The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Father Poulson, our pastor down at the church where they let me sing along with the choir, made a gracious suggestion for a Lenten devotion: for each day of Lent, find something to be thankful for. I like this idea. So, for each of the next forty days, Funny will lead off with a short moment of thanks for something of great value. For Day 1, then, read on.
Image: Carl Spitzweg, Ash Wednesday. Public Domain.
Ohhhhhhhhh moan! The handyman charged $615 to repaint the eaves, install two new motion-sensitive lights, and plane down the solid-core door on the office so it will close properly. That doesn’t count the cost of the paint, which was more than any reasonable person could expect.
I can’t complain too much. He repaired some dry-rot that the roofers should have fixed and that was in their contract to fix but that they ignored (too busy chopping back my prize trees, I guess). The paint job he did is far superior to the one committed by Bila the Bosnian Lightning Bolt.
Bila, who does nothing but paint (well, he also will hire out for a few handyman jobs, but by trade he’s a painter), painted the entire house from stem to stern in a day. He accomplished this with a sprayer, which he used to apply a light coat over everything. As you can imagine, this hasn’t held up very well. Jack, on the other hand, actually painted the woodwork—you remember, with a paintbrush and a roller? He also filled cracks and generally repaired the tired wood trim. It looks very nice, and it appears likely to last for quite a while. It took him a day and a half to do this, and for Jack a “day” extends until well after dark.
This hail damage thing is turning into quite the financial fiasco. Fortunately, so far the insurance company has covered all the repairs. I’m going to scan Jack’s invoice and the receipts for the paint and exterior lights, mail them off to the adjuster, and we’ll see if they’ll spring for a little more cash.
And…even if they don’t, I still can’t complain. They’ve covered almost $12,000 in repairs so far. If I have to pay $600 or $700, that’s still a darn sight better than 12 or 13 grand.
Thanks to the hailstorm, the entire neighborhood has had a facelift. Almost every house got a new roof. Given the exorbitant cost of roofing, as you can imagine many peoples’ roofs were already pretty weary before the depression started, and what with the hard times, our houses were beginning to take on a kind of Appalachian look. Quite a few homeowners also managed to change out the 20-year-old Goettl air-conditioning units. These new units not only look a great deal less ugly, they run whisper-quiet. My neighbors’ AC/heaters used to growl like jet planes. Now when Terry’s and Sally’s units come on, I can hardly hear them. That adds a lot to the livability factor.
{sigh} By dint of assiduous penny-pinching my savings account had finally, within the past week, recovered its former glory. Just transferred the cash over to checking to cover the draft I wrote to Jack. That puts savings right back where it was a few months ago.
Hope a decent tax refund materializes. Hope the insurance company will cover some of this bill.
We still have the security door to install in back. Urk!
Image: A Modern Trade Painter. Lukeroberts. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.
Thank you, Mr. Stewart!
Well…yes, I am. Gotta check off a passel of student exercises and get back to work on the OB-gyn book. Oh, well. By way of procrastination, let’s go a-lollygagging in the meadows of Blogland.
OMG! Have you seen what Tom Drake at Canadian Finance Blog is up to? He’s built an entire series around his jaundiced view of some very suspect insurance products. His most recent target: Identity Theft Insurance. Mwa ha hah! This is great stuff. Don’t miss any of the entries in this excellent set of posts.
At BrokeProfessionals.com, 101 Centavos sweetly describes an awesome anniversary evening and makes a good case for the occasional splurge.
Frugal Scholar ruminates on product lifecycles, the state of frugality, and the art of using things up.
Bargain Babe wonders how much gasoline has to cost before you start to change your driving habits.
Here’s a useful post from Evan at My Journey to Millions: What to bring to your accountant. This year I tried to simplify and clarify the pile of paper that needed to be forked over. The less time your tax pro has to spend plowing through your paper or electronic debris, the less the job will cost you!
Money Crush experiences that sinking feeling after having lost track of the days…including the day the mortgage bill got automatically paid. Yipes!
Mrs. Accountability is a past master of food caching. Take a look at the incredible produce she scored: 60 pounds of it! And check out her strategies for preserving and storing it.
At The Digerati Life, SVB contemplates what life would be like in a tiny house. This post is replete with photos, highly entertaining. LOL! Have you noticed that these micro-castles amount to the ultimate escape fantasy for frugalists? The things are fascinating. Check out the stories from her readers in the comments section.
At Ultimate Money Blog, Mrs. Money suggests a passel of ways to use up eggs. This is always a mystification for me: I don’t eat eggs (they make me sick unless mixed with other foods) but occasionally need one or two to make biscuits and the like. Since an unadulterated egg makes the dog throw up, too, this leaves me with anywhere from five to eleven eggs to get rid of…they usually end up going in the trash, weeks and weeks later.
Nicole and Maggie at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured describe in detail what goes on during those wonderful three-month “vacations” people think university and K-12 faculty get to enjoy. Heeeee! You, too, can become a teacher and learn to work for free.
Uh oh…looks like the handyman is just pulling up to the house. Gotta go!
So I trot over to Home Depot last weekend, there to peruse that august box’s limited selection of security doors. As expected, every single one of them looks like prison bars, except for the pressed-metal kitsch with the cut-out silhouettes of hummingbirds, coyotes, and sombreroed campesinos snoozing against saguaros. Good god.
Moving on, this afternoon it was over to Lowe’s on the way home from the credit union. The nearest Lowe’s is out by the West campus, where the nearest branch of the credit union resides, placing both of these institutions in a locale that cannot be called, with a straight face, “near.”
Situation at Lowe’s: even more ridiculous. The only door they had that didn’t look like prison bars with a slot through which the guard passes your plate of slop is a Titan: twelve hundred bucks!
Give me a proverbial BREAK!
At least the cheaper doors at the Depot come with insect screen. You can’t get that with the low-end models at Lowe’s. The hideous metal mesh, which lets mosquitoes in, is sorta OK in front, because the random door-to-door nuisance can’t see you through it and so can’t easily tell you’re alone. But in back, where one would like to gaze out upon one’s expensively appointed landscaping, steel mesh is just not gonna make it.
Sooo… It looks like it’s prison bars with insect screen and a double-cylinder deadbolt or nothing. Just now I’m leaning toward a .38 special.
Ohhhh well. While at Lowe’s, I did pick up a replacement for the impossible motion-sensitive spotlight in back, the one to which you have to take a screwdriver powered by male muscle to change the light bulb. When you get it open, you find it takes an exotic size and shape bulb that requires a special trip to HD or the electric supplier to track it down. Really. I wish to be able to change my light bulbs all by my pretty little self, thank you!
Also got a rather nice, not very pricey motion-sensitive coach light, which will go on the back porch. The little cheapie I installed when I moved in is looking pretty ragged already—it really was junk of the best you-get-what-you-pay-for variety. This looks sturdier, and I’ve come to really love the motion-sensitive coach lights I installed last year in front. They’re reasonably attractive, and what a luxury, to have them pop on when you walk up to them!
I tend to wander off and leave that back porch light on. Then when I go out there by daylight, I’m peeved to see it was burning all night and half the morning. This thing will come on when Cassie goes out to pee during the pre-dawn hours but not burn kilowatts when it’s forgotten.
One sterling quality of the motion-sensitive light is that it clues you if someone’s outside in the yard. Or…if a moth flew by or the wind is blowing…
New sliding or French doors to replace the three rather sketchy sliders (like…maybe one that has an actual latch on it?) also appear to be prohibitively expensive.
Really, though: unclear whether functional doors are really necessary. After all, the door squealer and the stick in the slider’s track worked: the guy ran off without getting inside. The whole point was to alert me if someone tried to get in the house while I was here, and that was exactly what happened. Probably newer doors wouldn’t be a whole lot more secure than what I’ve got. They might save a few pennies on power, but how many years will it take to recover the costs from the power bills?
The annual rebate from Costco’s American Express arrived late last week. It was only $157, the lowest kickback I’ve ever received from that august credit card company. Compare with last year’s refund of $337, and the $210 they sent in 2009. Pretty pathetic.
Of course, what it says is that in 2010 I cut spending way, way back. The only major purchase I made was for M’hijito’s dryer—since he pays for everything in cash, we charged it on my card and he reimbursed me so I could get the kickback. If it hadn’t been for that purchase, the rebate would have been even less.
In one respect the small check is not so disappointing: it means I succeeded in cutting my budget to unheard-of low levels. Of course, that happened because I had to cut back: I had no money.
Like everyone else, evidently. Spending dropped drastically across the country as more and more Americans fell victim to layoffs, forced “retirements,” furloughs, and pay cuts. Reports tell us we’ve seen a recent uptick in consumer spending, with an increase of 4.4 percent in fourth-quarter 2010. That’s good for the economy, I guess. One could speculate about pent-up need, though: at some point along the line people simply have replace cars that crap out and household infrastructure items that break—such as M’hijito’s clothes dryer. As experience tells us, all these things are engineered to break at once. Will people keep on buying after they’ve replaced the things they can’t do without?
Oh well. I could’ve used a larger kickback. On the other hand, a couple of other windfalls blew in: the RASL payment and a couple of new jobs from new and old clients. So, what the heck. I’ve learned to limit spending, and don’t expect to increase it for the sheer joy of seeing a few extra pennies in the annual AMEX rebate.
How about you? Now that you’ve tightened your belt, do you intend to loosen spending if and when times get better, or will you continue to cultivate your new frugal habits?