Carpet Cleaning

Maintaining what you have is one of the best ways to keep from having to spend extra money to replace something. A huge example of this is carpets. In my house, carpet is everywhere except for the kitchen and bathrooms. If we had to replace our carpet it would be a huge expense.

We just moved into our house a little over a year ago, and since it was new, the carpet was new also. I keep up with the cleaning pretty well, especially in the high traffic areas of our living room/dining room, so I thought giving the carpets a thorough cleaning would be pretty simple. Over the last 3 weeks I've cleaned the carpets in the whole downstairs, as well as our stairs and upstairs hallway, master bedroom, and 3rd floor loft. My grandmother has a Hoover Steamvac, which I was able to borrow.

It is a pretty big project, so I was really glad that my mom was able to help me with the downstairs, especially when I did the stairs by myself - that was way harder! In preparation I vacuumed the whole downstairs, then mom and I got everything up off the floor. We moved some of the larger pieces, like our dining room table, but left the bookshelves and couches in place.

The Steamvac is great and pretty simple to use, but it does take a little while because you have to go back over the wet carpet a few times to remove the excess water. This is the tank that holds the water with the cleaning solution; it has a handle to carry and a built in measuring cup for the cleaning solution.

The best thing about it is that it really gets the carpet clean. The tank that holds the dirty water is pretty disgusting after using it, but it is the proof that the carpet is getting clean!

This is some of the dirty water - nasty!

And this is a huge clump of hair, dirt, dust - and I vacuumed the carpet right before I steam cleaned it! This was the loft, which has less traffic than the downstairs.

The scary thing to me is that my carpet was that dirty - we keep the house clean, we don't have any pets, and our house is new. It sure is incentive to keep up with my cleaning, and to routinely do some hardcore cleaning with the steamvac. This will keep our house clean for our every day living, and also help to keep the value of our carpet, which ads to the value of our house.

A steamvac like this one is actually pretty affordable. Here is a similar machine on Amazon priced at around $160 new. This comes with the stair attachment that I used too. My grandmother has had hers for over 10 years, so it has paid for itself several times over now.

I have also seen similar steamvacs on sale recently for around $100. The cost to rent a machine is around $50 and a steam cleaning service is even more, so this is an investment that will pay for itself very quickly.

I am marking my calendar to borrow my grandmother's steamvac in 6 months so that I can keep up with these carpets!

2 great offers

Request a free insulated freezer shopping bag from Sam's Club! You do not need a membership to Sam's club to request this freebie! Click here for the form, but hurry, there is a limited number available.

Sign up for the Special K newsletter and you will be able to print a buy one, get one free coupon good for Special K cereal! Click here to sign up!




Thanks, Deal Seeking Mom!

More photo freebies!

I forgot to post about this when I was putting together my free photo resource post yesterday!

Get 25 free photo cards from SeeHere - use the code newbaby

These cards do not have to be Valentines cards, and they do not all have to be the same style and design. Shipping for 25-50 cards is around $5 but it looks like you can get 24 for only $2.49 shipping.

I ordered my Christmas cards through See here and they turned out amazing. I highly recommend! Note: if you used this code to get the free cards around Christmas time you will need to make a new account (use a different email) for this to work.

Thanks to Nicole's Nickels for the heads up.

Free Photo prints

I love getting pictures printed, but the expense can really add up. There are so many opportunities to get cheap or even free pictures printed. These vary from time to time, especially around holidays.

Many sites will often give you free prints if you are a new member.

Join Shutterfly, Snapfish, SeeHere, or Kodak Gallery and get 50 free prints through each site when you first sign up. Be aware that you will have to pay for shipping, which usually comes to just a few dollars!

Right now there are a lot of Valentine's Day related photo sales. One of these sales is for 3 free Valentines photo cards from Shutterfly. Enter code 3FREECARDS at checkout, and just pay for shipping. It also looks like you may be able to make any theme greeting card, not just the Valentines ones.

Through 1/27/10 you can get 100 free prints from Snapfish with any purchase (even a single print!). Code is PRINTSNEW. This is valid for new AND current customers. You will have to pay for shipping (around $5) but that works out to 5 cents a print!

A new website I just recently heard about is York Photo. Sign up with them and get 40 free prints!

One of the great things about being members of these photo sites is that they will often run promotions that give you freebies or other special offers. I always take a quick look through the emails they send me to see what the current offers are.

I hope you are able to use these offers to get some of those Christmas pictures printed!

Thanks to Moms Need to Know, BabyCheapskate, and MoneySavingMethods for some of these deals!

Acme this week

This week at Acme is a great opportunity get some produce on sale with the $1 sale. The following are all priced at $1 this week:

Celery
Onions (3 lb.)
Eat Smart Veggies (12 oz, broccoli is pictured)
Fresh express salad (spinach, garden salad, and cole slaw)
Mushrooms (6 oz)
Baby carrots (1lb)
Garlic (5 oz)
Minced garlic (jar)
Scallions (5 oz)

While it is tempting to get a ton of fresh produce when it is on sale, I am going to try to be careful with the amount I buy this week, so that none of it ends up in my food waste picture on Friday!

Check out coupon match-ups for Acme this week thanks to Mindi @ Moms Need to Know! There is a pretty good deal on several General Mills products, along with some free toothpaste!

Food Waste Friday

This week I had to toss about half of this Half & Half. Does that mean I only wasted a quarter of it? While trying to figure out if it was good still or not I learned that you can freeze half & half. So next time I will freeze some, and hopefully it will not end up in my food waste picture again!

One of the biggest things that I have learned by participating in Food Waste Friday is to purchase less perishables when I go shopping, especially fruits and veggies. I end up shopping every week, at least to get the few great sales, so its easy to just buy enough fruit for that week instead of stocking up for the whole month. The other thing I have found is that when there is a great deal on a specific fruit and I want to stock up, I just choose not to buy other fruits at the same time. Sure we end up eating oranges for 2 weeks, but after that we are ready for something different, and we didn't waste anything!

Thanks as always to Kristen @ The Frugal Girl for her food waste inspiration!

Shrimp Corn Chowder recipe

One of the ways that we've worked to save money is by cutting back on our eating out. When we got married, we both saw eating out more as a "right" instead of a luxury. Homemade is way cheaper, but casseroles and pot pie can get very mundane. I've tried to get more creative with meal ideas, especially by borrowing from things that we would order when going out to eat. Even if the main ingredient is more expensive than chicken, you save a ton by making it at home!

This week I started with a recipe from Real Simple (I got a subscription for Christmas).

Shrimp is not usually the most frugal of ingredients, but I wait until frozen shrimp goes on sale for about $4.50 a pound, and then we get a 2 pound bag. This usually lasts us a few months, by using it more as a garnish or accent with different meals. And since we use it occasionally, there is room in the budget!

The Recipe:

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 leeks (white and light green parts), chopped sub. onion juice
1 fennel bulb, chopped sub. celery
kosher salt and black pepper
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 8-ounce bottle clam juice sub. chicken stock
3 cups whole milk sub. 1% milk
1 pound potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3/4 pound cooked peeled and deveined medium shrimp
1 10-ounce package frozen corn sub. canned corn
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice omit


I melted the butter, added the celery for a few minutes, then stirred in the flour, salt, and pepper

Next, added the chicken stock, onion juice, milk, and potatoes. After potatoes were mostly tender I added the corn.

I chopped up the shrimp a little, then added it to the soup and heated everything through.

We garnished with a little crumbled bacon (suggested by Real Simple)

We really liked how this came out, though I think next time I might add a little spinach for some more color and texture. If we had ordered this out in a restaurant, we probably would have paid between $6-$8 a bowl for this dinner.