Battening down the hatches

Regard the difference between:
Cheap bleach in a 2 litre bottle from asda or similar
Thick bleach in a branded bottle.
There is a huge price difference.

joan misread your post and thought you said for "bears to climb up" !!! Wonderful mental picture - so disappointed when I realised it was just because glasses needed a wipe!

There is a huge difference in prices of Paracetamol even within Boots. The budget pack of 16x 500mg caplets (red and white pack) is 16p. Then it jumps to 45p for 16 Another offer on line is 32 for 69p. The branded Panadol is vastly more expensive but the active ingredient is exactly the same. I never buy any but the cheapest.

The Poundshop near my sister has paracetamol packs of 16 which are three times as expensive as Morrisons. You just have to do a bit of comparing.

Jess I have one! Bought in a mad moment as it was reduced! It's a deep jade green so could be an alternative for B'ham. Five years old if it's a day!

Poundshop took a `hammering` last night. Mainly, due to items that seem specially produced by some manufacturer with less weight/smaller package than comparable items in the supermarkets.

The trick is to be aware that some items ARE cheap but Poundshop must make their profit somewhere, so they get up to all sorts of tricks with other items that carry nondescript names.
Sticking to well known brands will help but even then when you are fully aware of price comparison you then need WEIGHT/SIZE compare.

Perhaps we all need a uni course in `Retail Trickery`.

Agree re clothes - keep em out of sight and suddenly people think you have a new thing. Sometimes they even come into fashion again. Apparently Oriental is in this season. (I confess to picking up this info reading a trashy gossip mag in the cafe)
So any Chinese jackets etc in the back of the cupboard - time to flaunt em.

Another free gadget in my garden is my riddler (garden sieve). I got an old polystyrene box and cut it down to size, strengthening it with duct tape, and got the fan guard off a broken pedestal fan. I sieve the lumpy soil through the fan guard and good friable soil falls into the box. Even the tape was free - left behind my my son's flatmate when he moved away.

I love to be in the garden, wearing my black wellies and old clothes, throwing the ball for the dog, and digging, weeding, planting or whatever needs doing. Sometimes I come in looking like the swamp creature from hell, though not recently as we have had no rain for three months.

There is a grassy pathway near a stream very near my home, and every so often the council slashes the long grass. I'm always out there after it's dried a bit, with a few empty chicken feed sacks, gathering the hay for my garden or my chickens. I like to grow spuds in a raised bed of hay, with a compost/soil mix inserted into parts of it, containing seed potatoes. As the spuds grow, more hay is added.

When you look around, it is amazing how much free stuff you can find. For instance, before the council comes and does its slashing, there are plenty of huge weeds along that path, suitable for the chickens. English plantain and dandelions are favourites. Free chicken food in other words.

I did a major pruning of my citrus trees, and now use the pruned branches stuck into the soil against a fence, for beans to climb up.

There's no end to it all really....

Forgot to say that when the hook broke completely we tied it on with plastic string and it worked like that for quite a while.

Even I can fix our upstairs loo when it stops flushing - the handle that you press down is on a rod which has another rod hinged to it by a sort of hook-and-eye, and that second rod pulls up a plunger that lets the water through. Every so often the hook-and-eye comes adrift and has to be refastened.

The press-button kind of flush mechanism is a mystery to me though. The old-fashioned overhead cistern with a nice sturdy chain to pull was almost foolproof.

grace dont phone a plumber until you have looked at it, my DH is a plumber (in another life ) I bet its something you can do yourself.

Emoticon .... not emotion! Predictive text! Bah humbug.

grace before you call out the plumber why not try and see if you can fix it yourself? If its just that the flushing mechanism isn't working it is usually easily fixed. I fixed ours! [proud of myself] emotion

gracesmum, will the plumber do a cheaper job if he knows you're over a certain age? He might? My hairdresser keeps Tuesdays and Wednesdays for her 'pensioners' (!) so I'm off there tomorrow to get an inch or so off my flowing (white) locks.....

Hello Annsixty and welcome. I am very new to this too, but already feel a part of it and have taken advice from many of the threads. I hope you feel as comfortable here as I have been made to feel.

Now I'm going to read this thread in the hope that some tips on saving money will rub off on me.

Gally- what a brilliant idea! Really, all we do at Christmas is pass presents back and forth for no particular reason, other than it's expected of us. Yours is a great idea - it'll be a laugh and it'll benefit the charity, too!

Hello Annsixty...
... its thanks to this thread that I've remembered how good a med/large chicken can be! Sunday roast, all veg form the allottment. Monday cold with pickles and salad, Tues the leg meat will make a curry, and the bones will be boiled to make a lovely minestrone soup for Thurs again using home-grown veg. Pudding has been a large summer fuit pudding (crustless white bread reduced to 50p. in M&S bought at the same time as the chicken).

Welcome annsixty and especially to the topic I raised about trying to make ends meet. After all my good intentions, we now have a loo which has stopped flushing - so it's call out the plumber time, and we all know what they cost. Might have to cancel next month's hairdresser too - but I forgot - DH hit the big 6-5 yesterday so untold wealth courtesy of DWP is winging its way to us [irony/heavy sarcasm] emoticon

I like this thread .
I have been invited to spend Christmas with D3's in-laws so there will be 9 adults and 4 small children; presents are to be limited to £5 per person and all are to be obtained at a 'Chazzer' (charity shop) and be suitable/or not, for each recipient. Money will definitely be saved all round and fun will be had - I can imagine present opening on Christmas morning will be hilarious.

There's a programme about the Poundshop tonight, Secrets of the Poundshop, 8pm on Channel 4.

Nobody's mentioned the Poundshop. I get all sorts there.

Hello annsixty - pleased to meet you! I joined Gransnet last year and I would be lost without it. We're all different, have different views, but rub along nicely in the main! Don't you be worrying about being lacking in confidence, either - no-one will know! soop has just said that she doesn't have any qualms about bringing up her hopes and fears, and neither do I. Please feel comfortable about talking to us.

annsixty I'm happy that you've decided to stay. GN is a life-line for the likes of me. I had no confidence. I was lonely and depressed. And then I found Gransnet. I cannot begin to thank the lovely people that I now "connect with." Whatever problem bubbles up from time to time, I have no qualms about expressing my hopes and fears on this forum. You, too, will benefit from the kindness of strangers...

Hi annsixty and welcome. There's lots of room for every individual on here and plenty of threads to keep you interested. You can start your own, too.

When interest rates were good I used to live off my creditcard, pay everything as soon as it was due each month, but get interest on the money I'd put into the bank. I impulse buy terribly when I do go into town or go to a supermarket and sometimes think I should go shopping more often as I tend to get overwhelmed and buy too much [I always point out to whoever serves me that 'I don't get out much']. Our local surgery has a bookshelf full of really good books for sale so it's always worth seeing what they have on offer. By the way, what are the sort of things that Aldi are good for; I haven't been there for a while. I spend a lot of money on cd's and must learn how to download things, although now I've discovered Radio 6 I prefer listening to that all day. And I've stopped [well, almost stopped ] betting on the horses because I won so little it was costing me more in petrol picking my 'winnings' up than I'd won. Do price comparisons for pretty much everything when policies come up for renewal; it's amazing how many people just pay the same company each year. And, we must support anything to do with petrol prices and utilites bills, because in this country we're being screwed over badly with what we're made to pay.