New Feature at Lizzie's Home!

I've been meaning to do this for quite a while, ever since I found that free online PDF converter and put up the couple of articles you see on the left.

Online friends of mine have often ribbed me (in what I presume is awe and amazement at my skill, LOL) about my strange affiliations with self-made templates and spreadsheets. On a couple of boards I would regularly prattle on about the benefits of such-and-such a template as a household tool. I bored them all senseless, no doubt :P

The various spreadsheets and templates I make up go hand-in-hand with my Home Management Binder (for a good overview on how to set one up, see here) . Along these lines, a site I particularly like is Donna Young's - her printables come in many different formats, but what I liked the most about her pages was their simplicity. There are no fancy graphics to waste your printer ink. Most are in PDF and Microsoft Word format. I actually like these much better than the pages from Organized Home's Household Notebook - their pages are graphic and colour-heavy. They also open as images rather than documents, and its just that little bit more fiddly to print using the 'print images' section of the menu (whereas the PDFs and Word documents print directly).

Anyhow, I'm going to (very slowly!) begin altering and converting my Excel and Word templates to PDF (and I'll provide certain templates in their original formats for self-altering) and then offering them as free downloads from Lizzie's Home. For the most part these documents will be quite plain, maybe with a little bit of shading or a very simple image. If you see something you like in the menu to the left but want colour or pictures removed for ease of printing, just let me know and I'll be happy to oblige. It might take me a few weeks to get a selection up, but it is coming!

I've thrown up a simple Freezer Meal Inventory to start things off - those familiar with 30 Day Gourmet's Freezer Cooking Manual will recognise the format :) . Useful for those who like to do OAMC or freezer cooking, you make a "\" mark in each box as you put the meal in the freezer and when you take it out, make a "/" mark to form the X. You'll be able to see at a glance how many of a particular meal you've eaten, and how much you've still got left. Make some simple notes in the 'needed on hand for serving' section - things like side dishes to prepare, items to make sure you have (like hotdog rolls, or wooden skewers etc). Post the list on the freezer door, and train the kids and hubby to cross things off as they take them out!

Cheers,
Lizzie