How we are Coping on Week 77 of Lockdown

It does actually feel like I am writing about how we are coping on week 77 of lockdown.

I don’t think we have done 3 weeks yet really but the days are a bit monotonous and roll into one. I’m sure you get what I mean.

We are determined not to cause our mental health any damage. So we try to cope by planning activities to do to make use of our extra time indoors.

Here we are sharing some of what we have done so far this week. This is in an effort to help you to cope too. Don’t forget to share with us what you are doing.

By the way, we are thinking of people who have young kids to have to now entertain all day. That must be so draining so we are thankful for the life stage we are at. Our ‘little ones’ are big enough to take care of themselves.

Social Media

We are like most people nowadays so we tend to use Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at lot. Our favourites at the moment are Pinterest and YouTube. We are drooling at all the ideas for decluttering and decorating that we are finding!

Do you know what is surprisingly shocking? That so many ‘ordinary’ people have their own tools at home is surprising to me. And I don’t mean just a little hammer! I’m talking about saws, electric drills, and sanders!

So we spend hours (literally) looking at people organising their pantry, shopping at thrift stores, and doing DIYs to spruce up their homes. Just type what you want to see in Pinterest or YouTube and you will be entertained and inspired for hours.

Our own DIY and Pantry Making

Do you follow us on Instagram? If you do, you will see how we turned a junky storeroom into a beautiful pantry (if we must say so ourselves). We now have enough storage for surplus food and also our regular groceries.

We are pleased to say we did all the work ourselves including, decluttering, painting, and putting up the Ikea shelves.

Just a word of warning that if you do plan to do this yourself, it does get bad before it gets better. But the feeling of satisfaction you get when it is all done makes up for the hard work.

It definitely was a fun project and here is the finished look.

 

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From a cluttered storeroom emerged a useful stocked pantry. Changes are still taking place… We like to call it a work in progress.

A post shared by joleisa (@joleisacreed) on Apr 1, 2020 at 4:23am PDT

Of course, we kept the project as low cost as possible. A lot of the jars are recycled jars that other products came in. All they needed was a good wash with soap and water. We did buy these jars on Amazon and they are our favourites. The baskets were bought at Tesco for half price and the two white ones were from Home Bargains.

There is also a little cupboard space that we completely emptied, cleaned out, and painted. Now it houses extra pots, pans, cups, glasses, lids, our Nutribullet, ice cream maker, slow cooker etc. The bottom is full of all things cake making. I can imagine just how much all of this woud have cost us if we didn’t try to do it ourselves. Here’s a sneak peek at how that space looks now. The shelves in the mini pantry are lined with black contact vinyl which we have had for over a year. We found it online for sale when we bought our cricut machine. It seemed reasonably cheap and when it came, there were two rolls rather than one. For some reason they were trying to get rid of it and we were the beneficiaries .

 

I’m sure with time we will keep chopping and changing to suit us as we go along.

Completing online surveys

Well, unfortunately, we haven’t had any paid work this week at all. Have you? So we actually spend a lot of time doing online surveys to earn some ‘every little helps’ money. This is done as we are already on our laptops. The best-paid ones are Prolific and also Qmee. You just need to create an account and start making money.

If you are on your computer, just keep looking out now and again. Sometimes you can get money by just pretending to buy something. Like we search for ‘red wigs’ and might be rewarded with 9p. It seems minuscule  but every little add up.

Keeping the mood up

Watching tv these days isn’t bad too. There is a lot of valued entertainment including exercise, drama, laughs, and crafts. We try to keep up with one of the televised exercises per day and have a good laugh at ourselves. I do 20 squats and call that my 20 minutes of exercise. Leisa loves to do some crazy dance and have us all in stitches, so that’s another 10 minutes.

We are thinking that we do need to get some vitamin D from the sunshine though. Check out my previous post about this. Thankfully, we found a table tennis bat and a little ball so we plan to spend some time doing that. Hopefully, we won’t injure ourselves and need hospitalization! I say roll on sunshine! I dont know how this Spring is so cold.

We have not had any takeaways at all, instead, we make our own takeaway style meals, and you should too!

 

Keeping up with friends and family

We have friends all around the world and we do try every day to make video calls since everyone is at home.

There are two elderly friends that we call every morning before we actually start our regular daily routine. We make it a video call and they really look forward to it. We try to encourage and motivate them every day because they are shut-in, and in one case, she does not see anyone at all. After we pray and catch up about the general news, Leisa might share a crazy dance move or a crochet project.

My friends in the States also share what they are up to and we share what we think about how the countries are responding to the Coronavirus. We have a friend from back in college who now teaches in Kuwait and we also video talk with her about how she carries on teaching online etc.

Our mom and sisters also live in Florida so we chat with them too. Thank God for the technology to be able to do this. Can you imagine how dismal things would be if we didn’t have all this at our disposal?

All in all, we try to lift each others spirit and that way stay encouraged each other for the day. It has mostly been ok so far. We want to try and learn new things and today we decided to learn how to use IMovies. It’s hard! Almost like Maths, which we both hate!

Anyway, its not all about us. Tell us how you have been getting on. We would love to hear. Cheerio and see you around next time.

Related post

Check out how we managed last week

I’m linking up with this Cass  Emma and Becky in this week’s ‘Frugal Friday’ linky.

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