So. We just dropped the price of a very used car on appliances. Nice appliances. Energy-efficient appliances that will pay for themselves in a couple of years. But the cheapskate in me is clawing at her throat and ripping out her hair every time she even glances at a checkbook. I don't normally worry about money, but after a big purchase I'm all PANIC PANIC PANIC for about three weeks after. Also, I'm a little more needy in the financial security department than I even have been before.
Also, with this meal planning thing, we're spending a lot more money on groceries than we used to. I have to keep reminding myself that we're spending far less money on food overall, but I died a little inside when we went out last night to get foods for the week. Nevermind that we're not spending at least ten to twenty extra dollars a day on restaurant/prepackaged food. I see the grocery bill that will hold us for at least a week, and I freak.
It still hasn't removed my undying affection for the appliances. I did eight loads of laundry last night, folded them all and put them away (except for James's mountain o' socks), cooked dinner for the two of us, and was still cheerful and happy enough to do the dishes immediately after supper.
I LOVE my kitchen. It's bright, it's airy, it has counter space and room to turn around. Room for a little breakfast table. Three windows, lots of cabinets. A sink bigger than a silver dollar. I don't even care that the cabinets are a badly-painted forest green or that some of them really need to be replaced one of these days. It's MY kitchen, and it makes cooking fun and unchorelike. I may just start sleeping on the floor down there, or maybe start curling up in my oven for the night. My new oven. My new oven of love.
The office is the one room that is completely done, and it looks beautiful. I'm a huge fan of this Toasty Grey thing. Thanks again, Kemma. It looks especially nice with my desk color, which is a deep cherry red.
Oh! Our bedroom is done, too, but we're not sleeping in there. We have to get a queen mattress for the gorgeous queen size bed frame and headboard (which we got for FREE from a couple in our church). It is huge. It ain't just a headboard. It has a high, narrow set of dressers on either side of the bed, and a giant shelf with a mirror and two lights behind. The mirror kinda weirds me out (I just know I'll wake up in the middle of the night and take a baseball bat to the shadowy figures lurking about my bed), but it looks really nice--provided I can apply Windex to it more than once a year.
We haven't gotten said mattress because of aforementioned PANIC PANIC PANIC about the checkbook. With my growing size and ungainliness, it's gradually moving up the scale from "want really bad" to "kind of need". Not that we'll ever outright NEED a queen-size bed, but we'd both get more and better sleep, and my hips wouldn't wake me up at three in the morning, telling me to turn over or they'll strangle me in my sleep.
Our guest room is done (that's where we've been sleeping). Ish. There is a smell. A pet smell. It's not in the carpet, walls or ceiling. It's in the radiator. This radiator is a beast. It's not the tall, cast iron kind, but the kind that's low to the floor and runs along the wall--metal hot water tube covered with diffusers (small square metal panels about 2" by 2" and about 1/16" apart), and the whole assembly is covered with aluminum panels. The diffusers are the problem. It's impossible to clean and vacuum around and behind them, they're really hard to take off, and there are hundreds of them. When winter comes, and they start kicking up heat and scent particles, the problem will be so much worse. We're going to replace all of them some day, just because they're so ugly and beat up, but we can't do it now. In the meantime, we have a smelly house, and I don't know what to do about it.
I can live with it; I know what it is, I know it's nothing that's going to hurt us, and that it's just unpleasant. But it means we can't really have people over. Perhaps we can talk to our realtor. She does a lot of house-flipping; maybe she's run into the same problem before. Of course, she probably just replaces the radiators in most cases, but we can ask.
I need to go. I have to eat. Ye olde fetus is kicking me pointedly at regular intervals.
No comments:
Post a Comment