The Relaunch

Origins

In 2010, Weezl put a call out for recipe testers on MSE.She was creating Cheap Family Recipes. Having lived on 50p a day for her  Mortgage Free In 3 challenge, £100 a month for 4 people, which works out at just over 80p a day each, seemed quite generous!

I really enjoyed helping out with the recipes, ideas, a little coding and, my own special contribution, creating the most humungously huge spreadsheet for the nutrition and stock checking as we built the monthly planners

Wayback

Weezl had 2 babies and moved on from CFR, eventually letting the hosting payments go, and the site disappeared into Wayback machine. It was much missed, and a while later, someone brought it back, missing a few pictures and links, but very welcome.

A while later, it had gone again.

Back from the dead

For a few years after that, I thought about reinstating it several times, but didn’t get around to doing anything about it. Then in the summer of 2019, I was doing a lot of SEO work with Lemoneye , who look after the techy bits of ThriftyLesley for me, and impulsively decided to bring CFR back again.

The initial brief I gave Lemoneye was to try to recreate CFR as much like the original site as he could. As the build progressed and I was being given design ideas, that completely changed! Eventually becoming this rather beautiful site that you see today

I had to do masses of work price checking and rebuilding the recipes, so as I write, only Meal Plan One has been recreated, and the main part of the Celebration Week. 

I hope to get Meal Plan Two recreated in the early part of 2020. And then there is Meal Plan Three, which was never finished. I’m hoping to be able to complete that too by the summer. Masses of work, but so valuable.