Cats have to scratch. It’s a law of nature, I guess, and if you don’t give them something they can scratch on, they will use your furniture.

Luckily, cat scratchers are easy to make. When I first got my cat, Mr. Savvy nailed two poles together and then I got a carpet sample from my local carpet store–for free, of course–and we stapled it on. The whole project took about an hour, cost us next to nothing, and 10 years later, the cat is still using it. Because we used real wood and nice carpet, the scratcher has lasted three times as long as one we would have bought in the store.

Here are some plans to make your own cat scratcher:

Recycled Cardboard Kitty Pad from Design Sponge couldn’t be simpler. Shape strips of cardboard into a coil and secure with tape. Instant cat happiness.

Here is a door cat scratcher from Martha Stewart. It looks nice, although I wouldn’t put it on a door I cared much about.

Build Your Own Sisal Rope Cat Scratcher from ReadyMade has good instructions and helpfully points out that the cost of one of these scratchers in the store is about $70.

Finally, you can build your own cat tree. This is worth the work since cat trees can cost hundreds in the store. The above post has full instructions of how to make one. Here’s a round-up of more cat tree plans from around the web. I particularly like the cat castle.

[Image courtesy this site]

Recently, I went through my freezer and wrote a list of everything I had in there with the intent of using it up. I realized that I had everything it took for a Thanksgiving meal, including a frozen turkey that I bought last November. So we decided to have Thanksgiving in July.

I didn’t want to exactly reproduce Thanksgiving food, so we gave everything a summer twist.

Instead of stuffing, I made jalapeño cornbread–thus using up frozen corn and frozen jalapeños from last year’s garden–and turned it into cornbread-and-sausage stuffing, using vegetables from the garden and homemade sausage.

For the potatoes, we drew inspiration from potato salad and added parsley, dill, and some sour cream (frozen in the freezer) to regular mashed potatoes.

We served a salad of spinach, nasturtium flowers, and strawberries (all from the garden) as well as sautéed fava beans (frozen) and zucchini (from the garden).

And of course, Mr. Savvy cooked the turkey in his smoker.

I even served cranberry sorbet as a palate cleanser before the meal.

Finally, for dessert, I made an excellent pumpkin ice cream using a can of pumpkin that was in the cupboard. I’ll share the recipe tomorrow.

Thanksgiving in July was a great way to eat up some food, have some friends over, and have fun for very little money. And it turns out gratitude and friendship is just as meaningful in July as it is in November.

I just regret not taking some pictures!

Thanksgiving In July Menu

Smoked Turkey
Cornbread-and-Sausage Stuffing
Sour Cream Mashed Potatoes
Sautéed Fava Beans And Zucchini
Salad
Cranberry Sorbet
Pumpkin Ice Cream

For the last couple of months I’ve been trying out iQ eco-friendly cleaner. It calls itself the “Smarter Cleaner” because it is 100% nontoxic and claims to be environmentally friendly. I was able to try out two of their cleaners: the Nectarine Bathroom Cleaner and the Green Tea All-Purpose Cleaner.

Aside from being nontoxic, iQ cleaners say they are environmentally friendly because they reduce the number of plastic bottles people use. Most cleaners are 95% water and 5% cleaning solution, so iQ skips the water part and just gives you the cleaner through a recyclable cartridge that you insert into a specially made bottle. Then you add the water yourself from the tap.

The idea here is that when you run out of cleaner, you just insert a new cartridge into the bottle, thus reusing it. (The old cartridge can be tossed into the recycling bin.) On top of that, the company doesn’t have to make as many plastic bottles or ship bottles of water all over the place. From the press release:

“It takes an astounding gallon of crude oil to make just 29 bottles of household cleaner and even more to transport it across the continent. … We created iQ to combat the excessive waste and cost of traditional cleaners, designing something that is easy to use, easy on our planet and less expensive than conventional cleaners.”

That sounds great, but does the cleaner work? I’m happy to say yes. In fact, I really liked iQ. It seemed capable of cleaning just as well as my homemade cleaner and other all-purpose cleaners—even when cleaning the toilet.

This is especially impressive since this product is 100% nontoxic. In fact, the cleaner goes so far as to call itself “child resistant,” which is the first time I have seen that label on a bottle of cleaner.

Also (and this is the important part): this product smells good. I was particularly enamored with the Nectarine fragrance, which does indeed have a nice fruit-like smell to it. The Green Tea was less exciting—it smelled like a traditional cleaner to me–but it was still nice and mild. I am curious to try their other fragrances, Bamboo Berry and Plum.

As for cost, the initial bottle and cartridge, or “starter kit” as they call it, is around $4. After that, the cartridges are around $1.99 each. Since most bottles of cleaner range from $3-$5, if you stuck with iQ, you would be paying less for a superior product. That’s a pretty good deal.

That said, my homemade cleaner costs less than $.25 a bottle. That’s hard for any company to beat. And while iQ’s environmental claims make sense, they are still using plastic, which is less than ideal. Homemade cleaners have all the same environmental benefits, and then some.

Of course, I am the first to admit that my homemade cleaner doesn’t smell as good as iQ cleaners do. Also some people simply don’t have the time or inclination to make their own cleaners. If that’s the case, iQ might be a good option for you. You can learn more about the company, and where to buy it, here.

So let’s sum up iQ: The Smart Cleaner:

Pros:

Works Great
Smells Great
Reasonably Priced
Nontoxic
Reduces Plastic Use
Less Overall Environmental Impact

Cons:

Still Uses Plastic
Not As Cheap As Homemade Cleaner

Seems pretty clear cut to me!

If you have used this product, what did you think?

[Courtesy What's Cooking America]

This weekend, I tried a tip to refreshen stale tortillas and it worked so great I had to share.

If your tortillas have gone stale, either from age or your accidentally leaving the bag open in the bag (as in my case–whoops), simply take wet a paper towel and spread it in the center of the stack of tortillas, then microwave for 60 seconds. The moisture will redistribute through the tortillas and they will be fresh and ready to use.

I tried this with flour tortillas, but I hear it will work with corn tortillas too.

I don’t like buying sponges for doing the dishes. They seem high-priced for something you throw away, plus they are notorious playgrounds for bacteria to breed. While you can curb this last problem by washing the sponges in the washing machine or microwaving them, there’s always the risk that when you are cleaning with a sponge you are really spreading more bacteria on your plates and glasses.

But while I have long made scrubbies out of onion bags, I have never come up with a great alternative to the sponge. Then I was reading The Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen and came upon this passage:

We recommend you switch away from using cellulose sponges in the kitchen and use cotton dishclothes instead, changing out to a fresh one every couple of days. They don’t add too much to the laundry burden, and they’re a lot more sanitary than sponges. When they become stained and worn, they can be downgraded to cleaning rags. Best yet, it they are all-cotton, you can compost them at the end of their lives.

Good tip. I’m going to try it.

The Internet makes it easier than ever to live by the motto “never pay retail.” Recently, my husband and I needed to buy a range cooktop for our kitchen remodel. After shopping for months, we found one that we liked for $1,000.

I didn’t want to pay that much for a range. It seemed to me that they should be around $600-$700. I’m not sure where I got that number, but it seemed like a good round number and that is what I budgeted for. Unfortunately, the manufacturers didn’t agree–in fact, ranges had been going up in price. In the months we have been looking, they have risen an average of about $200 per unit, so it seemed that I was going to have to cave in and pay the $1000.

I decided, though, that since we were buying the range from a national hardware store, I would at least try to find a coupon to see if I could save 10-25% first. So I went home and got on the Internet.

And while I wasn’t able to find a coupon, through a variety of searches, I found a store on the East Cost that carried the same range for $300 less than anyone else–and they were willing to send it to me for free. On top of that, I found a factory rebate from the manufacturer for $20 off that model.

So in less than an hour of searching, I saved $320, bringing the price of the range down to $680. If we sell the existing range for the $100-$150 price range I’m hoping for, I will have cut the price of the new range almost in half.

That’s a lot of money for one hour of work.

How has the Internet helped you save money?

Sooner or later, the Internet comes up with a solution for everything. Enter Coin Jar Calculator, a website that estimates how much the money in your coin jar is worth.

Since different coins have set weights–$10 in quarters weigh half a pound, $4.50 in nickels comes out to a pound, etc.–the site has you weigh different handfuls of coin, compares that to the overall weight of the jar, and comes up with an estimate for you of how much money is likely to be in there.

I don’t know how accurate Coin Jar Calculator is, but it certainly looks easier than counting all those coins. [Lifehacker]

Last week, I wore out the the drum unit on my printer. Which is a way of saying, I print a lot. In fact, printing is one of the biggest costs of my home office, and as such, I’ve learned some tricks to cut down and save money as best I can.

And for good reason, too. Inkjet ink is one of the most expensive fluids on earth. No, really. Look at this graph comparing it to other liquids:

[ReflectionOf.Me]

So, the number one way to save on printing is to get a laser printer. The toner for a laser printer will often cost less per page than inkjet ink, especially if you use the extended cartridge. For example, the high-yield black toner for my printer prints 5,000 pages per $65 cartridge, which equals $.013 per page. The similar inkjet ink yields 200 pages per $14 cartridge, which is $.07 per page. Therefore, the inkjet ink costs 5 times more than the toner cartridge.

Another tip is to get your cartridges refilled, which means you are only paying for the ink instead of a new cartridge and packaging. You don’t have to do this yourself–many stores will refill your cartridge for you.

Here are 5 Other Ways To Save Money On Printing:

1. “Print” To PDF: If you can, go paperless. Much of my research is printed to .PDF, which means that I save the document as a .PDF on my computer. That way I have a personal copy that I can refer to, but it’s not on paper. This kind of “printing” is free.

2. Print In Draft Mode: Most printers have a draft mode that print a lighter version of the document for you. Using this mode can extend the life of your cartridge, sometimes almost doubling it.

3. Print On Both Sides: Many printers have a duplexing option that allows you to print on both sides of the page. You can also duplex manually by turning each page around (or just reusing old paper), but I hear that it can damage some printers, so look into it before you do it.

4. Copy And Paste Before Printing: If you are printing from the internet, copy and paste the information into a document and spend some time deleting unnecessary graphics, ads, and extra pages at the end. You will be amazed how much the document will shrink.

5. Play With Fonts: Finally, don’t be afraid to change the font style or size. For example, I have a 489-page document that I regularly print in Times New Roman size 12 font. When I knock that down to size 11, the document drops to 420 pages, saving me 69 pages of printing–although it is harder to read. Likewise, changing the font itself can make a difference. That same 489-page document balloons up to 598 pages when I use 12-point Verdana and shrinks to 441 pages when I use 12-point Arial Narrow. So experiment.

A note of caution on this last point–there are document standards that you should respect in professional or academic situations. It’s not a good idea to print a resume using 10-point comic sans font if you want to avoid looking a little nutty. Play around with fonts and sizes only when printing for your own purposes and save the fully toned, properly formatted printing for when you need to show the document to someone else.

How do you save money on printing?

Most of us know that when you choose convenience in the grocery story–the food that has been sliced, diced, and pre-prepared for you–you pay for the privilege, but a recent article in ShopSmart, a magazine put out by ConsumerReports, demonstrated just how much.

The magazine sent their staffers to grocery stores in New York to compare the prices of “convenience” groceries such as pre-sliced apples or crumbled cheese to their whole counterparts. They found that sometimes you are paying a whopping 60% more for products that have been precut for you. Here’s the breakdown of what they found:

Baby carrots cost 63% more than whole carrots, at $3.99/lb. vs $1.49/lb. Since most baby carrots are whole carrots that have been sculpted down, that’s a pretty big savings. Switch to carrot sticks?

Broccoli florets cost 63% more than whole broccoli, at $3.99/lb vs. $1.49/lb. It takes approximately 30 seconds to cut a whole broccoli into florets.

Crumbled feta cheese costs 63% more than whole feta cheese, at $8.65/8 oz. vs. $3.23/8 oz. I didn’t know this one, but I did know that crumbled cheese molds faster than whole cheese.

Sliced granny smith apples cost 50% more than whole apples, at $3.97/lb. vs. $1.99/lb. Like the broccoli, that’s a lot to pay for a few minutes of work.

Ground beef patties cost 33% more than regular ground meat, at $5.99/lb. vs. $3.99/lb. You still have to handle the meat either way, right?

Cut-up chicken costs 25% more than whole chicken, at $1.99/lb vs. $1.49/lb. I can understand not wanting to cut up a whole chicken, but if you eat a lot of it, that’s a savings that’s hard to ignore.

The moral here? It sounds like you can passively add savings to your shopping cart just by opting for the more labor-intensive product. Convenience costs a lot.

And while we knew that, it’s still nice to see the numbers.

Have you been watching this Extreme Couponing show on TLC? It’s a whole show about people who use coupons to get thousands of dollars in food for a fraction of the price. In a recent episode, a woman paid $6.46 for $680 worth of groceries. That is impressive!

I’ve talked about using coupons to eat for cheap before on here, and while I still think extreme couponing is an impressive skill to have, there are some problems with it. For one thing, the food that you get isn’t very healthy. Coupons tend to be for brand-name food that is loaded with preservatives, fat, sugars, etc., so relying wholly on coupons is not a good way to get a healthy diet. Also, storing all this food is hard. The show depicts people stockpiling toilet paper in their spare shower and shoving boxes of cereal in their closet. It takes a lot of organization and time to make sure you aren’t wasting the food you’re getting. I mean, even mustard expires eventually.

And then there’s the time issue. When you add up the amount of time spent getting the coupons, researching the deals, shopping in different stores, organizing and storing the food–not to mention cooking it–extreme couponing sounds like a full-time job to me. And I wonder if some of the capable ladies that they have on this show would be better off using their time in a different way.

On the other hand, when they are saving 90% of their grocery bill, who can blame them for wanting to coupon?

What do you think of Extreme Couponing?