Furnishings

I have mentioned before that I’m slowly furnishing my house.  Moving from an apartment to a three bedroom house means that I have a lot more space.  (I have to admit, since I’m not using the attic due to lack of safe access, I could really use more storage space in the house, but that’s another story.)  One of the things I love about the house is that I have what I call a family room and a living room.  The family room is in the finished basement, and is where I have my old living room furniture, my tv, and hopefully someday, a treadmill and a trainer for my bike (which I also don’t yet own).

The living room is upstairs, just as you come into the house through the front door.  It has a fireplace (that will someday be converted to gas, since I know I will never use the wood burning fireplace) and until recently, it was completely unfurnished.  I finally found the perfect picture to put over the fireplace, and I had been holding on all of the decorating until I found something to go there.  But now that I have that, I can start furnishing.  So over the weekend, I put in two chairs and a table.

Yes, they are made of metal and meant to be outside.  But they count, right?

Okay, they don’t really count.  I set them up in the living room because I thought it was funny, plus it was nice to have another place to sit.  I’m currently researching couches and other furnishings.  I don’t want to go all out and spend a fortune, but I do want something nice and comfortable to put in that room.  I look forward to having a place to just sit and read without the distractions of the tv or (worse) my bed.

Unfortunately, couches and chairs aren’t cheap.  Especially if I want to do something of decent quality (which I do).  So for now, I’m just watching the sales and making decisions on what I want.  I hate shopping, so this is always an adventure for me.

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.