Does your brother's meal count thing work better when you plan around what's already in the fridge instead of starting fresh each week? I ask because that was the missing piece for me. I used to make a list of 5 dinners, buy everything for them, then watch half of it go bad because life happened and we ate out twice. Once I started writing the list by looking at what we already had first, then only buying the gaps, the savings got bigger and the waste basically stopped. The list itself is good but the order you build it in is what really cuts the bill.

Used to be the guy who said just grab the big stretcher and stop overthinking it. Then I did a hallway in a 1940s place where nothing was square, maybe 4 feet wide, and that stretcher kept kicking the trim loose and sliding off the wall. Grabbed a knee kicker and a gauge, worked the rows a few inches at a time, and it laid flat with no gaps. Took me a bit to trust it because I always heard you can't get carpet tight enough without the power head. Turns out in these old settled houses the walls aren't plumb anyway, so fighting them with 8 feet of leverage just makes a mess. You get a better feel for the stretch when you're right up on it.