Miss Thrifty

A millionaire businessman, Matt Stockdale, is launching a new energy company – charging gas and electricity at cost. Fat cats, begorrah!

The company is called At Cost Energy. It isn’t up and running yet – at the time of writing, an application to become one of OFGEM’s licensed energy supply companies is going through the system – but prospective customers are being invited to register their interest at the At Cost Energy website. There is no obligation to sign up, but At Cost Energy is hoping for an indication of how much energy it may need to buy, with a view to going “live” later this year.

I have registered – this initiative is timely. (more…)

The Cath Kidston sale is currently in progress on the company’s website. As regular readers will know, I am v. partial to Cath Kidston but bristle with indignation at the RRPs. This time around, some of the discounts are stingy but others are pretty good, so I thought I’d round up the most bargainous of the bunch for you. Here they are, divided into the website sections:

Accessories: nothing to write home about here, unless you’re in the market for thick woolly scarves.

Bags: bonanza! The cowboy tote bag (left), made from oilcloth with leather trim, is reduced from £55.00 to £30.00.

I love the cowboy print – I even have it on my bedroom wallpaper – and there are a few cowboy bags in the sale section this time. The cowboy messenger bag is reduced from £38.00 to £25.00. The cowboy bucket bag is reduced from £40.00 to £25.00. I hope this doesn’t mean that the cowboy print is for the chop…

Bathroom: washbags down from £18.00 to £12.00. (more…)

You can get spare parts for just about everything these days, but Miss Thrifty reader Emily has a wee problem. (Did I just write that? Oh dear, I think I did.) Her question:

Please help Miss Thrifty – moved into a lovely new house a couple of months ago and smashed the cistern lid on the first night. Any bright ideas on where to buy a new lid? Really don’t want to have to replace the whole toilet!!!

Time to reach for the Thrifty Rolodex… I called Steve, the UK’s leading toilet spare parts supplier, to see if he could help.

Steve sighed and said that despite stocking just about every toilet spare part you can imagine, from conical sealing washers to Wirquin Jollyflush outlet valves, he no longer stocked replacement cistern lids. Apparently he’d had to pack them in industrial quantities of bubble wrap and would spend sleepless nights  worrying about smashes and breakages in transit.

However he did provide some excellent advice for Emily: (more…)

IKEA sucks? According to the latest news reports, our long-standing love affair with the adored bastion of low-priced, Swedish furniture could be coming to an end.

Here’s The Mail on Sunday:

A weakening financial performance, missed store targets, planning headaches and enticing overtures from homegrown retail chains have all bruised Ikea.

And according to deeper analysis of its figures, the retailer cannot rest the blame solely on a weak economy…The retailer’s profitability has fallen away every year since 2004 in the UK, and with the exception of a bumper sales year in 2007 at the peak of the spending boom the amount we have handed over in each store has followed a similar trajectory.

The newspaper points to new ranges and cut-priced homeware initiatives from other retailers such as T.K. Maxx and Argos. It also suggests that with interest rates and mortgage repayments as low as they are, people are “banding up” when it comes to replacing cheap household products and furniture bought during the boom.

Fair enough. What I find most interesting of all, however, are the comments left by the readers. They have their own, very strong opinions about why they won’t be returning to IKEA. (more…)

Next time your cooker, fridge, lawnmower or washing machine breaks, don’t buy a new one. Buy a spare part, and fit it yourself.

We did this a while back, when our fan-assisted oven became a fan-unassisted oven. We couldn’t get the oven hot enough for cooking; this is what happens, when you buy a house with a kitchen straight out of a DIY shop bargain bin. We thought we’d have to pay someone to come and replace the fan element, or buy a new cooker and have someone come and fit that. Both options were disgustingly expensive.

Here in our cushioned First World, we are accustomed to a disposable culture: buying up cheap things, then buying up another batch of cheap things when the first lot fall to pieces. To some extent, however, the recession has put paid to this mindset. Our next door neighbour Colin, a TV repairman, is a good barometer for this. Two years ago he was complaining, bitterly, that people were binning their sturdy old goggle boxes for junky flatscreen jobs; these days, he is once again rushed off his feet with TV repair work. (more…)

I like Vax. Their products aren’t wildly expensive – a snip, compared to the spendy Dyson range – but their vacuum cleaners and hoovers upright models are very sturdy. Our vac is a Vax, kindly donated by Frugal Grandma’s next door neighbour, Dorothy. I suspect that it is decades old: it is one of those round orange beasts with the 1980s vibe. It weighs a ton and heaving it up and down the stairs is a pain, but it runs and runs and runs. I suspect that these old Vax cleaners are like cockroaches: the Apocalypse will come and go and they will still be hanging around, roaring away and doing their thing.

For this reason, the latest Argos offer caught my eye. (These days the Argos press bods send me a weekly e-mail with details of that week’s discounts, which is quite handy.) It goes by the title of Vax Power 2 Anniversary Edition Bagless Upright Cleaner.

It is also going for a bargain price: £49.99, reduced from £159.99.

Vax Bagless Upright Cleaner from Argos

Back in March I wrote about the joys of Cath Kidston wallpaper - and how places such as Focus DIY sell rolls of paper that are “very similar” to the original versions, but a lot cheaper (taps nose conspiratorially).  

It is one of the most popular posts on this blog – second only to the Make Do And Mend post, in fact – so having read an e-mail from Miss Thrifty reader Claire, I feel duty-bound to share her news in full:

Thank you so much for this top tip. I was after the same Cath Kidston wallpaper and just couldn’t justify the cost. I went into Focus DIY - who are now discontinuing the Millie wallpaper and selling it off for £5 a roll. What a bargain!!!

Thanks Claire!

By the way dear reader, if you are a visitor from the future and you are stamping your foot because you are too late for this bargain, take heart. You can still buy these wallpapers online, for £13.99 a roll, from wallpaperdirect.

This is the industrial-strength rendition of my Hassle-free oven cleaning post. Trust me: the inside of your oven door could look like it was painted with Cuprinol, several times over, and this would still make it look like new.

For this heavy-duty version, you will need:

• Liberal quantities of bicarbonate of soda.
• Water.
• A bowl.
• A cloth.
• A wallpaper scraper.

Yes, that is all! (more…)

Many of this blog’s visitors arrive via Google. Many of the search queries that lead people here are in the form of questions. The answers, I haz them…

why are the tesco voucher codes not working

Because you have the caps lock on. Either that, or your codes have expired; go here for the latest ones.

why do wedding cakes cost so much?

Because, dear heart, they’re a bitch to make. Think about it: you bake several cakes, faff arround with dowelling supports and then spend a gazillion years on the icing and decoration. Even then, it’s not over: you have to take the damned thing apart, get it to the venue and assemble it again without breaking or toppling anything. When I got married I decided to make my own wedding cake and save money. Four tiers and several sugar rose cascades later, the painful and protracted experience was seared upon my soul.

how to make a fake wedding cake

Ah, so I’ve put you off making a bona fide wedding cake. (more…)

We ran out of floor cleaner so I’ve started making my own, out of some of the old-fashioned tricks and treats that now grace my cleaning cupboard. It costs pennies and works just as well as the relatively expensive, chemical equivalent. The tiled floors also seem to dry more quickly, although I don’t know why that is.

Here is the recipe (if you can call it that): (more…)