The Diary of a Frugal Family

This DIY Orange Peel Kitchen Spray smells amazing and more importantly, it does a great job cleaning your kitchen and bathroom surfaces.I love a good cleaning video as much as the next person but what I don't love is the message that you need to go out and buy a hundred and one different cleaning products in order to do your own cleaning at home.  You absolutely don't need to fill your trolley with a different cleaning product for each cleaning job around your house and a good cleaning product doesn't need to be filled with chemicals.Don't get me wrong, I'm not against all the … [Read more...]

Remember my post about the Christmas parcels we're making up for our local food bank?  Well today, I thought I'd give you a bit of an update...In case you missed that post, we're basically making some Christmas hampers for local families which we hope to include everything they'll need to cook their Christmas Dinner other than the turkey. ;-)  I'm aiming for eight parcels but I've started early so if I get enough for the eight then I'll do more if I have the chance.First things first, I got in touch with our local food bank to make sure that they would be OK with me making these … [Read more...]

Tuesday is National Random Acts of Kindness day so I thought I'd dust off this old post, give it a polish up and share it with you again because I want you all to be overflowing with as many ideas as possible to make someone's day!One single random act of kindness isn't going to change the world but it is going to make someone have a better day than they would have done otherwise.  It's going to make you feel better for doing it and as well as making the recipient feel better themselves, it's also going to increase the chances that they're going to be nice to someone else in … [Read more...]

This post is an advertisement feature in collaboration with EDF Energy. As always though, all thoughts and opinions are my own!You might remember from one of my recent weekly 'five frugal things I've done this week' posts that one thing we're really trying to focus on at the moment is saving some money on our energy bills. As a family of four with two teenagers, I've found over the last year that our energy usage has crept up which means that our bills are on the up too.It's not just about saving money though (although that's definitely a huge part of it), it's also about trying to … [Read more...]