Pinching Pennies
Margaret Maron
"Use it up, wear it out,
Make it do, or do without."
— New England Maxim
Growing up, we never had much money, so hand-me-downs were a way of life. In good years, we got two pairs of shoes: school shoes in the fall, Sunday shoes at Easter. And like our clothes, they never really fit well because Mother always made sure "there was room to grow." So I would start the school year in shoes and clothes that were too loose and finish the year in clothes that were too tight and shoes that pinched my feet.
I never quite had Dolly Parton's Coat of Many Colors, but Mother was handy with a sewing machine. She could and did take dresses and coats apart and restyle them. When clothes were too ragged to wear, she would cut the good parts into squares and triangles and make quilts.
On a farm, nothing ever goes to waste. Our barns and shelters were full of dented buckets, coils of baling wire, scraps of lumber, and odd pieces of ironware because "you never know what will come in handy." It became such a way of life that it's a wonder I haven't wound up on one of those reality shows about hoarders.
My first impulse is still to see if I can't make it myself from stuff on hand rather than hiring someone to do it or buying it in a store. Over the years, I taught myself to build stone walls, lay blocks, frame in a window, and repurpose kitchen cabinets. I've caned chairs, resized doors, reupholstered furniture, wired junked lamps, and reglazed windows.
When we finally added a real office onto the house a few years back, I wanted a big—a REALLY big—bulletin board, but the prices were shocking. A 4 x 6′ cork board cost five times more than I was willing to pay and it wasn't as big as I wanted anyhow. After rummaging around in a DIY store, I came home with a sheet of brown fiberboard. It was as ugly as homemade sin, but it was half an inch thick, measured 4 x 8′ and cost only $6. It soaked up four coats of white paint before all the brown disappeared. But when I nailed it up over my work counter and edged it out in scrap molding, I finally had the bulletin board I'd always dreamed about.
Recently we paid several hundred dollars to have a professional take down a 40-year-old sweet gum tree that endangered the foundation of a rental house we've acquired—a case of spending money to save money, I suppose. Actually, I wanted to cut the tree down myself, and twenty years ago, I would have. I also wanted to try my hand at sculpting a couple of the resulting logs with a chainsaw, but for some reason, my husband objected to that as well; and these days I try not to give him a heart attack. (Hospital stays are $$$$$)
My all-time favorite money saver came when we were very young and nearly broke and still lived in New York. My husband was getting his master's and we had just had a baby. An elderly childless friend was going into assisted living and offered to sell us her homeplace: an 1880s wooden farmhouse with a turret and fifty acres of land only a few miles from the farm I grew up on. Her price? $5000. We didn't have $500, but I so wanted that dilapidated house. It had stained glass windows in the turret, heart pine flooring, and wraparound porches with gingerbread molding. But it had no indoor plumbing, the roof was shot, the wiring was pre-WWII, and there was extensive termite damage. It was only later that I came to realize how lucky we'd been because that house would have been a time and money pit. If we had bought it, I would have done most of the restoration myself and I would have poured every ounce of creativity I possessed into it, not into writing. Not all bargains are bargains, and sometimes an unanswered prayer can be the most economical thing that every happened.
What's yours?
