Tag: thrift store

Bike For My Longer Legs!

April 28, 2020

Bike For My Longer Legs!

Lucas has a unidirectional purposeful mind when it comes to what he wants. As a three year old he told us for over six months that all he wanted for Christmas was a bike. That was it. Nothing else. He didn’t break it up like the girls do (tell Grandma Joanne one want, Grandma Tina another want, each Aunt a different want, and each sibling a different want), no. Mister Super Focused always just asks for one thing only.

Well, for the past four months, actually since just after Christmas, Lucas has been asking for a “bike for my longer legs” or “a boy bike that fits my long legs” for his upcoming May birthday. He’s been singularly focused on that one wish.

I figured that if the thrift stores ever open back up I would get a boy bike with 16″ wheels.

Instead, Grandma Tina came over to drop off the coolest little pool – pics on that one in another blog! – and a special surprise for Lucas.

He was one super happy boy!

And being the lovable big brother he is, he let Thea ride it too! Just because “she loves to ride my little bike which will be hers now!”

Thank you, Grandma Tina! Thank you to Grandma Tina’s landlord whose son had outgrown this one and wanted to give it away so another little boy could love it. I promise you, this bike will be loved for as long as Lucas can fit it and in his fond boyhood memories when he’s older!

We had to drag him off of the “coolest long leg bike that fits me” well after dark and he kept going back out to check on it in the shed. The following two days he was outside bouncing from the pool to the bike without stopping for the entire day to break only for food (most of which he took outside to eat while on his bike).

Typical boy.

No. Wait a minute… Typical Tart child.

I asked him yesterday, “Lucas, what do you want for your birthday now?”

He said, “my house with stairs!” Me too, dude. Me too.

Thank you for reading!

Type at you later,

~Nancy Tart

Hand-Me-Downs

A radio talk show guy’s comment made me ponder my absolute love of hand-me-downs and thrift shops.

September 4, 2018

Hand-Me-Downs

Driving to pick up a long-distance call, I was listening to Christian talk radio.  A guy comes on talking about how he and his family love hand-me-downs.

I can totally relate!  All my life I’ve loved, and lived in, hand-me-downs.  When my kids get a bag of clothes, they all get excited.  It’s sorting, trying on, modeling, and deciding how to “fix” something they love to make it fit (sewing skills).  Anything we can’t use (and everything we grow out of or don’t have room for) gets passed on.   We only allow them to keep what they can fit “in their drawers” and on their bit of hanging rack space.   Rebeccah, who loves shoes, has created some interesting storage adaptations to stretch her allotted space to keep extra shoes.

Kids grow so fast!  At one stage, Kimberly jumped through one full shoe size every month for about six months!  During this same time, Jaquline sprouted through three shirt sizes and Rebeccah’s legs stretched by nearly a foot!

We had quite a few bags of shoes and clothes to give away!  Most, we had received as hand-me-downs but they looked practically new!  Lots of happy kids got to pass around clothes in this growth spurt.  The girls like to plan who can get their clothes – if anyone we know needs them, if anyone is their size and is okay with used clothing, or if they know a friend who “loved” some outfit.  Otherwise, we donate to Alpha-Omega or Betty Griffin Thrift.

The radio talk show guy was mentioning that he was super excited one day because a friend gave him some amazing hand-me-downs that were almost new and stylish.  He was showing one off at work and realized he was wearing the emblem for a college he didn’t attend!  So he almost felt embarrassed telling a coworker it was a hand-me-down.  Then, he stopped.  He said we are to be good stewards and trading clothing around if it still has wear in it is being a good steward of the materials (less waste) and finances (less purchases made).   He told his coworker that the money he and his family saved on clothing allowed them to give more financially to charities they supported.

I had never thought of our hand-me-downs as “good stewardship” in that way!  I have always told others that it saves waste (why throw something away when someone else can use it?) and it stretches our budget.  I never actually thought of what I do with the money I save.

We do give a lot of what we make, sometimes we end up giving more in time than in money, but we still help in a lot of places monetarily.

When we do buy clothes, it’s usually underwear (I do buy that new from target on “clearance,” it seems some character is always going out of style), sneakers, or jeans.  We go to the thrift shops on the day when said clothing is x% off or wait for an end-of-season sale (thrift shops do that too).  So, annually, we spend about $300 on all 8 of us.

I never really thought about how much money I’d spend without hand-me-downs.  Using thrift shop prices (I still wouldn’t buy new): I figured that for each growing child, I’d spend about $80 twice a year, and for each adult, I’d spend about $40 a year (what we already buy from thrift stores can’t be counted as savings).  So for our family, that would be about (160×6)+(40×2)=$1,040 annually in addition to the $300 we already spend!

$1,040 is almost a rent payment.

That’s about three weeks’ of work.

Then I realized that I never buy anything new – furniture, animal cages, books, movies, games, toys, yarns, craft stuff… the list is endless.  Except for food, most cell phones, a few tools, the coffee maker, most mattresses, and one computer, we’ve taken hand-me-downs or bought resale items when it comes to everything else.  And we donate what we no longer need.  Oh yeah, and the drum set was new – Louis got a full size eight piece drum set on a clearance sale for $120 about 10 years ago.

We save for items we want (like our couch).  We had a hand-me-down one that served great for a while, but Louis wanted a big one that all of us could sit on at once and it would double as a kid bed when guests came.  We ended up saving and finally bought a really nice used sectional that had two backless sections that doubled as storage (bonus & I love dual-purpose!) and seats six adults without using the backless parts – it was on clearance at Alpha-Omega Thrift so we spent only $165 of the $200 we’d saved for it.  (Yes, Louis was shopping, so we ended up buying $35 of future birthday gifts while we were there.) And one of my sisters said “let me crash here, this is comfy!”

The radio guy quoted the scripture about “where your treasure is, there your heart is also.”

Yes, my treasures are in my children, my family, my friends, the really important things in life.  Our hand-me-down and thrift-store lifestyle helps me to understand that even though we have some cool stuff, it’s just temporary and I’m not really concerned with it.  I mentally note that I’m wearing sandals from one sister, a skirt Christina grew out of that was a hand-me-down from a friend, and a shirt from another sister… all hand-me-downs!

I’m sure the radio guy is right.  Our family is able to do as much giving as we do because we don’t spend “full retail” on temporary items.  Our treasure is in heaven.  Our treasure is the character growing in our six awesome blessings on loan from God…

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

School Supplies

School supplies on a budget – our methods

August 31, 2018

School Shopping

Lots of people do school shopping in late July or August, just before school starts.

Since we do school year-round, I’m constantly replacing school supplies by stopping in at my favorite thrift shops and scooping up extra pencils, notebooks, erasers, or expo markers (the most commonly used items in our school).

I do try to take advantage of the school sales that pop up at the end of school supply shopping months.

Take notebooks: one independent writer in our home goes through an average of five single-subject notebooks a year!  (That’s not a lot when you consider that each notebook usually has 70 pages.)  Our history, science, and most upper math courses require a paragraph or page of written work.  Grammar practice is to edit said paragraphs or pages and rewrite them correctly.  So we use a lot of paper.  I prefer to use notebooks because they keep all the papers together and they are easier to carry than loose leaf paper (we often do work in remote locations).  This year I have four independent writers and one still using training paper (the ones from tablets with three-line-spaces).  But my training-writer is writing times tables and measures this year.  She will need one or two notebooks.  I always add one extra for each student because I would rather have extra than to buy them at 4 to 10 times the sale price!  (Most of us homeschool on a budget, don’t we?)

Oh, yes, another trick I learned was to buy college-ruled notebooks because you get extra lines at the bottom.  (Silly, but it also makes you write smaller thus more work ends up on one page.)

We bought 22 notebooks this year!  Staples & Officemax both claimed the “normal” price for a college-ruled store-brand notebook with 70 pages was $2.49.  I know Walmart has them for $1.20 or so and the thrift shops have partially used ones for $0.50. They were on sale for $0.25, usually I can find them for $0.10, but this year if someone had them super cheap, I missed that sale.  Shopping the sales essentially saved us $20.90 just on notebooks.  (The receipts claimed we “Saved” way more, but I base my savings off the cheapest normal price, not the inflated office supply store price.)

Pencils, erasers, markers, rulers, and other assorted small things I usually buy from thrift stores because you can get a lot more used items less expensive than the sale price on new ones.  Rebeccah does Sunday School and likes to buy cute craft stuff for it, which is also less expensive (and a much larger collection for choose from) at the thrift stores.

Backpacks are another thrift store buy.  I generally choose to spend less than five dollars on a backpack.  Someone’s hand-me-down from last year often has a lot of wear left in it.  We use backpacks for school stuff, travel bags (you can only carry what you can fit in your backpack), and overnight bags for Grandma’s house trips.  Even Lucas has a backpack (a cute smaller Cars one we found for a dollar at a thrift store).  He’s funny, when we’re headed to drop off at college, I’ll say “grab your school stuff.”  (Generally, a writing tablet or book)  Lucas puts two books (usually two the bigger girls have been reading – lately a favorite has been Prince Caspian), his crayon box, and his tablet in his backpack and will say “I’m ready for my school!”  His backpack swallows him!

We have learned to use the before-school sales to help keep our expenses low yet still get the items we like to use.  (Filler paper is cheaper than using notebooks, but I’ve learned notebooks are neater and easier.)  The older girls need computer paper for some college assignments and CAP work, so we also tend to buy computer paper during the sales times as they will have some super mail-in rebate offer or something.

The coolest part of shopping for school supplies is the practical math lessons that go along with it!  (I can find lessons in everything!)

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

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