I knew these would happen. I knew of the handful of things we would need to buy to round out our home, but I have been blindsided by some of the basics that we need.
To backtrack, I came to a huge realization on our moving day a few weeks ago: Our systems no longer work.
Basically, all of the systems of organization Andy and I put together at our apartment were great for our apartment. It took us a solid 2 years to come up with all of them and I know that if we had had kids in the apartment (as was the plan before our ducks lined up so nicely) the systems would have changed again. This includes things like the little corner in front of the walkway we kept our items to donate, our shoe rack in the kitchen off the foyer, the small desk we put in between the kitchen and living room to place papers and bags, and how we sorted some cleaning stuff into bins under the sink or in the laundry closet.
Now I will be the first to say that I found our systems to be a little frustrating. They often resulted in small items being strewn all over the place and our little nameless section between the kitchen and living room was always clogged with bags, boxes, workout gear, yoga mats, and ongoing projects. Our apartment constantly felt like it needed to be purged, even though we had a policy of living just above bare minimum already.
The new house has an entire bedroom that we've devoted to storage while we save the money to buy a climate-controlled shed. For now, Andy has outfitted it with basic shelves to hold tubs of equipment and some bookshelves to hold our books we don't have room to display in our hallway. It's also where we are currently housing items we brought from the apartment that don't clearly have a use yet, but we want to give a year window to see if a use comes up for it (like our barstools, we no longer have anything that is at bar height that you could sit at without getting in the way).
But now with the new feng shui we have gaping holes where we need a new system to be set up.
Enter the unexpected home expense or UHE.
Examples of this are endless, but I will include a small list and their prices here:
Sofa table from Ikea- used for bringing our sofa further into our really long living room, storage and a place to set drinks during lounging- $99
Bathroom storage shelves from Ikea- $80
Nightstand for V- $60 (I was using a table that had about 6 square inches for me to store my book, flashlight, and lip goop)
Extra shelves for storage room- $40
Equipment to create new circuit in office for TV and computers- $80 (not including ladder, gloves and other safety equipment)
Blinds for Living Room and Bedroom- $560 (yeah, this was super unexpected. Custom blinds are expensive)
Total: $920
And that's not including all the other random stuff we've had to acquire like putty knives, dry wall repair kits, center beam supports for our closets, new bathroom accessories for the 2nd bathroom, shelving for the utility room and, oh yeah, a washer, dryer, refrigerator, weed whacker and lawnmower.
Holy crap, being a homeowner is expensive.
We've also been told this is temporary, that eventually we won't be acquiring stuff, just spending money for maintenance, but I feel like until we get the yard to a workable place we can continue to expect the larger bills to flow. I think this will settle down in a year, but until then, I have to keep remembering that it's temporary, expected, budgeted for and until I see Andy panic, I will remain calm and enjoy the process.
Though I may need to find a corner on Aurora presently unoccupied and start yet another side business.
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