Monday Q&A-short answers edition

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you want me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me(thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line.
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I’m kinda behind today, so I’m going to answer some easy questions! 😉

1. You have mentioned that you buy your wheat from a local farm and grind it yourself. Is that purchase included in your $80/week goal?

I buy my wheat in 50 pound bags from a small family-owned business that delivers natural and organic foods to my state and several adjoining ones. They do have a farm and grow a fair amount of food, but I’m not positive that they grow the wheat themselves.

When I buy wheat from them, I buy enough to last for quite some time…so I haven’t had to buy any since I starting tracking my grocery spending so carefully. When it comes time to buy again, I’ll hopefully have saved some of my grocery budget to pay for the wheat. That will be a while from now, though, because I think I still have 50 more pounds of wheat!

2. If you could travel anywhere in the world for any amount of time, where would you go and for how long?

I don’t honestly know! I’m not a big traveling person…I really am happiest right here at home, and I’ve always been that way. I do really enjoy it when we get to go away for a short while sans kids(I love them, but it’s nice to have a break every now and then!), but when we do that, it’s not really a matter of the destination. It’s more about getting time together, and it doesn’t really matter where we go.

If I had to pick a destination, I’d probably like to go to a tropical beach somewhere(although maybe I’m thinking that because I am very tired of being cold right about now!).

3. You have mentioned that you don’t like the style of your house (the split foyer or something like that). How did you end up choosing that house?

Yeah…it’s a split-foyer, which is pretty much the only house style I don’t like. I like ranchers, I like Cape Cods, I like Colonials, but I don’t like split-foyers. I don’t really like the way they look on the outside, and I hate the traffic flow problems that the tiny foyer creates.

So, why did we buy it? Sometimes we wonder that ourselves(!), but it was mostly because of the location. It had by far the largest, flattest lot of any of the houses we could afford, and we liked the neighborhood. It’s an older one, with towering oak trees and wider streets than the new developments have. And while the houses don’t have acres of land each, they do have some space between them(more than the other houses in our price range did).

We didn’t buy the house for this reasons, but our neighborhood borders the water, so when it’s warmer, I can get up and go for a walk and see the sunrise over the water, which is really nice. Our community has a pier and dock, which you can see here. And since it’s an older neighborhood, we don’t have a bunch of annoying covenants and HOAs…this means that there’s a house here with burgundy siding and aqua shutters, but it also means that there’s a field with horses in it a block from my house(we like to go feed them apples and carrots).

Like every house, this one has its good sides and its bad sides, and so instead of focusing on the tiny foyer, I remind myself of the open streets, the tall trees, the flat lot, and too, I remind myself to be thankful that we even have a house! It’s not something to be taken for granted, even if it’s a split-foyer. 😉