convince my husband to make our daughter this refashioned ruffled toddler skirt from Sew Much Ado.
• I am loving the tee shirt tote bag mentioned in this refashioning roundup at Simple Organic.
• One of the first crafts I want to do when we get our first house is making some decorative stepping stones for the garden like the ones on this FamilyFun post.
• This post on Simple Party Decorating at How About Orange… is inspiring me to get a little crafty for BB’s first birthday party.

What crafts are you dreaming about right now? Feel free to share any ideas or links in the comments section below!

We recently decided that we wanted to get some light blocking curtains for our kids’ bedrooms, with the hope that they might sleep in a bit later in the morning if the light isn’t shining into the rooms. A quick Internet search and shopping excursion told us that buying a good light blocking curtain would run us approximately $20 per bedroom before hardware. And the choices we were finding in that price range were not really what we wanted style-wise.

Being the big cheapskates that we are, we decided to see how much the fabric to make our own curtains would cost and we were pleasantly surprised to find that we could nearly cut our cost in half by sewing our own – and get cuter fabric, too! We picked out the cute fabric above for our daughter’s room and a fun Mickey Mouse fabric for our 4 year old son’s room (his curtains aren’t quite finished yet, so I don’t have pictures yet). Total cost of fabric was about $24 for a yard and a half each of the floral pattern and a black backing, the mickey mouse fabric and a navy blue backing. Another $6 got us two curtain rods so we spent $30 total.

Making the curtains turned out to be relatively easy – my husband mostly seemed to make the pattern up as he went along, but it was all pretty obvious – I’m guessing anyone who can use a sewing machine can figure out how to sew curtains. It took him approximately four hours to make the first set of curtains and that includes stopping to eat dinner in the middle.

You might notice that they aren’t entirely light blocking. We realized after we got home that the fabric we bought wasn’t quite long enough but we decided to start the floral pattern a bit lower and we actually really love the overall look – and her room is still much darker now than without so we are quite pleased – but if you want it to block ALL the light, make sure to buy a bit more fabric. The first panel took the longest to make, just because he spent a lot of that time figuring out how he wanted the curtains to look – the rest went by pretty quickly and by the end of one night he’d nearly finished our son’s curtains also.

If you really want a pattern or ideas to get you started, I recommend these links:

• How To: Make Curtains at Apartment Therapy
• Lined Curtains Instructions at Alternative Windows
• Simple & Sensible Tips For Sewing Curtains at Apartment Therapy
• Calculate Fabric Needs to Sew Simple Panel Curtains at About.com
• How To Sew Your Own Curtain at eHow.com

• Sew Your Own Crib Sheets at Make and Takes
• Homemade Baby Food 101 for the Modern Mom – Part 1 at Simple Kids
• Protect Your WordPress Site From Viruses at Blissfully Domestic
• 31 Days to a Better Grocery Budget: How To Maximize Your Savings With Coupons at Money Saving Mom
• Oasis Audio: Free Audio Books in Exchange For Reviews at Money Saving Mom

Feel free to share any great posts you’ve found this week in the comments section below. Did you write something amazing you think we should know about? Definitely mention that, too!

Our system before the Cash Budget was probably typical of most households, unfortunately. My husband got paid every month, we paid our bills and bought the things we thought we needed and some stuff we wanted and we hoped for the best. We sort of kept track of it all but mostly we just hoped that no major medical catastrophe or life changing event would come along and knock over the dominoes of our life. We really had no way of knowing how much we were saving until our bills came so we could see how much we’d managed to spend that month. Unfortunately, when we paid with credit cards, it was hard to commit to any hard lines – because the money was still there when we wanted to spend it.

Of course I know we should have been entering all our receipts into a Money Management program or checkbook, but being honest with myself – it’s not something that either of us were good at keeping up with. We needed something to reign us in in a stricter fashion and a cash budget was perfect.

Getting Started

The first thing we did was figure out how much money we were spending and how much money we thought we could live on comfortably. This was pretty easy – we printed out a couple of credit card statements and took out some highlighters and a calculator and figured out how much money we were spending on things like gas, groceries, household supplies, dining out, and frivolous expenses. Some numbers were reasonable, others less so.

Next we decided how much money we thought was reasonable for each of those categories and then also counted how much money we were spending on things like rent, insurances, utilities, etc. These expenses we pay with the Direct Pay option on our bank account – and we continue to do so because it’s easy and since we know how much cash we are taking out each month, we know the money for our mandatory expenses is going to be there.

The Envelope System

Tsh @ Simple Mom also uses a Cash Budget and she wrote about the Envelope System a couple of years ago. This post is definitely worth a read for anyone considering a Cash Budget – it really helped me to organize our system. Once we’d figured out where our money was going and how much we wanted to spend, I went to a craft store and bought 4 coin purses for about a dollar each. I wanted something sturdier than a plain paper envelope but small enough to easily fit in a pocket. Each coin purse is for a different type of expense: food and supplies, recreation, discretionary and larger purchases. Each month we take out money for discretionary and recreation and each week we take out money for food and supplies. At the end of the week / month, any money left over gets moved to Larger Purchases so that we can save up for a Big Ticket kind of item that would be too expensive to pay for in a single month or week’s budget. Things like a new hand vacuum or a video game system could come from Larger Purchases – anything we want bad enough to wait and save for. This works great because we still get the things we really want after we save up for them the old fashioned way – and it gives you some breathing time to make sure that purchase is really important.

What About Credit?

We still use our credit cards – especially where we are saving for a house, keeping a good line of credit is important and there are some things which are simply easier to pay for with credit. Expenses for our car or medical / dental bills get paid for with the credit card because we consider them necessary and not something that we can say, “Hmmm… Do we really need that?” Anything non-negotiable like that gets paid with credit. It’s a small list but it’s there.

We also pay for things purchased online with our credit cards, especially on Amazon.com because we have an Amazon VISA which earns us gift cards over time. To make sure we don’t get too frivolous, we make sure to run the purchase by each other first and usually take the money out of our cash budget the next time we’re at the bank by simply taking out a little less money next time.

Bottom Line

Sometimes a cash budget is tough, I won’t lie, but the benefits far outweigh the inconvenience of having to tell ourselves, “Nope, sorry, we’re broke.” In fact – the inconvenience itself is really a good thing – proof that this whole thing is necessary. Every time we tell ourselves no, we see a moment where before cash we would have said yes – and that means we just saved money.

The only real complaint I can make here is that when you get to Target to buy diapers or milk and realize you don’t have an envelope with you… that kind of sucks. But a quick way around that was found when we also decided to add a “personal allowance” to our budget. We both get to take out a little bit of money each month to spend on things that we don’t have to run by each other. Like a coffee while we’re out or a magazine, etc. This can also temporarily cover a gallon of milk – which we’ll pay ourselves back for when we get home. So really, it really does work. And the proof is in our savings account which is getting closer and closer to being a down payment for our first house every day.

I don’t think I could survive without some form of a menu plan. I vaguely remember those days before planning out a month or week’s worth of meals – and man, it was scary stuff. Planning your menus makes, literally – everything easier. From grocery shopping, to planning your budget, to fixing your meals, even deciding what to have for lunch is easier when you’ve got a game plan for your weekly or monthly dinners.

Monthly Menu Planning

When I started planning our menus, I went straight to monthly planning. I got the idea from Simple Mom – one of my favorite bloggers. The idea might seem daunting, but it’s actually pretty easy – to be honest, I find weekly menus harder to plan because it comes up more often. With either plan, one of the best tips to get you started is to establish theme nights. For example:

• Mondays: fast favorites (think meals that you can make with your eyes closed)
• Tuesdays: italian night (spaghetti, lasagna, ravioli, etc.)
• Wednesdays: all american meals
• Thursdays: soup & sandwiches
• Fridays: sea food friday!
• Saturdays: Husband Cooks!
• Sundays: something new

By having themes, it makes it easier to build a road map. I like to keep a list of recipes I’ve tried and recipes I want to try on hand, so I can just plug them in accordingly. We also built a recipe wiki on our server – basically an online recipe database where we store all of our favorite recipes so that we can access them from the laptop in our kitchen instead of printing out recipes or lugging out our cookbooks.

So with a monthly menu plan, once a month, I sit down with a calendar or a Word document (you can also find free templates to help you get organized – like these from vertex42.com) and I map out my month. I make note of any important events like birthdays or dates we know we’ll be having company or going out to eat and then I plug in a month of meals. All of this is subject to change – don’t feel like you are tied down to whatever you’ve written down – the goal is to make your life easier, not more complicated. So know that you can always rearrange things or change your mind. But by having a plan, changing the plans can actually be easier – and you can look back on old months and see what worked and what didn’t and eventually just copy and paste weeks into the new month.

Why We Went Weekly

A few months ago, we switched to a cash only budget (something else I plan to blog more about soon) and I found it easier to switch to a weekly menu plan so that I was able to take better stock of my pantry and make sure we were using the foods we had and sticking to our budget. So these days I’m only planning out one week a time, but the general method is the same. I still have an idea of themes for each night (we almost always still have a pasta dish on Tuesdays and seafood on Fridays for instance), although at this point it’s all largely in my head.

Weekly menu planning seems to be the most popular. It’s relatively easy to map out a week of meals and there are lots of online communities sharing their weekly menu plans – a great way to get new recipe ideas! I’m An Organizing Junkie hosts a Menu Plan Monday meme which is very popular – I recommend it to anyone getting started with menu planning.

How do you plan your family’s dinner? Do you do a weekly, monthly, biweekly plan or something else? I’d love to hear your thoughts, tips and ideas in the comments section below!

Basically this is a sort of online database of all of our recipes, organized in a Wikipedia-like style – hosted on our server, which is awesome because that means it’s always fast to load.

I love this because I can enter in recipes from all over the net (or from magazine clippings, etc.) and have them all in one place, with no more paper clutter.

Here’s how to set up your very own, local-network wiki:

Step 1) Follow these steps to install media wiki.  Note that this requires a webserver and database server: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide
Step 2) (Optional) Setup a DNS server (I used dnsmasq: http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html). This will let you type in ‘recipes’ in your browser’s location bar, and be taken to your wiki.  With very few computers, you can skip the DNS server (and edit the hosts file on all the computers involved).
Step 3) Edit your hosts file. On linux, OSX, BSD, and any other sane operating system, it’s /etc/hosts.  On Windows, it’s in c:\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Add this line to the file:

192.168.0.1    recipes

(Here, 192.168.0.1 is the IP of your computer. ‘recipes’ is the name you want to type in.)
Step 4) If you’re using dnsmasq, restart it so it will reload your hosts file and know that ‘recipes’ means ‘go to 192.168.0.1′.  You will also need to make sure that all your computers use your new DNS server as a nameserver.
Step 5) Navigate to http://recipes/ and start adding recipes!