Isn't life filled of 'I wants'? Often in this day and age our 'I wants' can be immediately obtained - money or no money, cash or plastic fantastic, our 'I wants' can be fulfilled at our wish or close to; but at what cost?

Made with love treats are the best!

When we moved into this place in the city we downsized in the size of the house and yard considerably from our house we lived in for the previous 5 years in the country but the rent of course up-sized, and quite considerably so!  The thought between us at the time of the move was that this little place would get us up to the city and the kids into schooling and a year or two down the track (and hopefully being back on two or at least one and a half incomes) we would look at finding a bigger place. Well we are at the two year mark now and for us to up-size in this rental market we would be looking at around $100 or so extra per week!  That is what we jumped up to by moving here and we could increase that much again (just) but at what cost?  We would lose any ability to save, be living month to month and we would definitely be on the back foot financially again.  So moving will not be happening at this point in our lives and so we find ourselves saying...

"We Will Just Have To Make Do"

Restraint on our part now will help us reap the rewards later.  It took us a while to learn this lesson in life but I feel we are there now (mostly) :) Have you been in this position? Gosh it's a really hard place to be isn't it?



Although it is a cute little place we now live, warm and reasonably dry, located near some lovely little beaches, close to both our workplaces and has a cosy homely feel in general, one of the things that really doesn't work in this house for us is the kitchen - it is tiny! No storage and a very small amount of bench space. I really needed to be able to make the kitchen function better to support the costs savings we need to start making again.  For the past two years it has been get in and get out as fast as we can, no stock piling groceries, only shopping weekly as that is all the space we had and I didn't enjoy being in there for hours on end like I did at our old place.

We have a lovely little deck to sit and enjoy the sun

When we moved in we put our large fridge over an entry door and shut that off leaving the kitchen as one way in and one way out.  In the space beside the fridge we put a little storage cupboard so that we could fit in all our kitchen supplies.  This cupboard got me thinking about what we could do to help alleviate the lack of storage space for stockpiling.  So off I went down the Mitre 10 and purchased another storage cupboard for $70 - a $70 solution to saving on moving house....that's a bargain! ;) well in the least it will help us make do.



So after MrW worked his magic and put it together we placed it into the space we had in the laundry and it fitted perfectly.  We spent most of the weekend stripping the kitchen cupboards apart and re-organising everything :) Although it is now feeling a little more cluttered having the extra cupboard in the small space I am very thankful it has achieved the purpose! We were able to spread things out better, make each cupboard serve it's own purpose without overcrowding rendering it impossible to find anything and most of all we now have a cupboard that is just for stockpiling!

We went from this:

Our only food storage area and check out that jumble of plastic containers :/

To This:

A 'larder' again! Oh how I missed having one of these!

Ahhh nice and organised :)

I can't do much about the available bench space but by keeping the benches as clear as we can of clutter it will help.  Now it's time to start shopping fortnightly if we can and begin stocking up on items we use regularly as they come on sale and lets start to reduce the grocery budget!

I celebrated by making Scones for lunch and a Banana Cake for the boys to take away on school camp this week - some happy time in the kitchen :)