by Michele | Aug 22, 2014 | Preparation Stage
Even this set had been paired down by a few pieces before we moved aboard.
One of the biggest challenges when moving into a small space is trying to decide what to get rid of and what to keep. Over the course of our preparations, each time we moved we would slowly eliminate a few more items. Once we moved onto the boat however, we realized that even some necessary items were too big and bulky for storing on the boat. The top storage issues on the boat currently center around cooking and tools. Over the years together, we have gotten into the habit of purchasing high quality tools when needed and have accumulated quite a collection that is hard to downsize due to the amount of money we spent and the fact that we still need some just not all of them.
From sprawling to compact!
The biggest space consumer was our cookware. Full sized pots and pans just do not work well in tight spaces, regardless of how much you paid for them! We decided pretty quickly that we needed a better solution and decided on a nesting, nonstick cookware set from Magma. Suddenly, we went from filling up a huge cabinet to having all of the pieces in one small package. After a few months of using them, I am still impressed with the quality and the ease of cleaning. At first I thought that having the pieces nested would get annoying, but it really hasn’t been a problem in use.
We received this set as a wedding present. Great for a house, not so for the boat.
This set is perfectly sized for our cabinets…small!
We also found that our traditional dining dishes were too bulky and heavy, not to mention glass! When we first moved onto the boat we figured that the no glass rule was a little too harsh, but fragile things just don’t survive a moving environment. And so, we have officially replaced the dining set we got as a wedding present with a 4 person camping set from Bass Pro. Because they are designed for campers in mind, the entire set of plates, cups, mugs, and bowls all nest well and fit into our kitchen cabinets much better. We’ve only used them a few times so far so the durability is still unknown, but we like the turned up sides for the plates and the sip-top lids for the mugs for sailing.
The throw pillow in the picture gives you an idea of the size of these babies. Small but mighty!
Dan got some new compact tools as well. We decided to replace his large 18-volt set with a new 12-volt set from Milwaukee. The tools and batteries are much more compact and easier to store. While Dan has noticed the reduction in power from his drill, it hasn’t been a big detriment to the jobs he’s been doing. Unlike the kitchen items that we are in process of selling though, we’ve decided to keep his old power tools, but down into deeper storage. That way, if we need one of them in a pinch, we aren’t stuck without a way to fix the boat.
In Part 2, I’ll talk about how we downsized our entertainment items without actually eliminating them.
by Michele | May 16, 2013 | Preparation Stage
As part of our new eating-at-home regimen, Dan and I decided to make a small garden in our backyard this spring to help get us some healthy, fresh food options. Last year, we attempted to solve this issue by joining a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) group where we bought a “share” of local farmers produce crops that we could pick up once a week. As noted in our post Julia Who?, we didn’t do too well with making use of the many unknown vegetables that ended up in our kitchen so we decided to try out our green thumbs this year.
We started by picking out a spot in our backyard and tilling it with a borrowed gas-powered tiller. A few things came to our attention pretty quickly. First, the soil in our backyard is amazingly rich and black, as in potting soil black. A neighbor told us later that our house used to be the “manor” on a large apple orchard that encompassed most of the neighborhood in years gone by. Because of this, we didn’t need to add any additional garden soil to our bed but just added some tasty cow manure fertilizer. (Carter kept telling me very seriously “there’s cow poop in there, Mommy.” I think he was concerned.) The other thing we noticed was that one side of the garden is almost certainly located over an old gravel driveway which we didn’t realize until after tilling the whole area. Now we have some nice white rock mixed in with that row. Oh well, you win some you lose some I guess.
Next, we attempted to shop the local greenhouse by bike to pick up our preferred crops but unfortunately had to defect to visiting Lowe’s when we couldn’t find much more than flowers. I mean, flowers are nice and everything, but I’m more of a practical girl myself. If I’m going to be down in the dirt, I’d better be getting something delicious out of it. We returned with 3 tomato plants, 1 red bell pepper plant, 1 cucumber plant, a bunch of red and yellow onions, broccoli, arugula, and seeds to grow lettuce, spinach, and cilantro. Being the gardening noobs that we are, we weren’t quite prepared for the amount of plants that 1 little tray actually buys you. We are going to be eating a lot of broccoli and onions in the coming months, that’s for sure!
This week we had a bit of a frost scare (in May, seriously?!) but luckily didn’t lose any plants. Our seedlings are all popping up on schedule and we are looking forward to some fantastic veggies in the near future. Last night we harvested our first small batch of arugula and it was certainly worth the effort! We’ll keep you posted on whether the rest continues to produce such excellent results.
by Michele | Apr 12, 2013 | Preparation Stage
Sure it can eat through mud and snow…and your wallet.
Now that we’ve taken care of most of our “big-ticket” items to improve our savings, Dan and I are trying to tackle the smaller ways that we can find extra dollars in our budget. Not only is this important for increasing our savings to maximum levels but it also is helping to prepare us for living more frugally while cruising. If we want to have any kind of decent chance at living on $1000-$1500 a month than we have to get serious about knowing where each of our dollars goes and how to cut that down as much as possible.
The tracking part is made much easier by the online financial website that we use: Mint.com. We have all of our bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and investment accounts tied in so they automatically update whenever you long in. We’ve used this program for a few years and we’re pretty happy with it, though it can be a lengthy process to set everything up and figure out what budgets you want to set for yourself. Once you have been using it for a couple of months, it can really help to show you where your money is going every month. For some time now, it has been giving us a pretty clear indication that we have been spending too much in the Food and Gas departments, so we’ve finally decided to get those under control.
Food was first and it was somewhat daunting to me to be honest. Not to play the martyr working mom bit, but it is really hard to provide home cooked meals during a working week. There’s just not enough time to be able to figure out what to make every day and go pick things up from the store so I had to find a different approach. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we have purchased a subscription to 5meals1hour.com for five dollars a month. Well, we’ve completed the first months’ worth of recipes and I can honestly say that we are way ahead of where we were last month, but I can’t give all the credit to the menus. We only used about 1/3 of the recipes on the menus, but we have still been eating at home on average of 5 days a week, which is a huge deal for us. I think just the change in mindset about grocery shopping every two weeks for actual planned meals has been the biggest positive change that 5dinners1hour has made for us. We can still improve a lot in this area, especially because I’m not a very experienced grocery shopper yet so I think we’re paying too much for our groceries, but we’re seeing a definite change in attitude and habits.
Gas spending is our other cash hog. Like a lot of people we know, it’s just something that we haven’t taken seriously before. But looking at our accounts, we have spent almost $1300 in gas alone since February 1! That’s averaging $18.50 per day, yikes! Here are a few strategies we are implementing to help us cut down this silent killer.
- Drive less…obviously. Eating meals at home isn’t just saving us money in the food department, it means less driving too.
- Walk and Ride Bikes, and not just for leisure riding. Dan has started riding his bike to work most days and we are planning to use our bikes for trips to the grocery store, library, and other close to home errands.
- Get rid of the gas guzzler in the driveway. We’re still working on this one, but the goal is to eliminate one of our 15 mpg SUV’s for a 30+ mpg compact car. Even if we have to spend some money over the sale of our Jeep, we should get most of it back in the end when we sell it in a year. This one has the potential to save us in the realm of $250/month!
Hopefully, we’ll find some good success using these strategies and find others to help us keep our everyday spending in check. If you have any suggestions, let us know in the comments!
by Michele | Mar 21, 2013 | Preparation Stage
Each one of those is about 21 seconds of cruising. Start counting!
I am a sucker for new beginnings. New Year’s, birthdays, and even Mondays can generally make me feel like this time is going to be different. True, I’m usually right back to my normal routine by Wednesday, but there’s always next week, right? My most recent enthusiasm for new beginnings has been brought about by finally moving into our new house this last weekend. I mean, I love Dan’s parents for sure and am super grateful that they’ve welcomed us into their home for the last 2 months, but there’s just something about having your own space.
We’re hoping that with a new house will come some new habits and a new budget to go along with them. We’ve developed some habits in the last few years that are hard to break and hard on the pocket book, namely eating out almost every day and constantly being out running around for entertainment. You wouldn’t think that the running around part would be that big of a deal, but with $3.50/gal gas prices mingled with the propensity to buy random stuff we don’t need when we’re walking the mall for fun and then the added likelihood of eating out if we’re already out of the house, and maybe you can see how kicking that habit could add almost $1000/month to our cruising kitty.
So how do we plan to change our bad habit? Well, first we have to start by wanting to be at home and therefore having plenty of entertainment for ourselves, sans television preferably. If the only thing we have to do at home is chores, then we don’t exactly want to spend a lot of time there. That means games, books, and possibly a new garden in a nice spot in the backyard. Also, our new neighborhood has sidewalks (yay!) and is fairly close to a couple of different parks, so walks and bike rides are definitely in our future – assuming of course that the future is warmer than today. Thirty degrees in March is precisely why winter is on its way out of my vocabulary.
I’ve also found a new meal planning subscription that we are trying out called 5 dinners 1 hour. One of my biggest problems with cooking at home is planning what we are going to have before I want to make it to ensure that we actually have the food on hand. No one (in our family at least) wants to go grocery shopping after work and then still come home and make dinner. 5 dinners 1 hour is a subscription service that provides 5 dinner recipes a week with a full grocery list and advanced preparation instructions to have all five of your entrees ready to go in an hour over the weekend. Then all I have to do is heat it up and whip up a side dish during the week. There are even 3 separate menu types to choose from: classic, clean eating, and gluten free (we chose clean eating) so you can find the right plan for your family. We just started this week, so I’ll try to post an update in a couple of weeks on how we like using it.
Do you have any suggestions for us to try? Games or great books to read? A recipe that your family loves? Leave a comment and let us know!
by Michele | Oct 19, 2012 | Preparation Stage
Our first batch. Those strawberries were delicious!
As you may have figured out by now, I don’t exactly consider myself the “domestic” type. This would certainly include my cooking skills or lack there of. My father-in-law used to joke that my best dish was bagel-bites and that wasn’t really an exaggeration. That is why you will find “Learn to Cook” on our To-Do List page. My best dish is no longer bagel-bites but I do still have a long way to go before I could peruse a Julia Child cookbook with confidence.
At the beginning of the summer, I heard an ad on the radio for a local crop share program which ran once a week from May through October. I figured this would be the perfect way for Dan and I to get a taste of what it might be like to only be able to cook items that are readily available, instead of relying on out of season fruits and vegetables. We know that there may be a lot of new foods in our travels that we haven’t eaten before and so we wanted a little practice with finding new recipes and getting out of our comfort zone.
Well, it sounded good in theory anyway. In the beginning of the season, we were doing pretty well trying out arugula in chicken breast with sauteed radishes. We had some fabulous green beans and spinach, fresh garlic and blue potatoes, corn on the cob and delicious blackberries. However, those were all the things that we had eaten before and already knew that we liked to eat. When we started getting shipments of squash, parsnips, turnips and beets, we were significantly less successful in our enthusiasm. Mostly, we would just drop off our whole box of food at Dan’s parents’ house and go out to eat. Not exactly what we had hoped but I guess that’s life.
I’m not sure if we learned more about cooking or about ourselves in this exercise. We certainly know that we have a long way to go before we could live reasonably on $1000-$1500 a month, which is our eventual goal. Maybe we’ll just start by eating bagel bites and move on from there.
We are normal (well ok, not so normal) people that have a dream to see the world and live life as it was meant to be. We both have successful careers in the healthcare industry, even in this terrible economy. We want to break free of the current cycle of trading time for dollars and dollars for more and more things we don't need. So, we have decided to forego the fruits of our economic success and "retire" well before we are 30 and set out to see what is over the Horizon.