I'm back to my version of normal now. The funk over new carpet has passed, although I still have a yen to do something to the house.
Paying an $800+ Visa bill, the mortgage, the newspaper and making the usual transfers to the various accounts this morning helped provide a little perspective. That coupled with using Windex on some of the carpet stains upstairs in the kids' bedrooms and seeing them mostly go away helped me accept that it makes more sense (on many levels) to just get the carpets cleaned throughout the house.
Prior to kids I had shampooed them myself, but that's been 7 years, and they've never been professionally cleaned.
In the end, I think I will feel much more content with funding M's 529 a little and making an extra house payment. I think I am pretty good with delaying gratification, but delaying gratification by 10-15 years is hard even for me. When I'm itching to change things up, knowing that we're saving a couple thousand in interest over the life of our mortgage loan doesn't quite hit the spot.
Still, I have to assuage this itch a little.
I will buy some new curtains for the office, since D sleeps down there when he has early morning code moves and has told me the sheer curtains suck. When he told me this at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday as he was preparing to head downstairs and said, "We need to get new curtains for down there," I asked, "Right now? At 8:30?"
This summer we have to stain and seal the deck, since it has been since N was a toddler that we last did it. Seeing a nice, bright deck will help ease my home improvement desire. By gosh, maybe I'll buy a nice, wooden wind chime, which I have been wanting to purchase for years. Every time I'd see a $24.99 or $36.99 price tag for a wind chime, I'd gulp and move on.
But this year, I'm gonna do it.
Just watch me.
Paying an $800+ Visa bill, the mortgage, the newspaper and making the usual transfers to the various accounts this morning helped provide a little perspective. That coupled with using Windex on some of the carpet stains upstairs in the kids' bedrooms and seeing them mostly go away helped me accept that it makes more sense (on many levels) to just get the carpets cleaned throughout the house.
Prior to kids I had shampooed them myself, but that's been 7 years, and they've never been professionally cleaned.
In the end, I think I will feel much more content with funding M's 529 a little and making an extra house payment. I think I am pretty good with delaying gratification, but delaying gratification by 10-15 years is hard even for me. When I'm itching to change things up, knowing that we're saving a couple thousand in interest over the life of our mortgage loan doesn't quite hit the spot.
Still, I have to assuage this itch a little.
I will buy some new curtains for the office, since D sleeps down there when he has early morning code moves and has told me the sheer curtains suck. When he told me this at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday as he was preparing to head downstairs and said, "We need to get new curtains for down there," I asked, "Right now? At 8:30?"
This summer we have to stain and seal the deck, since it has been since N was a toddler that we last did it. Seeing a nice, bright deck will help ease my home improvement desire. By gosh, maybe I'll buy a nice, wooden wind chime, which I have been wanting to purchase for years. Every time I'd see a $24.99 or $36.99 price tag for a wind chime, I'd gulp and move on.
But this year, I'm gonna do it.
Just watch me.
1 comment:
You're version of normal kind of cracks me up - is that okay?
I KNOW that Matt and I are supposed to be partners in our finances, and I think we mostly are, but he is the banker (professionally) so he handles most of it. I think I would probably be more thoughtful about my spending if I paid all of the bills.
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