Cardboard Box Chic

That’s my new decorating style.  It’s pretty fabulous.  Boxes as seating, boxes as decorations, boxes as tables.  Cheap, but not so durable.

Unpacking is going slowly, if you haven’t figured it out.  Part of the problem is my social life.  Oh, I know, my life is so hard.  Actually, it just happened that months ago, I made commitments for Saturday and Sunday of this past weekend, which meant I was out having fun (in the ridiculously cold weather) and not inside unpacking boxes.

As expected, we’ve found a few quirks with the house.

First off, we were inundated with pill bugs.  I did a bunch of research and ended up cleaning up the flower beds near the house and caulking underneath the door.  Voila!  The pill bug problem has all but vanished.  I just have a bit more caulking and sealing to do and I think we’ll be golden.

We discovered that the plumbing was essentially backwards in the master bathroom – so in the shower, the hot water was cold and the cold was hot.  Not a problem if you have dual handles.  Which I don’t.  So I had to have that fixed.

Then, using my powers of observation and Google, I discovered that the hot water heater was connected backwards.  That was a bit harder to fix, but it’s been taken care of.  I actually got in touch with the seller’s realtor and ended up not paying a single cent to have that fixed.  After all, they marketed the house as having a brand new hot water heater.  Not so great when it’s installed improperly.

I’m sure there will be more quirks appearing, but I’ll just have to wait and see on that one.  Next step is finishing the unpacking.  One of these days, anyway.

Megan Smith

Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance.  It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information.  It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck.  While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan.  I needed to budget.  I needed to know what I was spending my money on.  I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way.  I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.