May Days

Remember me talking about the great deal I got on a 16x20 photo canvas from canvasondemand.com? Well it arrived the other day and looks fabulous!! The colors are brilliant, and it looks right at home on the mantel:

I went ahead and pulled down the other two 8x10 canvases that I had by the stairs so that they could snuggle up next to the big one. Here is another view of the whole fireplace/mantel...

I am very happy with the order, and I highly recommend them!!

So I have started another hobby, and I recently finished a "project" for it: my coupon box! It has about 30 envelopes that are labeled with categories of coupons. Right now I have them in a photo storage box, but it is a bit too big so I am going to keep my eye out for a smaller one.

To clarify, I had been using coupons before but it was really just like everyone else--make my regular shopping list and whatever is on there that I have a coupon for then I use it. But there are two big differences in this way of couponing: 1) only use coupons for things when they are on sale 2)stockpile enough product to last 6-8wks until it goes on sale again. That is how you save big money! I have only been doing it a couple of weeks now. I subscribed to the Sunday/Wednesday paper, and also to the magazine All You (it has lots of coupons in it).

Now don't get it confused with that stupid pseudo-reality show Extreme Couponing...we in the coupon game do NOT like that show. It is so unrealistic. Nobody is going to have that many coupons, need that much mustard, or spend that much time "couponing" every week. Plus a lot of the stores break their coupon rules just for the effect of the show. Hopefully these crazy people donate all of their unneeded items to charity after their 15 minutes of fame on TV...

Anywho, I have a decent amount of coupons already and have already done 3 successful shopping trips! Two were at Homeland, and one was at CVS. At all of them I saved 60-70% off of my total bill! Right now I am just working on getting my stockpile up so I am still doing most of my basic grocery shopping at Walmart. But once I get going in a month or two, I should be saving big time! Me and my mom are each other's coupon buddy so we always talk about good sales and exchanged unused coupons. I also have a couple other girls at work who are big couponers that are teaching me tricks! Nick and I are so used to buying generic everything that this is like a luxury to finally have name-brand food, LOL!