Propane sale

Walmart.com

Ready to break out the grill? Summer is right around the corner! If you're in need of more propane, Walmart has a great deal through April 5. Exchange a tank for $18.92 and get a $10 gift card or buy a new tank for $46.82 and get a $25 gift card. There is also a $3/1 Blue Rhino Propane Tank Mail-in-Rebate which means you could snatch up a propane tank for as low as $5.92!

Wedding wrap-up

I hope you've enjoyed the past couple weeks of wedding saving ideas. Here are a few more ways we saved money:

--> Our reception venue saved us the most money of all. We rented the National Guard Armory in Beatrice, NE. It doesn't sound glamorous, but it was a new building and the perfect place to have a reception. It can hold up to 500, had a state of the art kitchen, big bathrooms, new tables and chairs, etc. Plus, it only cost us $150 to rent and we could bring in our own food and alcohol vendors. That's unheard of in today's wedding world. The only catch is you have to be affiliated with the military to rent it.

--> We used Colleen's Catering from Beatrice, NE for the food. I thought it was delicious and at $8 per plate it was reasonable.

--> A talented friend, who makes cupcakes on the side, baked our mini cupcakes and cake topper. I ordered the tower off of Amazon. She was much cheaper than the cupcake shops.

Mother of Garage Sales recap

Sad news, friends. The lady with the new designer wedding dresses was not at the Mother of All Garage Sales this year. I was so disappointed. This year was the first time they had this event on Friday night in addition to Saturday. It was packed.

Line to get in

Mother of All Garage Sales today and tomorrow

Image source here

Anyone going to the Mother of All Garage Sales this weekend? I'm going to swing by tonight after work. Remember my post from a few days ago about the wedding dresses? I'll let you know if that vendor is there again so you can go tomorrow if you're in the market for wedding attire. If she's there, I'll try to get her contact info for those of you who aren't able to go.

I'm a little scared to be honest. My mom and aunt had a booth several years back at this event which I helped staff. People take this thing seriously! They line up with wagons and wait for the doors to open. It calmed down later in the day, but unfortunately I'll be going at the same time as the hard core crazies. Let's hope I don't get trampled. Wish me luck!

Stock up price on CoverGirl nail polish

Head to Walgreens and check if they have CoverGirl mini nail polishes on clearance. The Walgreens on N 14th in Lincoln, NE did and I bought 12 for $4.98 including tax. They are marked down to $1.79. Use the $3/2 CoverGirl products coupon in the 3/2 P&G Sunday insert to bring them down to $0.29 each. Luckily, I had 6 coupons which I used on 12 polishes. These make great gifts!

Free Redbox tonight

Free Redbox movie tonight only (3/27/14) with code MARCH27. We rented Wolf of Wall Street. Hope it's good!

DIY pocket squares for wedding

I love the look of a classic tux and so did my husband. I also like pocket squares versus boutonnieres on the guys - I think it's a cleaner/sharper look. Buying pocket squares from the store is expensive... about $10-$20 each and we needed 11. I found them a bit cheaper on Amazon, but still not a great deal. We could have rented them at the same place we rented the tuxes, but they didn't have the colors I wanted and they charged too much to rent a little piece of fabric. We decided to buy silk material from Hobby Lobby and make our own for around $5 for all of them. Instructions below the pics!

Flowers from Sam's Club for wedding

We spent a little over $300 on fresh flowers and we had them everywhere in the church and reception hall. We even had bouquets in the bathrooms. The reason we were able to afford so many flowers is because we ordered them in bulk from Sam's Club and I arranged them myself. Having the same amount of flowers done by a floral shop would have cost at least a couple thousand - probably more. Of course mine don't look as nice as a professionals, but I was happy with how they turned out. Good enough for me :)

If you haven't read this post from last fall, please do. I think flower arranging is a great skill that anyone can learn. Keep scrolling to see pictures and my flower plan.

Flooring deals

I'm still doing the wedding series this week (see this post from earlier today), but I just had to tell you about an upcoming promotion.

Some of my earliest posts on this blog focused on the remodel of our upstairs. We (wait who am I kidding... my husband, father-in-law, and brother-in-law) installed laminate wood flooring throughout the main living areas and saved us a lot of money. The click together type of flooring is pretty easy to do so don't be intimidated!

We bought the flooring during a sale at Sam's Club last summer. They are offering a similar promotion starting March 26 and ending April 19. There are five different colors to choose from. You can browse them online, but last summer I found that the prices were higher online than in the store.

Learn to do updos for events

How many of you are at the age where you're getting married or are in wedding after wedding? I feel your pain! Okay, so it's actually a really fun stage in life, but we all know it can be expen$ive!

One way that I've saved money on weddings is doing my own hair. I even did my hair for my own wedding. Yes, you read that right. Was it the best updo ever? Absolutely not, but I've learned over the years that nobody knows my hair better than me. There have been too many times that I've paid for a professional stylist to do my hair for events and ended up ripping it out and doing it myself.

With a little practice, you can do this yourself as well. There are TONS of hair tutorials online that make it a million times easier so start searching on pinterest and google. I just stumbled across this post today which has some great tips.

Getting ready at my parents' house the morning of our wedding. Who needs a hairstylist or makeup artist when you have man's best friend? He stayed by my feet the entire time!

 Here is how it turned out:

Ball jars as candle holders

Hope you all had a relaxing weekend. We will continue on with the wedding series this week. If you missed some money saving ideas from last week, here they are:

DIY pocket squares for wedding
Wedding dress for less
DIY burlap wrapped koozies for wedding favors
Painted tuna cans as candle holders
Milk cans + branches + white lights for wedding reception lighting
Learn to do updos for events
Flowers from Sam's Club for wedding
Wedding wrap-up 

Now onto today's post! Chances are your relatives have Ball jars lying around. If not, auctions are a great place to buy them. My grandma had boxes and boxes full of them. Since my theme was antiquish, the Ball jars worked great as vases and candle holders. Using them saved us a fortune. Buying new vases could have cost hundreds especially since I used several Ball jars on each table. I used the more rare blue Ball jars for the flower centerpieces and the clear jars for candles.

The below jar is a quart. I filled these with water and put floating candles in each one. I wrapped the top with raffia that you can buy real cheap from craft stores. I bought the floating candles online in bulk. There were three of these on each table.

Testing these out at home weeks before the wedding

Milk cans + branches + white lights for wedding reception lighting

Our wedding theme was antiquish and we wanted to have lots of lighting throughout our venue. The ceilings were insanely high so there was no way to string lights above. My solution was to put branches into milk cans and then string lights around them. I scattered the milk cans throughout the venue.

Painted tuna cans as candle holders

I wanted lots of lighting on the tables at our wedding reception. I did not want to spend much on candle holders so I started brainstorming and decided that tuna cans/wet cat food cans were the perfect size.

We started saving cans. We did a lot of dumpster (okay recycling bin) diving as well! No shame.

We cleaned the cans up and spray painted them with Valspar Crackle Spray Paint from Hobby Lobby, but you could paint them any color you like!

Base coat

Top coat

DIY burlap wrapped koozies for wedding favors

We all have that drawer that is overflowing with koozies. I decided to reuse old koozies for our wedding by covering them with burlap and using a black sharpie to write an H on them. (Our last name starts with an H.) This was an easy, but time consuming project. I loved that our party favors were unique!

I have very few pictures of how to do this, but I used this tutorial from Strictly Homemade so that should help you! My instructions are below the pictures.

Wedding dress for less

Our one year anniversary was this past Sunday, March 16. In celebration of that I'll spend the next couple of weeks showing you how we saved money on our wedding.

The average cost of a wedding these days is just insane (in my opinion). I would rather save that money to pay off debt or for a down payment on a house. We were very frugal with our wedding. However, I don't think you'd ever know that we spent much less than most. Today I'll talk about how I saved thousands on my dress and accessories.

I wore two new designer dresses... one for the ceremony and another for the reception. They were originally priced $1,500 and $2,000. I paid $100 for each. Seriously.

The dresses were originally from Ellynne Bridal. I bought them at the Mother of All Garage Sales in Lincoln, NE. That sounds weird and kind of gross, but bear with me. Ellynne Bridal sells their rack and last year's dresses to a lady who buys them for cheap and then sells them at the Mother of All Garage Sales. She had racks and racks of beautiful new designer dresses all marked down to $100! They all had their original tags. The year I found my two dresses was 2012. I heard she was there in 2013. I went this year, but she wasn't there :( I was hoping to get her contact information for all of you.

Here is my ceremony dress:

Free 8x10 at Walgreens

Use code MARCH8X10 at checkout to get a free 8x10 print at Walgreens. Pick it up at your local Walgreens to get this deal completely free. Even if you don't need pictures printed right now, these make great gifts!

To get more than one print for free, create a couple different Walgreens accounts with different email addresses. Okay, okay I know that's cheating the system, but it works!

Offer is good through March 19.

Here is one of the prints I'm ordering. The picture is of my dog and I added the caption in Photoshop.

Yankee Candle coupon

I just love candles! Get $20 off a $45 or more purchase at Yankee Candle through 3/16! To print the coupon: click here. Even if candles aren't your thing, they make great gifts!

Yankee Candle

diy St. Patty's Day mantel

How stinking adorable is this mantel?!

Props to the landeelu blog! See how you can easily copy this look here.

Funnies

Someone posted this video on facebook and I think it's hilarious! Make sure your sound is on.

I guess the first video was so popular that they had to make a second. I don't think the second is as good, but it's still pretty cute!

Hopefully these will give you a few laughs to start your day!

17 DIY St. Patrick's Ideas

The Girl Creative blog had a great post on St. Patrick's Day a few weeks ago. She gathered all sorts of festive projects from around the web.

Check it out here.

We bought a truck!

The weather was amazing here yesterday - upper 70's! My husband and I couldn't stand being at work any longer so we took the afternoon off and continued our truck hunt.

We found a GMC Sierra at Beatrice Ford. We were treated very well, they were willing to negotiate, and we drove away happy. One of the things we loved about this dealership is that they'll pick the truck up from our home when it needs an oil change (or any other service) and leave us a car free of charge. Doesn't get much easier than that!

St. Patrick's Day printables

This week will be all about St. Patty's Day. It's only a week away! I don't normally do much in terms of decorating or crafts so what you'll see this week are ideas from around the web that I've found. Maybe I'd be more into it if I was Irish?

You all know how much I love free printables! Here are some you can print off and use in March courtesy of the Tomkat Studio. I think they'd look best in a black distressed frame.

The Tomkat Studio

Vinny app is a must if buying new vehicle

If you're ever looking to buy a new or used vehicle, you must download Vinny on your smart phone. It's a great invention and will help you better negotiate with dealers.

I mentioned yesterday that we're in the market for a truck. We found one we really like and went back to the dealership yesterday to wheel and deal. We couldn't get them to come down so we walked.

Btw we had the worst luck yesterday. Before going to the dealer someone slammed on their brakes and my husband tapped the back of their vehicle. Luckily there was no damage. We get to the dealership and they run the carfax on our SUV that we want to trade in. Apparently it was in a wreck before my husband purchased it. We had no idea and think the dealership it was purchased from covered it up. Certainly explains why that SUV has been somewhat of a lemon. After leaving the dealership, a huge truck drove by us and a rock flew up and cracked our windshield. So the windshield is getting fixed this morning. Maybe it was all some sort of sign? Let's hope today goes better.

Anyways, I was doing more research yesterday evening and stumbled across Vinny.

Here is a write up on it from Driving Scene:

We need a truck

I drive a car and my husband drives an SUV. There are soooo many times that we could have used a truck this past year. Any other DIYers feel the same way? We are constantly hauling building materials from Menards or picking up random junk I find on the curb ;) Plus, we've helped move a ton of people this year including ourselves. A truck would have been so convenient.

Today may be the day we break down and buy one. And now I probably just jinxed us. We found one we really like. Now to get them down on price.

I know this post is really boring, but all I can think about is getting our ducks in a row in case we do purchase today. It will be so nice not having to borrow a truck anymore. Fingers crossed!

Husker centerpieces

I attended a work event last night and I just loved the decorations. I thought they were really fun.

Mardi Gras!

Happy Fat Tuesday! How many of you are celebrating tonight? Thought I would share some festive crafts that I've stumbled across recently.

The following three pictures were found on pinterest. Unfortunately they do not link to the proper sites so I don't have instructions. I'll do my best to make up my own so bear with me!

You could make a wreath using one of the following tutorials (just pick out Mardi Gras colored bulbs):

Live Love DIY
Mommy's Kitchen
Crafts and More!

The last step would be gluing Mardi Gras colored beads on top.

Oscars

Did you watch the Oscars last night? I thought Ellen killed it! I hope they have her host again. I don't ever remember laughing that much while watching the Oscars. Anyone else that has to host it in the future might as well give up now!

Like most, I love to watch the Oscars for the fashion. Do you ever see a gorgeous gown in the store or online (or even on pinterest) and wish you had somewhere to wear it? I find myself doing that all the time!

While there wasn't one dress that took my breath away like some years, here are my favorite dresses from last night: