(This post was originally written on Saturday, July 21, 2012 – see the intro post for more details…)
Today Sara and I spent probably a good 2-3 hours just wandering around, between both Lowe’s and Bed, Bath & Beyond.
We’re trying our best to stay calm through another one of these damn waiting periods – this time we’re waiting for a check to show up in the mail from my 401k to fund our down payment … because even though I overnighted the paperwork to them, heaven forbid they overnight the funds back to me!
But I don’t want to rant about that right now… 😉
It’s kind of fun to plan for our future like this, though, so we spent hours wandering just about every single aisle in each store, speculating about the things that we need and the things that we’ve already talked about doing around our new house in the future. Some of them are relatively small and will likely get done right away, like adding a couple of extra ceiling fans and sprucing some things up in the kitchen, while others will have to wait until next year and possibly beyond … we’d like to redo the garden in the front and even replace a tree with something a little more tropical, for example, but that’ll be at least springtime, depending on costs and whatnot…
But it’s nice to have a fresh look on everything and be able to talk about these kinds of things that have always been off-limits while we’ve been renting all of these years. I mean, sure, we could’ve redone the garden at our current house, but that’s not exactly something that you can take with you when you leave and at the end of the day, why should I spend a bunch of money out of my own pocket to spruce up somebody else’s investment??? That one was honestly an idea that I’d been entertaining for a while, but we never quite had the extra cash lying around anyways … but now in hindsight with all of the other drama that’s happened recently, I’m kinda glad that we didn’t go through with anything earlier because I’d be out there with a shovel and a garbage bag digging up all of my shrubs to take with us at this point!
I can tell that over the next month or so, we’re going to be spending a lot of money – not just on the house itself, but also lots of these little home improvements off the bat and also just in updating some everyday creature comforts like maybe dishes, towels, and stuff like that. And it’s kind of fun because it helps cement the fact that although we’ve certainly had several nice homes together over the last six years, this will be the first one that we’ll be able to truly call our own… 🙂