Recently I upgraded our frugal lifestyle with a couple of tools that really have made a difference. Two of them are so simple and so effective that I wonder why I didn't use them before.
These simple bellows totally changed my life ... in wintertime, at least! For the last ten years, since moving here, I've spent countless hours blowing on uncooperative embers. Many winter days, in fact, felt like I'd almost spent the whole time huffing and puffing on the fire. With this simple and ingenious air blowing device I can easily keep a good fire going on those days when nothing seems to go right in the ignition department.
I probably would have invested in them years ago, except that bellows don't seem to exist in this part of the world. I bought mine on holiday this summer in a grocery store in Switzerland: no matter that we were traveling light, no matter that it was hot outside, no matter that it was priced in Swiss Francs! I bought bellows in the middle of summer, and I'm so very grateful to the Swiss for carrying such an invaluable and simple tool in their stores in July!
Then I also made my life in the kitchen a whole lot easier with a simple sharpening stone. Actually, I've been using a sharpening stone for years on my sickle, which needs to be sharpened constantly when I use it to cut the grass. But I'd never thought of using it to sharpen my knives, until the day I noticed they were so dull that I couldn't slice a mushroom. Chopping, cutting, slicing, it's all so much easier when your knives are sharp!
These simple tools have made such an improvement in my life that they've made me wonder: what other "life-changing" tools am I missing out on? What simple and invaluable tools do you use?
