The Frugal Urbanite household hit the point where we were so stressed doing everything frugally that we were running out of free time and something had to give or we would make ourselves miserable. The casualty ended up being coupons for a couple of months.

This is a fairly common occurrence and I’ve mentioned it before. Clipping coupons can take a healthy chunk of time out of your week and with me slowing down because of the pregnancy and all the work on the house, I just ran out of the time and energy to clip (or shop, for that matter) every week, so we had a 2 months coupon hiatus.

Because we were no longer shopping every Sunday, we started reincorporating BJs into our monthly shopping. I would normally pick up 10 or so jars of spaghetti sauce on sale at the store, but instead I would just grab a case at BJs for only maybe $.50 more for the whole mess (not to mention BJs would have taken manufacturers coupons if I had them). The meat there was a tad more expensive than the good sales at the grocery stores, but I discovered that the quality was better than the ‘sale’ meat. I could get 90% ground beef instead of greasy 80% for only pennies more and big cuts of meat were nicely marbled instead of questionable like the pork shoulders at Giant. It’s very unlikely we’ll go back to buying these items at the local groceries.

We continued to look through the grocery store circulars to plan out the menus using sale items so we continued to save 30% or so at the local stores. We also had my big ol’ stockpile to work from, so we didn’t have to buy any toiletries (a big use of my coupons) or household items, which also saved us a bundle. It also meant that we had a lot of repeat meals to pull from the stockpile, but no one has died from eating pasta 3 times in one week.

In any case, we really only lost about $40 over the course of the 2 months, which we could absorb and sometimes you have to consider the cost of quality of life over how much you could save.

Has anyone dropped a frugal habit temporarily (or permanently) for the sake of their sanity?

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Sorry for the big breaks between posts. It’s just lately I don’t feel like I’ve got anything to say and I hate blogs where you can tell the owner is just posting for the sake of posting.

We’ve finished the floors on the first floor. And by we I mean Mr. because I sure wasn’t doing anything besides supervising.

Anyways, the end cost turned out to be a shade under $1,200 for 700 square feet (we did the foyer, the hall, the kitchen and the dining room all at once.) That price includes the laminate, the pad, the quarter round trim and all the assorted other minor things you need. We were fortunate that we were able to borrow the miter saw and other tools from a friend and several friends came over to help lay the actual floor down.

We went with laminate over engineered or true hard wood because of a) durability and b) cost. From what we understand, engineered isn’t as durable as laminate and in order to get one of the truly durable hardwoods (not all hardwoods are the same hardness) we’d be looking at around $5 a sq.foot and up. For that money, we could replace the laminate 3 times. To be honest, the laminate isn’t as good looking as a really nice hardwood, but I don’t really stare at my floor.

We also went with self-installation because we’re cheap (installation started at $1.99 a sq.foot, which would have doubled our cost) and because we choose a ‘floating’ laminate with click installation. Click installation laminate is not only easier to install because it snaps together, but you don’t have to worry about what’s underneath unless it’s remarkably uneven or you are working directly on the subfloor.

I wish I had some better pictures of the before floor (nasty, white vinyl laminate that hadn’t been taken care of so the stains just wouldn’t come up) but here are some shots.

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