Household Money Saving Tip #1 for 2010

I'm hoping to provide some more good tips for saving money.  There are so many easy things that we can do to cut our bills every month, and most you barely notice.  All the little things can add up to big savings.

Yesterday it got very cold outside, and it was a little chilly in our house as well.  We keep the thermostat turned down to 67 or 68 to keep the heat bill down, but it felt much colder.  I went around looking for a leaky window, door, whatever was making it chilly, and found the bottom of the door had a slight breeze.

I have all that extra fleece from my I Spy bags so I went to work.  I measured the doors, cut a larger remnant into 12x36 inch rectangles, and sewed it into tubes.  I also had some extra beans from that previous project, but didn't want to use as many as it would take to fill the whole thing.  I searched around and discovered that you can pretty well stuff them with anything.  I used beans at the ends for weight, then stuffed them with empty plastic grocery sacks (someday I'll do a whole post on uses of them).  Finally, I stitched the end closed and threw it in front of the doors.

 

You can also make draft stoppers for windows with a much smaller piece of fabric.  If you're a creative person, you can turn this into a fun craft for the kids to help with and decorate it to look like a snake or caterpillar.  I was interested in function at the time of this quick creation.