A couple of weeks ago on The Really Good Life, I was umming and ahhing about whether or not to buy an automatic chicken coop door. There were several reasons arguments for it but we don’t *need* one, it would just be a convenience – and I didn’t know whether convenience is worth £100.

The wonderful Alice helped me justify wanting to sleep later than daybreak and added:

Is there anything else you could give up or change to save the equivalent of £100 in a year to compensate? For instance I’d go a whole year without a takeaway to pay for being able to lie in all year, and that’d probably save me enough money over the year (as well as probably compensating somewhat in carbon/environmental terms). Can you “trade” anything else in your life that you don’t really need, motivated by knowing that the sacrifice is “paying” for the lie-ins?

As I said, Alice is wonderful and this is a great idea – and without naming any particular thing, I’ve decided to I’ll give up numerous often-fleeting wants over the next few months to (retrospectively) pay for it — mostly, I suspect, unnecessarily food while I’m out and about, stuff that can be easily done without and isn’t really missed outside of the moment — money thrown down the drain for little value.

Anyway I thought it would be fun to keep track of this money through a moneybox/piggy bank so I can see it building up (and at the same time, see how much I normally fritter away!) – and whenever I think something like that, the next thing that comes to my mind is: “how can I make one of those reusing or recycling stuff?”

So what can I reuse or recycle to make a money box or piggy bank?

Around our house, we already have some old coffee cans with slits in the tops for collecting change and my dad uses a giant old whiskey bottle from a bar for his pennies. They’re both very practical but I’d like something that’s a bit more fun if possible.

One idea I had was to make a papier mâché chicken from old newspaper and out of date flour. I imagine a hollow plastic ball could be used in the same way instead of the papier-mâché – and could be decorated in a similar way to become a rotund hen.

So any ideas?