Someday A Goat

Waiting 4 years to waste $31.74

We've been in the house almost 4 years, and the entire time I have dreamed about hanging plants on the front porch. Never have I been able to justify the cost of purely decorative plants, and shade-loving blooms aren't cheap. In a fit of madness a few weeks ago, I came home with $31.74 worth of lobelia with deep purple blossoms. Here's how it looks now:

Awesome, right? Let's just say adding daily watering on the front porch was apparently too much to ask of my chore list. I'm admitting defeat and feeling a little sad about the 4 years spent thinking about two plants that I didn't even want.

And because we've been on a spending tear, a huge roast was exactly what we needed from the grocery store this weekend. It's one of the most expensive pieces of meat we've bought, and I'm not sure how we ended up thinking it was a good idea, but the deed is done and I'm about to have a leftover roast beef sandwich. Plus we have a new oven that needed to be tested.

In one bright note for our budget, we did make a practical choice on a temporary fix. The sprayer on our somewhat new faucet has been slowly crapping out, and on Saturday, it was the only way to get water out of the faucet. Not exactly practical. We're going to order an industrial-strength sprayer with no plastic parts, but until then, the least expensive sprayer from Home Depot is just fine. It took a while to figure out how to swap just the sprayer, but it washed cherries.

Oh the dryer lint

I cleaned 6 years of lint out of the dryer today. I hope I got it all, anyhow. We clean the dryer ductwork in the house, and I wipe the trap between each load, but wow, the amount of lint inside the dryer was insane. It was caked on, and there seemed to be a lot of sand in the lint. The brush I used had a rubber tip on the end and that really helped break up the lint. A headlamp is also recommended. Wrangling a flashlight will make you crazy. We've used our headlamp time and again, and replaced the batteries once in 6 years.

It took an hour, and I didn't even pull off any of the panels on the dryer. I cleaned from the front and back vents both. Getting frustrated with squeezing the brush in tight spaces, I cursed the dryer for being difficult to clean. Only to stick my head further inside the dryer to realize that I could unscrew the lint trap screen housing for better access. I also discovered a few holes in the dryer-to-vent piece, so we'll pick a new one up soon. 

Someday when I'm perfect, I'll establish a regular cleaning schedule based on the specific manual for my dryer. For now, I removed a 10-inch pile of lint and helped prevent a dryer fire. Wish I took a picture of it. Our washer and dryer are from 2004, and I'm hoping they will last about 3 more years. 

Slapped silly by a housing disaster

Late last August, we came home after a weekend away at a wedding to the damage of 16,000 gallons of water on the main floor and finished basement levels. A part of the tank-filling mechanism in the toilet on the main floor broke and the water flowed all weekend. All things considered, we didn't lose anything irreplaceable, and the house was fixable. The repairs were thankfully covered by insurance, so the situation was much easier financially than it might have been, and we made several upgrades. Our damaged house is lovely and finished now, but it's still hard to relax after all the time and energy in the past 6 months focused almost exclusively on the house repairs.  

One of the rooms in our basement right after we got home. 

Damage in the main room of the basement.

Basic lessons from dealing with a big dang mess of a house 

• First call is to insurance company, not your mother. Although there are benefits to freaking out on the phone with your mother as opposed to a stranger. Of course, no phone calls are made until the water is turned off. 

• Take pictures. Really if you do one thing, take lots of pictures. We ended up with more than 1,200 images related to the project, mostly of the damage. Take a picture of every single thing, and all rooms from all angles. During the repair process, document every change as it happens. I can't tell you how many times I referred back to pictures. 

• Being prepared helps, except when it doesn't. We did have quite a few damaged items that were recorded in a home inventory, but had I taken the time to do a complete home inventory in the past, it would have been hours less work during a stressful time.  

• Prevention rocks. Most of my books are in the basement, several hundred of them. As it happens, they're all off the floor on shelves, and I only lost 3 books. Our holiday decorations were on the floor, but in a big plastic bin -- the prelit tree wasn't so lucky. Be aware of how you're storing things. We don't tend to just pile boxes clothes and knick knacks in the basement, and it worked to our benefit. 

• Take the time to think things through. Since the cabinets had to be ripped out anyhow, we took the chance to improve the layout and storage capacity of the kitchen drastically. We spent weeks coming up with convoluted solutions; just at the point of giving up, my husband came up with the simplest solution, so easily explained and executed that we were embarrassed at the time spent. We tried in every step to make sure we were making choices that went with the flow of previous choices.

• Watch the details of repairs. Paying attention to every single trivial change, and making sure that all work is done well is a long process. This is not the place to be shy about working with the contractor and communicating any problems early while still fixable. 

• Don't expect business as usual. We went multiple months without a dishwasher, and several weeks during that time we wouldn't have access to our washer/dryer, stove, microwave. Many of our habits -- frequent home cooking, regular laundry shifts -- had to change and it was hard. Nothing went according to schedule, but sometimes that just life. I can't imagine dealing with this and children. 

About a month after the incident, Atlanta saw serious flooding from rain, and so many of those homeowners faced the same process as us, but on a much larger scale, and with no insurance coverage. It's hard to feel self-pity when houses and schools had water up to the roof line. 

I'm 30 years old, and it is only during the past 6 months that I have truly felt like an adult. I've had a "real" job for a long time, we've been married for almost 4 years and owned a house for just over 2 years. But it is only now -- having to deal with contractors, making decisions that have a long-term effect on my house's value, tackling the mountain of paperwork dealing with insurance, and keeping track of every detail and phone call -- only after all that do I feel grown up. Home ownership for us has been a lesson in endurance and fortitude. 

A lesson well learned, it appears. In the 2 weeks since the house has been done, we had some serious vet bills and what we thought was a water heater that needed replacement. Nothing could change the vet bills, but today we found out a relatively inexpensive repair would fix our water heater problem. We've managed to remain relatively calm, and it's nice to not freak out at everything.

2009 Christmas budget: making it jolly

Working on my wreath last year. I spent about $11.08 on all these materials and made a simple wreath.

Decorations, cards, postage, gifts for each other: $80

This includes anything for the house, holiday cards and postage, and what's left over gets divvyed up between the two of us for presents. I've already spent $56.61, so I'll probably hold off on any other decorations until the sales after the holidays. That leaves us only $23.29 for presents for each other. Looks like we'll end up over budget, but not by much.

Holiday cards

I was planning on using any holiday card I have around, but I found a good compromise using a VistaPrint deal for free postcards. I paid shipping and adding color to the back side of the card. The service was pretty easy to use, although the quality isn't the greatest. They were super cheap, though, and I'd hate to kill more trees by sending them back to be reprinted. I'll send longer letters to a couple of family members. I probably wouldn't have done cards last year, but I got a holiday bonus, so I had a little extra money. It was mid-December, so we sent cards with a happy new year message, which we're doing again this year, which has the added benefit of giving me more time to address the cards.

• $26.60 stamps (book of 20 regular rate, 3 books of 20 postcard rate, $1 shipping)
• $14.10 holiday postcards (100)

 

Decorations

I've bought a few ornaments, but I really don't need much. Last year I spent $11.08 to make a nice wreath for the front door. We'll reuse that, and probably get real garland for the top of the entertainment center again. The cats destroyed the inexpensive tree skirt I bought last year, so I'm not sure what to do about that, I'll probably make something. I also like to fill various vases and hurricane lamps with inexpensive ornaments and LED tea light. We keep it pretty simple.

• $5.12 ornaments and small present at Pottery Barn -- used a $50 gift card, and all items were free shipping. I linked through Upromise, so I'll earn a bit of extra money. We like to have a wide variety of ornaments that don't all match, so I get a few nice ones each year.

Random

I recently used a couple of credits to order prints from Kodak Gallery to send to friends and various holiday projects. I got about $45 worth of pictures for just over @$10.

• $4.86 Kodak Gallery shipping to use $20 bonus credit for photos for family members
• $6.03 Kodak Gallery shipping, used $15 credit to order prints and a photo ornament. I used Ebates, but stupid me, clicked though on the rebate, not the reduced shipping plus rebate. Could have spent even less!

We don't have a lot of holiday expenses for hostess gifts or children's parties. Usually, if we're invited to a party where I feel obligated to bring a hostess gift, we pick up an inexpensive bottle of wine and this comes out of the regular food/beverage budget. We do the same with any meals we make for guests around the holidays. When we hosted a big holiday dinner for our parents last year, my mom bought the prime rib, so everything else was very doable in terms of budget. A potluck holiday dinner could save even more.

TIPS

• Pare down the holiday card -- don't do photo cards, or if you do, look for good deals on prints. Unless you get fancy with the cards, postage will most likely be your biggest expense, so start early when looking at your mailing list so you are prepared. Order stamps from USPS -- pay only $1 over the face value of stamps to save a trip to the post office and make sure that you get the fun holiday stamps you want (many post offices will run out). Spending a dollar to save a last-minute trip to the post office during the holidays is a deal indeed.

• Start with a special and basic ornament collection, add a few each year. You can always say you're going for simple elegance.

• Don't buy a big tree, or get a real one. It's easier to decorate (and store) a smaller tree, and artificial trees have improved drastically in the past few years and can be reused.

• Start stockpiling pantry items like cream soups, sugar, flour -- any non-perishable food and baking supplies that you tend to use every year. If you're keeping a grocery book (link), make a list of items you know you'll need and the prices you want to pay, and keep that in your wallet so you can instantly spot check a good deal.

2009 Christmas Budget Series

Introduction

Presents

Finally received our state tax refund

We just received our state tax refund in mid-July. Since we had paid one quarter's estimated taxes last year, which turned out to be unnecessary, it was quite substantial -- $1,120. I had many plans for that money. I'd been making lists ever since we received the return from the accountant. Big chunks to the credit cards, big chunks to savings, lots of little necessary chunks for various household projects.

Once the check was deposited, I felt like we had a little breathing room. For about 2 days. Then I started to panic that we would just spend it all, as we always do when we get a windfall amount like this. So I hit my list of plans for the money and got busy prioritizing and transferring to savings.

Where it went and will it stay there?

Budgeting is always about priorities, and planning ahead means that priorities are much more likely to be met. We mainly focused on sending some money to the credit cards, and taking care of a lot of little things.

Debt: Just over $300 went to the cards. The stupid tax lives on.

Garden: We desperately needed some weed-killer for the lawn, which was pretty and green when we bought the house and has been devolving ever since. We also set aside funds in the garden ING account for future expenditures: lawnmower service, mulch, whatever comes up this fall.

House: The garbage disposal has been leaking badly. We priced them a few months ago, and decided that the bowl catching the leak was a better solution than a cheap replacement. We've set aside $150 to offset the cost and now need to start researching models and how to replace the unit. We also set aside $125 toward an eventual guest half-bath remodel. Initially, we were going to do the whole project with the refund, but decided that there were more pressing matters. I'm still on the fence as to whether this was a good choice, I may transfer it to another priority as nothing in the bathroom is actually broken. It's just depressingly ugly.

Misc.: My passport expired in May and we have family out of the country, including a grandmother. Renewing the passport was a must for this refund. My car hasn't been washed since August 2007, so it's getting detailed. The E Fund contribution was reduced to $10 from $100, which was sad.

Fun: We rarely eat a dinner out that costs more than $30 or $35 on the high end for the two of us. As in we've been eating Chick-fil-A and the like way more often than spending on eating out like we used to, although most dinners have been cooked by my husband in the past year. So we went to one of our favorite restaurants and splurged on a $55 meal, which included a big tip. Another $50 went to a bachelor party, and $50 saved toward our trip to Napa for a wedding.

What didn't make the priority cut

What I thought was a ton of money didn't go very far, and I had to cut some low-priority expenditures. The good thing about planning is that I didn't end up spending the money on the below items only to end up not having the money for things like a stinky, leaky garbage disposal that's older than some of my coworkers.

• Health club dues -- if we were serious about working out, we'd go on a walk, use our on-demand fitness options on the TV or play tennis at nearby courts.
• New deck fund -- our deck needs to be replaced, probably next summer. I only wanted to put $10 toward starting a fund, but couldn't make it work.
• Tree service -- a couple smaller dead trees in our yard need to be removed. Since it's unlikely that anything would be harmed if they fell, this came off the list.
• Pest control -- we have a termite bond that requires an annual payment, but I wanted to start quarterly pest control inside service. We didn't have a lot of bugs inside this year, so it went on the back burner.
• Cats -- I had planned on taking the cats in for an annual checkup, but it's going to have to wait a little while until we can pay for it out of a paycheck.

Jeremy at Generation X Finance posted today about starting small when it comes to building savings, and that's exactly what we've been doing for the past year. A lot of our little allocations won't be spent right away, they're sitting in category-specific ING accounts until we need the money. It may be only $10 going to the E Fund when we're able, but it's something and each time I'm able to transfer that money, I feel a little bit encouraged that we can really do this.

My office has toilet-flushing gremlins

Every so often, a toilet in the 3-stall restroom on my office's floor gets possessed by flushing gremlins. The toilet will flush constantly, for hours on end, until someone comes and fixes it. I've never seen toilets do this, yet these gremlins attack our little bathroom every few months.

On an environmental scale, it makes me sad, especially since my region has had ongoing water problems for years. As a matter of pure money, I can't imagine that it benefits our property management's bottom line at all. I wonder if their inability to provide functional plumbing has any affect on our lease rates?

Along the same lines, our office HVAC system is screwy. Since I spent a good amount of time editing a commercial real estate trade magazine, I know that providing consistent temperatures and a comfortable environment is notoriously hard in multi-office buildings, especially in buildings below the Class A level. Thermostats often control space in another office, and particularly if the building is older and has been fitted out repeatedly for different configurations of offices, the HVAC system loses all semblance of logic. Barring redoing the entire duct work, there's really not a solution. That's not even really a solution from a property owner's perspective, because even if all that money is spent redoing duct work, your tenant could up and leave at the end of a lease.

But what is ridiculous is that not only is the HVAC system turned off on the weekends, which is pretty common for the size and type of building, they turn it off at night. I can't possibly imagine how that is an efficient and money-saving strategy because not only are most employees who work in the building miserable on a daily basis, it has to take more energy to bring temperatures back up to bearable in the dead of winter. Sounds like they need to start reading some PF blogs :-)

It got me to thinking -- what are some of the small things we do on a regular basis that might be saving us money? Could any of them be shooting us in the foot?

• If it's yellow, let it mellow. Last year, in the midst of serious drought restrictions and the possibility of water rates going up, we went pretty hardcore with this old hippy saying. I now have to remind myself when we have guests that there's a time and place for everything. I could see this going haywire, however, if you end up with too much TP in the toilet when you finally do flush and end up having to call a plumber in for an expensive repair. I try to be conscious of the amount of toilet paper used, and will readily flush if it looks like there's too much in there.

• We line-dry probably about 25% of our clothes, and have for years. It really makes items like jeans last much longer, and I find that I like the stiffness that clothes get when they've been line-dried. I've also lost a few shirts to one of our cats, who likes to climb the drying rack. If it were a favorite or expensive blouse, I could wipe out my annual savings by having to replace clothes. The sooner I get the clothes folded, the less likely this is to happen.

• We do a good amount of bulk cooking, and it only saves us money if we actually take the time to portion out the food and vacuum-seal it. This doesn't always happen, unfortunately. It's like leftovers, sometimes it's stupidly hard to do the easiest things. I try to plan a little bit better with the timing, we most often let food go to waste when we finish cooking late at night and just don't have the energy.

• Install a programmable thermostat is wise advice often given to those looking to save money. No problems there! We have one already. That isn't programmed. We've lived in the house for 1.5 years, and still haven't programmed the thermostat. Why? No one knows. I'll spend hours updating my price book, but don't program the thermostat. And I know exactly where the manual is. In some ways, I'm just as bad as my office property managers and their toilets.

Making fresh flowers last as long as resolutions

We hosted our first formal holiday dinner over Christmas, and it turned out just lovely. We really enjoy entertaining, and I have a tendency to make too grand of plans, so we've scaled back in quantity to account for my insanity.

Entertaining has a definite learning curve, and you only get better with experience. I think back to some of the first showers that I hosted, shake my head and smile. In the past year, we hosted quite a bit less, which allowed me to not make myself crazy on a regular basis. And really let the cleaning of the house go. Which meant that the week leading up to the holiday was a frenzy of cleaning and we were still preparing the table and food when the guests started arriving.

The evening was wonderful, though. I made a last minute splurge on four bunches of fresh flowers the day of dinner (I had stupidly forgot to buy any white wine--we had plenty of red, but no white, which is what I drink when feeling fancy). I love having fresh flowers when guests are planned, and arranging flowers really soothes me. It hasn't been in the budget for a long time, though. I'm glad I splurged, the flowers have lasted quite a while. Right after the new year, I re-arranged the vases, and they're about due for another rearrangement. They may actually last longer than most people's New Year's resolutions (I'll be posting my resolutions later today--only 6 days late!).

Entertaining tips
Be prepared -- any good girl scout should be, but know at least two days in advance what food will be served, and who will be drinking what. For a big dinner like this, my husband and I detail exactly what we need to cook, and go to the grocery store as early as possible. We also figure out a rough schedule of what gets cooked when so that everything is hot and ready at the same time.
Start early -- china, crystal, linens and silver should all be ready to go the day before. Trust me. Even if you're insane and have two cats, follow this advice. Otherwise your in-laws will arrive with the table half-set.

Arranging flowers

• A wonderful Southern woman once told me that a butterfly should be able to flit through the flowers of an arrangement--it should not be too crowded. Depending on the type of arrangement, I always remember this. I do have limited vases, so like any rule I ignore it from time to time.

• Use different types of flowers, but find balance. I used three colors for the Christmas arrangement, but two of them were mums of different sizes, so it didn't look all over the place.

• Unexpected surprises, like green mums on long stems, can catch the eye.

• Don't get stuck when re-arranging. Just because you started with one arrangement doesn't mean that you have to stick to it. Once the water gets a little cloudy, rinse and trim all stem ends, fill vases with fresh water and flower food (sometimes I add a little sugar if I don't have flower food), rearrange, and voila -- fresh flowers for at least a week more! My original arrangements each used all three colors (red, green and white) because it was Christmas. When I redid the vases, I kept one multicolored (below), a small square vase with just green and white for the kitchen table (above), and a set of three bud vases with just red. Another bud vase has a few green and white blooms. My next rearrangement will be more limited by the quality and size of blooms left.

• Enjoy the splurge!

Freshly rearranged flowers from New Year's Day, along with some Canadian maple syrup -- a holiday present from my husband's family up north.

Finally, the furnace is functioning

The circuit board was replaced, the insanely dirty evaporator coils were cleaned and the fan motor was just replaced. The furnace works! While I have my regrets about not renewing the home warranty, in some ways it is perhaps better to have control over the situation. Sort of in the same way that having a landlord to fix (and pay) for repairs is cheaper than owning a home, but not if your landlord doesn't return your calls or get anything fixed in a timely manner.

Between dealing with the dental insurance company and the cell phone provider and all the other entities that we're fighting, I don't know that I would have the heart to hound the warranty company and their service provider of choice into doing the job right. We had originally used the HVAC service that the warranty had sent out a while back while we were still covered. The technician was decent, but the managers never wanted to call us back -- I don't think they're quite used to clients as concerned with a job done well as we are. The evaporator coils were cleaned for free, which was 3+ hours of labor. They never did call us back with a quote to replace the motor.

We finally found a HVAC service company that has been simply delightful to work with (is that weird that I find such pleasure in locating a good company? Technically my husband found them, but man what a difference). I was discussing home warranties with the technician, and he mentioned that while his neighbor has  gotten a whole bunch of services for free under a home warranty, the quality of the service is so shoddy that it doesn't really make any sense.

Despite the really big expense, I'm happy to have heat in the whole house again. And so very thankful that our parents were able to help us out, keeping a possible budget buster from seriously adding to our credit card debt. We have friends from many walks of life -- some paid their own way through college (some never went to college) and some that still rely on their parents well into their 30s. We've been trying to remain truly independent for the past five years that we have lived together, but we're by no means perfect. That's what this blog is about, figuring out how to be happy and successful and live within our means. I think part of that is swallowing your pride and accepting help when it's offered and can truly make a difference. Thanks to their help, we can get back on track with building an emergency fund and saving for semi-annual and annual bills so that the next time that something like this happens, we can stand on our own two (four?) feet.

Furnace still a mess

Well, looks like we made the wrong choice when it came to not renewing the home warranty. We came back from Thanksgiving to find our house cold once again (good thing our cats have such nice warm coats!). The circuit board had been replaced, but the furnace didn't seem to be keeping up with the set temperature, and didn't get above 66 degrees on Monday. We called the service company back, and since I had taken the day off already, meeting them wasn't a big problem. I had planned on spending the day working on the blog, finalizing xmas plans and checking out the Cyber Monday deals. Instead I spent most of the day fussing over the furnace.

The service technician looked at the unit late in the afternoon and said that the motor for the blower desperately needed to be cleaned, and that's why it wasn't working, then left without fixing anything. He showed me where it needed to be cleaned, and it was pretty nasty.

(Sorry for the bad focus, we had to squeeze into the furnace to get an angle on the fan. Please note that this looks dusty and nasty--you should have seen the interior of the fan housing when the fan was replaced. Our house, the rest of the furnace and the utility room are all quite clean and well-maintained. It's like a nightmare was hiding in the furnace.)

Since we're new to this household management thing, and the manager wasn't calling us back, we were beginning to feel like colossal idiots who were getting screwed. We used a shop vac and a damp rag to clean off the motor as the tech had shown me, and the dang thing still wouldn't work.

I called them up this morning, and they were getting ready to send someone out to clean the unit for free, so it looked like we were on the right track. He arrived, and said the furnace and motor looked fine, and couldn't figure out what wasn't working. After some examination of the ducts, we discovered there was cold air coming out of the return vents. Since the motor was running in the correct direction, that didn't make any sense.

He did some more digging, and finally opened up the top of the furnace and found an unholy mess on the evaporator coils of the A/C portion of the unit. The interior of the evaporator coils was completely caked with dirt and cat fur and who knows what else. And it was baked on there too.

(Mesh-like metal webbing coated in who knows what.)

(This isn't the greatest picture, but it's the outside of the evaporator coils, and shows what the metal webbing should look like.)

He had to cut the freon line and who knows what else to get the coils out to clean them. He said that since our house is so clean (glad someone thinks so) and the newness of the unit, it was very unusual to see so much buildup on the coils. Due to the amount, he thought it had probably been accumulating since well before we moved in. Since the furnace blows the warm air past the coils, all of our problems lately had been cascading down from the warm air having nowhere to go -- melting the circuit board, etc. Watching him remove all that crud was fascinating to say the least. After a couple of hours spent figuring out the problem and taking apart the furnace, he got everything put back together. And discovered that the fan motor was shot. It would occasionally work, but would cut out for no reason.

Net of the story is that unless we replace the fan motor, we're going to continue to have problems. We haven't got the quote on the motor yet, but just with the work done thus far, the home warranty would have paid for itself, just 30 days into the term. D'oh! We didn't have to pay for the labor to clean the furnace today, but we already paid for the circuit board and we're going to have to pay to replace the motor.

Related:
Budget disaster narrowly avoided

Argh, I spoke too soon

I posted last night about the furnace, and did, in fact, jinx us. When we woke up to go to work this morning, it was once again not at the set temperature, but several degrees lower. Argh. Looks like we won't be lucky after all.

Update 1:58 pm -- The circuit board is going to be replaced. It's going to be expensive, and I really hope it fixes the problem. Excuse me while I crawl under my cube desk and sob.