Blogs We Love: Tiny House Blog

 Tiny House Blog is exactly what is says on the tin; a blog about about tiny house and small home design. Begun by Kent Griswold in 2007, Tiny House Blog has been documenting and commenting on the small housing movement for over five years. Daily articles feature book reviews, design plans, interviews, explorations of different construction techniques, reviews of high-efficiency or alternative energy appliances,  and beautifully photographed profiles of real life small houses and tiny homes.

While some of the articles may strike casual readers as a bit extreme, Tiny House Blog features some excellent ideas for efficiently using space in a small home, budget design ideas and tons of articles and links for DIY home repair and construction projects. The advice in an article like "Ten Tips for Decorating a Studio Apartment" may seem obvious to anyone who's lived in one for more than a week, but the blog showcases a wealth of creative, innovative ways in which many individuals are building the space that meets their requirements.

 The reasons why people may wish to live in a smaller home are as varied as the types of dwellings and the people who live in them, but one thing many have in common is the desire for quality materials and furnishings over the quantity of square footage. Though the craftsmen-style cottage so often featured is not for everyone, the interiors of these unique homes offer inspiration and decorating ideas for customizing your own home, whether it's in a space of 300 square feet or 3,000, and how you might do it yourself with reclaimed materials. Some of our favorites we've seen over the last couple of years are: this gorgeous circular shower (part of an entry on Malissa Tack's Perfect Retreat), a pictorial on the tiny cottages of faubourg marigny and how to find and use reclaimed materials. You don't have to live in a 120 square feet to appreciate a good use of space, unique features, or unusual dwellings. Tiny House Blog is about the tiny house movement, but it's also about refocusing, and appreciating quality over quantity. While we can take or leave the lofted-beds, that's a lifestyle we love.

Blogs we love: Stuff I Put On Myself by Natalie Dee

Welcome to another regular feature of Cheap and Cheerful: Blogs we love. Once a month, we will profile and link to blogs we love that deliver content to help you live better on a budget.

Natalie Dee, the professional web comic artist behind the daily Natalie Dee and also one half of the team responsible for Married to the Sea launched a new project earlier this month called STUFF I PUT ON MYSELF: a makeup blog. In addition to reviews that run the span of cosmetics from higher-end lines carried in department stores and sephora to drugstore brands, STUFF I PUT ON MYSELF also provides makeup tutorials, skincare tips, and fashion articles.

Our favorite feature so far is the The Pig. Offering brutually honest reviews of heavily hyped cosmetic products, The Pig assesses whether or not a product has delivered what it promises on the packaging. When a "special forumla" turns out to be not-so-special after all, STUFF I PUT ON MYSELF feeds the money to "The Pig", and then suggests cheaper alternatives. Feeding money to The Pig helps to visualize how much you could be saving by not spending money on products that don't live up to the hype, and makes it easier to make room in your personal care budget for your favorite small luxuries by helping you to shop smarter! Casual and conversational in tone, STUFF I PUT ON MYSELF brings the smart, unapologetic, and unaffected humour of Dee's webcomic work to the world of cosmetic and style blogging --and we think that world is all the richer for it.

One more step to building a better brown-bag lunch.

The Kitchn has put together a great collection of packed lunch recipes, ideas and inspirations. Buying lunch out everyday is expensive, but bringing a sack lunch is such a drag if you aren't sure what to pack. While there's nothing wrong with occasionally treating yourself to your favorite sandwich from that cute little cafe around the corner, bringing your lunch to work or university for the week can be better for your health as well as your wallet.

The main collection of (Our) Best Tips and Ideas to Help You Eat a Fabulous Lunch at Work is a great place for both beginners to start their build-your-own-brown-bag-adventure and for packed-lunch veterans to get some innovative ideas. Our personal highlights include: Office Lunch Survival Kit: 6 Essentials to keep at the Office, 5 Quick and Delicious Lunches Under 400 calories and Lunch-Packing Inspiration

Thriftspiration from the wide, wide world of livejournal

While for many people the idea of keeping a public journal is understandably a paradox, a livejournal account can be used to other ends. The livejournal online service boasts a wealth of public journals that users may join and gain posting access to called "communities". Communities are themed groups, and much like other online forums allow users to post questions regarding the subject, advice and experiences, or projects they've completed relating to the topic of the group.

Many of the groups are fan-oriented, catering to those with an interest in popular book, film and television series, or for famous actors and musicians. However, many of the groups are themed around certain life-styles or how to's.

One great community for thrift-spiration is thriftwhore, a community where users post photos and details of their latest shopping hauls from their local thrift shop or flea market. Whenever I find myself disappointed by my local Family Thrift Centre or Goodwill, I have a look at thriftwhore for a reminder that there's still treasure out there.

Those with a taste for interior design may enjoy saucydwellings. Though the community does not focus exclusively on thrifty design, there is an emphasis on creativity and style, both of which often go with decorating and furnishing on a budget. This user furnished and decorated a basement apartment on a "a side-of-the-road-or-Goodwill budget" and did quite well for themselves.

Though Dumpster-diving or Skipping, is becoming an increasingly dangerous (and depending on the laws in your area, possible illegal) pastime with more and more businesses outfitting their collection bins with compactors, the dumpsterdiving community on livejournal offers posts accompanied by photos of what users have found digging through other people's garbage. In addition to posts detailing hauls, dumpsterdiving also features posts regarding tips and tricks for finding and getting into receptacles, and sometimes offers information regarding the legality of the activity by region.

The communities featured in this post are but a tiny sample of all the offerings available for public viewing at one of the most popular journaling sites on all of the internet. If you find yourself with a little time and little inspiration for your budget living, consider checking out what people have been doing on "teh livejournal".

A cheerful wedding can come cheap (well, cheap-ish)

The months May and June may herald holidays and vacations for some, but for others sunny afternoons and warmer evenings announce the arrival of the wedding season. Spring and summer are no longer the only time to tie the knot these days, but many people still hope to hold spring or summer nuptials. In fact, I had the priviledge of being an attendent in a close friend's wedding just this past weekend.

--Which brings me to today's link: Off Beat Bride . While the site may not have an exclusively "cheap and cheerful" focus, many of the weddings featured highlight couples who were on a budget, stuck to it, and hosted a lovely occasion through creativity, doing some things themselves, and the help of their supportive personal circles (check the wedding-porn section and you'll see that "budget wedding" is a very popular tag).

I'm not due to be wed anytime soon that I can see, but I've always really enjoyed browsing this site. Like many others, I find the level of consumption encouraged by the wedding industrial complex to be flippin' outrageous these days. Still, I don't see why anyone should be begrudged a special day and I think it's extra lovely how the couples come together with the other important people in their lives to plan a ceremony and reception that suits them. Off Beat Bride well demonstrates that a "budget wedding" does not have to mean a depressingly "cheap" wedding. Regardless of what the bridge and groom's (or groom and groom's or bride and bride's) budget may be, every couple featured emphasizes quality and uniqueness through creativity, community and the D.I.Y. ethos.

So if you're planning a wedding some day, check it out. They do wonderful pictorials of real weddings, with commentary from the brides on how they put their one-of-a-kind matrimony-ceremony together. Additionally, the site offers articles that range from tutorials on making your own centerpieces and bouquets, to the ethical condrumn on where to draw the lines with do-(or duplicate)-it-yourself.

Reusing your T-shirts as reusable shopping bags

As this blog is called Cheap and Cheerful, I'm not sure if any of you readers out there in internet-land shop at markets like Whole Foods and Kroger, but for those who do, these and some other grocery stores offer a discount when you remember to bring your reusable shopping bags. Since the discount offered at most stores is only for a few cents off per-bag-filled-per-order, this practice will probably not save you any big bucks. Still, remembering to bring your own bags will help cut down on the rustling plastic-bag tumble weeds that crowd your cabinets and block your way to the Windex.

Here is a tutorial care of lifehacker.com, courtesy of vividmichelle on YouTube, that demonstrates how to quickly and easily recycle an old T-shirt into a reusable shopping bag.

It's free, it's recycling, you don't need a sewing machine, and even a bag made from your ugly "team building exercise '94" T-shirt looks better than a plastic one. AMIRITE?

Here's mine:




Behold! An old, outrageously over-sized wildlife T-shirt from middle school is now a slightly more attractive alternative for toting groceries, library books, and the many Tupperware containers that make up bag lunch during the working week.