Feats and flops over four years of Frugalmatic

This past July was Frugalmatic’s four-year anniversary, and I’ve been meaning to write a retrospect post about some of my biggest feats and flops from the past four years. (Plus, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write a post with a title begging for copious amounts of alliteration.)

Let’s start things on a positive note and highlight the four feats.

Feat #1: Bringing back our garden with a compost bin and rain barrels

My wife and I had a garden years ago, but three moves and two kids born within three years put our green thumbs on hold. The COVID pandemic slowed down life to the point that my wife and I realized we missed gardening, and we started one up about four years ago. It’s been expanding ever since.

I also built a compost bin, which has given our veggie scraps a new purpose. Every few months, I add a fresh supply of compost to the gardens, helping our plants to thrive.

Another feature of our gardens are three rain barrels. They each hold 100 gallons of water, and they’re helpful for fertilizing the garden. Once they fill up, I add some fertilizer and then apply the nutrient-rich water to the garden. It’s been a great system.

Tomatoes have been the stars of our garden plots, and we freeze many of them to later go into my famous homemade chili. In fact, I have a pot of chili simmering on our stove as I write this post.

Feat #2: Switching to a battery-powered lawn mower

I bought an EGO battery-powered mower in 2020 amid the COVID pandemic, feeling confident that battery technology had advanced to the point that I could mow my entire lawn on a single charge. As it turned out, I was right. Plus, I love how quiet a battery-powered motor runs.

I’ve always enjoyed yard work but struggled to find a mower that I actually liked. This EGO proved to be the way to go for me, despite its original battery failing. The battery was under warranty, and I received another one free of charge. The new battery has had no troubles, and it’s still under warranty. The EGO mower has easily been my best big-ticket purchase over the last four years.

Feat #3: Painting the house’s exterior

I took on this project in 2021, not sure how long my work would hold up. Painters say that preparation is the key to a good paint job, and I invested lots of time washing and scraping loose paint in hopes that the new coat would stick. It appears my efforts were well worth it. So far, there’s no peeling paint, and I’ve already been thinking about applying a fresh coat to one side of the house at a time, starting next summer.

I likely saved several thousand dollars in doing this project myself rather than hire professional painters. It did help that we have a single story house, so I could reach everything with a step stool. Being over six-feet tall helped, too. As I wrote in a post at the time, painting a house is also a great workout. I ended each painting session feeling like I had earned some nice rest and relaxation.

Feat #4: Somehow still using a dumbphone

I call this a “feat” because, in all honesty, giving up my dumbphone would be the easy thing to do. As I encounter more digital gates, I figure it’s only a matter of time before I run into one that I can’t circumvent. One of my fears is that auto insurance companies will begin requiring their customers to use a smartphone app to track their driving habits. Right now, insurance companies make this tracking optional. I suspect these companies are preparing for the day when they give us no choice. Would I quit driving in order to keep my dumbphone streak alive? Probably not.

The other looming threat, perhaps in the distant future, is the elimination of the physical credit card and a total shift to smartphone-powered payments. In this dystopian world, the majority of businesses would no longer accept cash, leaving consumers with no choice other than to pay with some type of phone app. It’s hard to imagine how I could manage with only a dumphone in this scenario. Maybe businesses would barter with me… or not.

For now, I’ll just celebrate another year of not having a smartphone and never having owned one. Yay me.

Now for the flops

I thought about making this post purely celebratory with only feats, but that wouldn’t be very authentic. And also not true because there have been a few, or several, failures along the way. You’ll notice a common theme with these flops: miscalculation and poor decision making on my part. I ended up spending more time and money because of my mistakes, though I regret only one of these flops: No. 1, the Camry.

Flop #1: Opting to repair our 2000 Toyota Camry

This is one of those decisions that seemed smart at the time but proved to be the exact opposite: stupid. I had persuaded my wife to spend a bunch of money (I’d prefer not to say how much) on fixing our Camry, believing we could squeeze a few more years out of it. We enacted this grand plan in early 2021 in response to used car prices skyrocketing because of supply problems caused by the COVID pandemic. I thought the repairs would allow us to wait out the turmoil and buy a used car later once the market calmed down.

As it turned out, we couldn’t wait. Our Camry was self-destructing and threatened to become a money pit more closely resembling the Sarlacc from “Return of the Jedi.” We decided to cut our losses, and, for the first time ever, we bought a new car. I’ve always believed used cars offer a better value than new ones, but the pandemic turned the used-car market upside down. At the time, it actually made better financial sense to buy a new car. Now we have a new Toyota Corolla. Despite our experience with the Camry, I’m still a believer in Toyotas. But when a car reaches 20-plus years old, it’s probably time to say goodbye when costly repairs are in order.

Flop #2: Removing our old hot tub

We bought a house years ago with a hot tub we never wanted, but I couldn’t bring myself to remove it until this summer. I bought a reciprocating saw to chop it up and found a helpful YouTube video to guide me. It took me about 10 times as long to chop up this thing than it did the guy on YouTube. I felt so incompetent at times. It didn’t look like cutting up a hot tub should take any skill, but I found a way to make it difficult.

Finally, once the job was done, I hauled some of it to the local dump. I couldn’t fit all of it in our minivan, and so my plan was to take three trips. Remind me to never go to that place again. Driving through the dump felt like playing Russian roulette with our van’s tires. My heart was racing as I had to drive over layers of garbage. I envisioned nails, wires, and whatever else puncturing our van’s tires. I dreaded the thought of having to change our tires—something I’ve never had to do—in the middle of a nasty dump site.

Thankfully, I made it out alive, and I then hired someone to haul away the rest of the cut-up tub. I told this person about my experience at the dump, and he told me a story about a wire one time becoming tangled on his truck’s front axle at the dump, and he had to crawl under his truck and cut the wire free to escape. So I wasn’t imagining the danger. It was a real dump of a dump.

Flop #3: Attempting to repair the dishwasher

This flop might have happened five years ago, but it was so big that it had to go on this list. As I mentioned about the hot tub, YouTube videos have a way of making things look so easy. And I thought I could both diagnose and fix whatever was ailing our dishwasher. I admit to buying a part without really knowing for sure whether it was the source of our dishwasher’s problem. When that didn’t work, I decided it was time to replace the entire motor. Yes, I bought a whole new motor and removed our old dishwasher’s motor, a process that took about 10 times longer than it took the guy on YouTube

I would have been content if replacing that motor had fixed the problem. But the dishes were still dirty, still not clean. Meanwhile, my family was wondering: When are we going to have a functioning dishwasher? For how many more nights must we wash this mess by hand? I was not a happy camper, but I was ready to surrender. We bought a new dishwasher. To my credit, I researched dishwashers on Consumer Reports before buying. We picked out a Bosch dishwasher, and it still works fine.

Flop #4: Making a cover for the playground

Our wooden playground has been used a lot over the years, and it requires some upkeep. When a cover that shades part of the playground needed replacing a few years ago, my wife and I decided to make a new one. We used some duck cloth, a big roll of it, that my wife had found at a thrift store. This was our chance to actually use this bulky cotton fabric.

According to our calculations, we’d save a few hundred dollars by making a new cover instead of buying a one. We measured the cloth and cut it to length. She sewed the edges, and I added some fasteners. For the finishing touch, I coated it with linseed oil to make it waterproof.

The project appeared to be a success for the first few months. But then winter arrived, and our homemade cover froze. It must have become brittle because it ripped once the weather turned windy. I watched it flapping in the breeze as I sipped on a cup of coffee, thinking how all our hard work had been destroyed in an instant. I took down the torn cover in the spring. We decided not to bother replacing it. Instead, our playground today has no cover. It just sits in the sun.

Making the cover with my wife was worthwhile, however. We like doing projects, but we often do separate ones. So, in the end, I wouldn’t have changed a thing on this project, except I would have taken it down before winter hit and put it back in the spring.

Not letting the flops stop me

With all these flops, I learned something. The truth is, sometimes my successes lead to flops. With each successful project, I look for a way to challenge myself on the next. For instance, my attempt to fix the dishwasher happened not long after I successfully fixed our clothes dryer. I gained some confidence from that repair and thought I could handle the dishwasher. Flops are bound to happen. They are never fun when you’re in the midst of them, but they almost always offer lessons. The old saying is true: It’s better to fail than to not try at all.