One of the first big projects that I want to take on in my house is ripping the carpet out of the office. The room I currently use as an office is actually an old screened-in porch. At some point, the back door was taken out and replaced with a window, so it now just serves as a little room. The problem with the room is that I don’t think it was quite properly renovated. My cat has taken a serious liking to the carpet in that room and peed on the floor more than once. That’s not a typical thing for him, so I strongly suspect that the room smells of other animals.
(Yes, I have had the cat checked by the vet, no he isn’t sick. But thank you for your concern.)
I thought I had the problem taken care of. Then the humidity rose. As did the smell. Yuck.
So my plan is to rip out all of the carpet in the room. A quick peek tells me that the floor beneath is just concrete. So I want to pull up the carpet, clean the floor, seal it with some sort of concrete paint, and then throw an indoor/outdoor rug (already owned) over top. The floor won’t be padded very well, but I don’t spend much time in there as it is, so I’m not worried about how it will feel under my feet. I just don’t want it to smell like cat all the time!
I’m hoping to get started soon. First I have to take everything out of the office. Next step is ripping up the carpet to see exactly what I’m dealing with. Should be an interesting project.
Megan is a 30-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.
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