Before You Say You Can’t Fix It…LWSZ Day 15

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Before you say you can’t fit it, read on!

Here we are at day 15 of the Living Well and Spending Zero Challenge. We are all doing an amazing job! Even if we’ve not been perfect, we’ve still been intentional.

This week we make a shift to being more creative, constructive, and inventive when it comes to the things we have.

Life during the first half of the 1900s was drastically different than life as we know it today. This is true in many ways including in the way we view the stuff we have.

Today, we live in such a fast-paced, fix it now, throw away society when we so easily look to money to solve our problems in some way. I love how Ruth Soukup says in her post about today’s challenge, “So often when there’s a problem, we try to buy the solution – when really, with just a little elbow grease or creative thinking, the answer is already near.”

I couldn’t agree more.

The truth is, we are so much smarter, creative, and intuitive than we ever give ourselves credit for in today’s society.

With such a large family, things really take a beating around here. With seven children, my appliances, furnishings, and even my furniture gets two if not three times as much use as these things do in a “normal” family.

This means, as you can imagine, that things break and wear out, perhaps more often than they would in a family that’s not super-sized.

Because we also have a large family, my husband and I also have to live frugally in order to provide for our large bunch. This has forced us to pause before rushing to buy the solution in some way.

Over the years, we’ve figured out how to fix toilets, lawn mowers, light fixtures, gas fireplaces, washers, dryers, and mastered installing many of our own appliances and fixtures as well.

We’ve done this, and you can, too. Living in today’s world also means that we have access to the internet, google, and youtube where you can find countless videos on just about anything you could ever have a question about.

Right now I’ve got duct tape on my couches. I could go out and buy new couches if I wanted to, really, but I simply choose not to. With a probable move in our near future, there is little point in buying couches that could potentially not suit our next home, and this is aside of having to move them clear across the country.

In reality, we could fix many of our things in need of repair by doing a little research, asking someone who knows more about these things than you do, or searching for a video to watch that would allow you to determine if you can in fact fix it or not.

My encouragement to you is this: the next time you find yourself ready to discard something you no longer want, throw away something you figure can’t be repaired, or schedule a service call, pause. Just pause and then get a bit creative, don’t me afraid to try your hand at it, and ask questions from the experts you know.

Not only is this a truly frugal solution, it is also quite fun to add “washer repair” to my list of skills.

What have you fixed on your own?