Flexing my thrift muscle

After all of my talk of thrift and saving last week it seems the universe has been out to challenge me to put my money where my mouth is, or not as the case may me. Last week my car clock started to blink at me on the way to school - 'oo er' I thought, 'I'd better just get it to school and then I'll take it to the garage straight after'. Well of course I got to school, turned off the car, it went 'tututututututut' and swiftly died. Hmm. I took Ivy into school anyway, and seemingly by fate the man who runs our garage was just coming out from dropping off his daughter and I almost snagged him to come and get my car with his truck, I even opening my mouth to say it, but something stopped me. I'll wait and see, I thought, which I did, until Will came home. We went out to have a look at my car - turned out the battery had just come loose, so he popped it back in, tightened it up, £0.
As I said we made a little guest bedroom in our house. I was looking for a second hand divan on gumtree and every time I kept finding one they would go, so in the end I put out a call on facebook to see if anyone was selling one - turned out someone I know had one to give away. It's seen better days, but with a couple of mattress protectors it'll do us for now until we have a bit of spare cash, £0.
A day later our hoover died. Hmm, again. Will took it all apart, put it all back together, nothing. He looked it up on the internet which reckoned it could only be one of three parts that had gone pop, all of which were about £25 each. Hmm, but which one? Then he looked again on youtube and found out a common fault with this particular model, where the little computer in it (or something??) dies, but can be bypassed to make the hoover work again. So that's what Will did, and it works! £0.
Meanwhile, I have sold two more things on ebay - a jacket from the charity shop I bought for £2.50 which I don't wear anymore, sold for £21, and a pair of shoes which end in a couple of days, I bought from a car boot never worn for £1, wore them once then broke my foot shortly after (they are running shoes) and decided perhaps my running days are over. They are bidding now at £20, so up at least £41 on the week.
However I have also spent £29 buying a printer. I ummed and ahhed over it for a while. It is to make prints of my paintings to sell at markets, and they are quite expensive to have made professionally, and also I would like to have the option to make them on request so that I don't have more than I need sitting around, so anyway the printer feels like a long term investment.
To add to our run of not-too-good luck, a couple of days ago our boiler went bang too. We are currently trying to get an engineer out (we have kept the boiler under warranty - phew) but were unable to do this at the weekend because they don't have an emergency number (????), and right now are taking a little convincing to get someone out as they are quibbling over our service history (The engineer we get to service our boiler is a bit tardy) so wish us luck on this one, I hope it will be another £0 fix, although not really as we have spent money keeping the warranty up for 3 years.
Oh, and also, my final triumphant save which I almost forgot - today I repaired my favourite pair of doc martens. I bought them second hand 5 years ago, and they have at least another 10 years left in them except that the stitching came away on one of the straps. They've been sat on my fixing pile for about 6 months as it was a bit of a tricky job (stitching through 3 layers of leather), but I finally got around to it this morning. They would be over £100 to replace, which is fairly academic I suppose as I don't have that kind of money to spend on shoes these days, but it still feels like a big win.
That's all for now, but I will be back in a couple of days. I have finally begun work sorting out what I will be selling for the Christmas markets, which will definitely be a bit of an investment - I hope it pays off!