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About Us

My wife (Joanna) and I (Trevor) have been married for nearly 15 years (in 2017) and have worked to use our resources responsibly. We lived near Vail, Colorado on a teacher's salary and had our first two children there. We continued into graduate school, where we had two more children, and managed to graduate without any student debt. While this clearly would not be possible without support (from family, friends, and the university), we have learned some things along the way and come up with creative means to provide the lifestyle that we want for our family and to keep within a narrow budget.

In this blog we will discuss improvements we made within our home (building toddler bunk beds and creating an indoor playground in a small space), affordable smart phone plans, making our own jam, purchasing our first home and everything that went along that and some simple car maintenance.

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Toddler Bunk Beds--DIY

Build your own Bunk Beds Toddler Size! In this post I provide the measurements I used to build bunk beds to fit toddler sized mattresses and link to the plans that I modified to build these toddler bunk beds. When we were expecting our third child we lived in a small apartment at the University of Utah. The apartment was great, but the bedrooms were small, so to maximize space we wanted to have our 5 year-old and 3 year-old use a bunk bed that would accommodate the smaller toddler size mattress. We searched all over and could not find anything, not just anything affordable, but nothing at all! Turns out toddler size bunkbeds can't be sold because of some regulation or another. So we decided to build our own. This was my first real building project and other than one shop class in 7th grade I haven't done a lot of work with wood. I did enlist the help of a friend who had worked quite a bit with wood and who had a lot of the tools. We started by choosing a straight forwa
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Sugar-Free Jam with Stevia

We recently decided that we wanted to try making our own sugar-free jam and wanted to try using stevia as well. After listening to the book    The Case Against Sugar   by Gary Taubes we decided that we need to drastically reduce the amount of sugar that we eat in our home. While this hasn't been too bad for Joanna and I, it is harder for our kids. We wanted something for the kids to put on their sandwiches, pancakes and similar things and so had been buying sugar-free jams from our local grocery store. But these were expensive. We checked in speciality stores as well as online and couldn't find anything cheaper. Since we've made freezer jam in the past we thought we'd try the same with sugar-free jam. We bought a box of peaches, since they were on sale at our local Sprout's Market and about 7 boxes of pectin ( Sure Jell No Sugar Pectin, 1.75 oz (Pack of 2) ). Now a note here about the jam, it isn't actually sugar-free since there is sugar in the peaches
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DIY-Indoor Play Area for Kids

How to Build an Indoor Play Area for Your Kids We have four very active children, so about a year ago we decided that we needed a place for them to play and burn energy in the winter and when they couldn't go outside. In our search for ideas we came across this blog , showing their indoor climbing wall and monkey bars. We really liked the idea and made our own very similar version.  Climbing Wall We used these rock climbing holds from Amazon for the climbing wall. We liked these holds because of the price, the natural rock look, and because they are installed with screws instead of with bolts. To make the wall we used 3/8" sheets of OSB (oriented strand board) that we glued and screwed together to create a double thick board. I made two sets so we could stack one on top of the other to make a taller wall. We used OSB because my parents had some extra and we could get it for free. Plywood would look nicer, but is more expensive. After attaching the boards we s
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