Coffee heat rising

Why Eat at Home?

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Check out Richly Reasonable’s small tour de force, In or Out Burger? Cruising the Internet in search of some material for a post, she ran across an article from an apparently disinterested source claiming that a McDonald’s hamburger costs no more than a burger made at home.

Breaking out the calculator, she begs to differ. This lady is an accountant, and so her results are a bit more credible than my English-major math. You need to see what she concluded.

There are many benefits to eating in. IMHO, the financial aspect amounts to the least part of the matter. The fact is, if you’re even a halfway decent cook, home-cooked food tastes better. I like the occasional grilled hamburger, but I can’t stomach a McDonald’s…eewww! A McDonald’s patty doesn’t even taste like meat to me. Put it inside a flavorless balloon-bread bun and slather it with institutional garnish, and what have you got? Not anything you’d want to put in your mouth.

Also, even though you don’t know where your groceries have been before you get them, at least you do know how the food was stored and prepared after it arrived in your kitchen.

My ex- and I used to eat out all the time—three to five times a week. After I left him, I took up with SDXB, who had been a multi-award-winning investigative reporter. He refused to eat in restaurants, partly because he was famously frugal but mainly because he had once done a series on what goes on in the restaurant kitchen. Because of what he learned in that project, he simply would not eat in restaurants.

I spent several years with this man, who loved to cook. The result was that I came to dislike restaurant food. The truth is, it’s not very good! Now I still enjoy eating in a few restaurants, but, with the exception of one family-run Mexican joint, they’re way too expensive to enjoy more than once every month or two.

It’s a matter of breaking a habit. When you start fixing your own meals with real, unprocessed food, you discover that most restaurant and junk food is not very good, just as you realize, six or eight weeks after kicking the soda-pop habit, that sicky-sweet soft drinks don’t really taste very good or, a year after quitting cigarettes, that tobacco smoke stinks.

Once that particular light dawns, the cost is irrelevant: today I wouldn’t drink a glass of pop if it was free and I had to pay for water. Nor, given a choice, would I prefer to eat out than in.

Estate Sale Coup

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Can you believe I found this at an estate sale?

La Maya and I were doing some recreational estate-saling the other day when we came across this throw at an otherwise unexceptional site.

Said she: “This looks hand-made.”

“Couldn’t be,” said I. “There’s another one over there, across the room, just like it. They must be convincing machine-made replicas from China.”

About then, along comes the lady who’s running the sale.

“The owner,” says she, “sits in front of the television and knits these as a hobby. She says it’s her ‘therapy.’ She just keeps making them, and she wants to get rid of them. She’s selling them for what the materials cost.” The price was $35.

On closer inspection, you could tell that $35 really was about her cost. The wool is very nice—extremely soft and warm. The throw above doesn’t appear to have been blocked, but it would be easy enough to do that yourself with a flat piece, and probably wouldn’t cost much to have it done professionally. The work is very nice…

There were four of them scattered around the house. I wish I’d bought more than one now, to give one as a gift. My mother used to knit and crochet—she was very good at it. And while buying the yarn was a lot cheaper than buying a hand-knit sweater at a shop, for sure good wool costs something.

At any rate, it’s going to be wonderful next winter, when the inside of the house gets chilly. I can’t wait to curl up on the sofa under it.

You, Too, Can Score This Loot!

Estate sales generally are better than yard sales. They happen when someone dies, moves, or just decides to clear out a lifetime’s collection of stuff that’s too good to give away for free. These days, foreclosures make for an ongoing bonanza. You can prospect online at this site: just click on your state and then your city for a list of upcoming sales. Estate sales are conducted by professionals who are in the business of organizing housefuls of junk and pricing the goods to sell. Often these outfits will post photos, so you get a good feel for whether a sale has anything to offer that interests you.

Just now I’m looking at one that pictures a practically new front-loading washer & dryer set, a high-end stainless-steel dishwasher, and a stainless-steel bottom-freezer fridge with French-style doors. These people are also selling what looks like an antique love seat upholstered in pristine gold brocade fabric, if that’s your taste.

Many of the dealers maintain e-mail lists. If you find a dealer that consistently has good sales and good prices, ask to be included on their list—they will send you notices of upcoming sales, often with photos. There’s an outfit here, for example, called Angels in the Attic. They must be somewhat selective about what jobs they’ll take on, because almost all their sales have at least some interesting items, and their prices are generally very reasonable.

Try it. You’ll like it!

🙂

Real Estate: Don’t worry! Be happy!

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Here we go again! The Arizona Republic, admittedly a joke of a paper that often gets the facts wrong, reports that young parents are snapping up “bargain” houses in the bedroom communities on the east side of hard-hit Phoenix. These smokin’ real estate deals cost upwards of two hundred grand and are at least a half-hour’s drive away from the center of employment in this area…to the extent that any employment is left.

We have here the young couple who bought a $270,000 Meritage home, thrilled at the give-away price. In passing, I would note that I know a painter who used to work for a company that went around to developments and repaired and rebuilt the flimsy construction, which often left details like keeping out the rain for someone else to fix. He said Meritage was one of their richest sources of business.

So let’s think about this bargain.

At 4 percent with a 20 percent down payment, the happy young buyers will pay about $1,350 a month—that’s with a very conservative estimate of the cost of homeowner’s insurance. Their down payment will be $54,000. Every young couple has that laying around the apartment, right?

Then, incredibly enough, we have the tale of the freshly divorced mother of two, unemployed and a brand-new import from California, who picks up another bargain at $200,000. No job—she thinks she’s going to find work at a shopping center about ten miles from her new home.

Maybe she doesn’t realize that in a right-to-work-for-nothing state, any job she may find as a shop girl won’t net enough to cover the $1,250 PITI payments. Assuming a 25% tax rate—oh, let’s give her the benefit of the mortgage deduction and make it, say, about 15%—she would have to gross $34,500, just to pay the mortgage. That’s before she eats and before she feeds and clothes the kiddies. Sales clerks earn about minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. Assuming she works 52 weeks a year or she lucks into a job where she’s given a few paid days off now and again, that comes to $15,080 a year. If she lands a job as a waitress, in Arizona employers are allowed to pay her as little as $3.00 an hour; the feds assume she earns enough on tips to make up the difference between that and minimum wage and so tax her on $7.25 an hour, whether she really collects that much or not.

Has no one told this lady that there are no jobs in Arizona? Let’s hope ex-hubby is cheerfully sending her a hefty alimony check each month. Doesn’t seem likely, IMHO; if the court allowed her to bring her kids to Arizona, it means she got sole custody, which doesn’t sound like Dad is going to be in the mood to pay through the schnozzola to support her and the expensive offspring.

Maybe it’s not that Arizona’s school system is so bad it can’t teach the most basic common sense; maybe the issue is that we have a population of lunkheads. Six thousand buyers, some of them unemployed, grabbing $270,000 bargains? These folks—and their lenders—don’t learn even after they’ve been hit upside the head with a two-by-four!

A Li’l Saturday Round-up

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Life goes on in other parts of the world, even though the economy and 110-degree heat under cloudy skies have pretty much brought a stop to existence in these parts. Here and there, some interesting posts:

Evan, over at My Journey to Millions, celebrates his second blogiversary by celebrating the impending birth of his son with a lovely letter to the young fellow. Ah, to be in the fresh morning of life again…

Mrs. Accountability is still struggling with the aftermath of a computer meltdown, with data she thought had been backed up NOT, after all… Nightmarish. She just learned that when you order up a copy of your income tax returns, the IRS sends you a report that does not duplicate, by a long shot, all the data you enter in a 1040 and related forms. It costs $57 to get the real thing.

J.D. Roth has launched an interesting project: he’s going to relaunch an existing but dormant blog, Animal Intelligence, and at Get Rich Slowly he’s going to track and report upon the steps and progress he makes toward turning that site into a money-maker. He plans to donate the AI proceeds to charity. For sure, that’ll keep me coming around GRS, and I’ll also want to keep an eye on the critter blog.

Frugal Scholar figured out that some purchases made in thrift shops can be traded in at Buffalo Exchange. That’s kind of a neat insight…if you were clever enough about it, you could pick up treasures at Goodwill that don’t fit and schlep them to B.E. for credit toward purchases that do fit.

Dividend Monk now has his entire eight-part series on growing wealth online.

Speaking of prefab houses, as we were the other day, check out Little House in the Valley’s recent discovery! These houses are too kewl to be believed—though a bit on the pricey side, considering that you have to buy the lot and pay for services and contractors.

At Punch Debt in the Face, Ninja is about to say goodbye to bachelorhood! In celebration he’s posted a beautiful paean to Girl Ninja. Be sure to read some of the other posts near this one, also inspired by this great life change.

In the singleton department, Single Guy Money discusses the value of renter’s insurance and provides some tips to things to look for.

Money Beagle reports that his beloved former dwelling has been repossessed by the person who bought it. An anonymous commenter at this post makes some scary speculation about deflation. Conveniently, over at WiseBread, Phil holds forth on the subject with “All about Deflation.”

Welp, time to go on about some Saturday activities. More later…

Tiny Houses of Yesteryear

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The other day I was cruising some of those sites plugging tiny houses and the occasional blog whose proprietor daydreamed wistfully of chucking all the junk and living in one of them. At some point in the course of this junket through the Internet—I don’t remember how—I stumbled upon this amazing site in the archives of Sears. Check it out, especially the voluminous collections of photos and floor plans.

As it develops, between 1908 and the start of World War II, Sears marketed houses built from kits. You could order up the plans and precut materials, and what you got was everything you needed to put a home together, right down to the nails, delivered to your site by freight train. Apparently it wasn’t hard to put one of the things together—a single skilled carpenter could do it.

These packages were made possible by the invention of drywall, which took the place of the much more work-intensive (and beautiful…) lath-and-plaster system, and enhanced by the invention of asphalt shingles, cheap to manufacture, easy to install, and fireproof. The prices today look astonishing. The Arlington (a.k.a. Modern Home No. 145), an elegant two-story model with indoor plumbing, cost $1,294 to $2,906.

Quite a few of the houses were bungalows. Meditating on these charming little structures, it occurred to me that some of them look suspiciously like my great-grandmother’s house in Berkeley. Could it be…?

Her house was built in 1922. Nothing like it appears in the 1921–1926 set, nor in the 1927–1932 collection. But in the last group of plans, 1933–1949, lo! What should appear but the Collingwood:

The exterior didn’t look at all like that. There was no dormer, the steps leading to the front door were different, and where the front porch is, my great-grandmother’s house had a small enclosed entry hall. But the floor plan is very similar, almost the same except for a couple of details:

The railroad-car layout is identical: the two bedrooms and bathroom stacked one behind the other on the right side of the house, and the living room opening through an archway into the dining room, which sat adjacent to the kitchen with its little eating nook at the far end and the back stoop off a little service porch. If the front porch were enclosed, the fireplace on the front wall instead of the side wall, and the living room and kitchen extended out as far as the “bay” in the dining room, it would the the same, identical floor plan!

The striking thing is how small this house is: only about 890 square feet. Some were much smaller; the Hathaway, for example, looks to have been about 410 square feet, when you add both floors together.

According to Zillow, my great-grandmother’s house, still standing on Hopkins Street in Berkeley and now valued at $733,500(!), has 1,265 square feet under roof. An average double-wide trailer is 1,700 square feet.

The house never seemed small to us: in fact, we regarded it as a normal sized home. My parents, in all their 38 years of wedded bliss, never lived in a house that had more than two bedrooms. People lived in larger houses, of course. But they were for larger families, people who had four, five, six kids. When my father moved them to a two-bedroom, two-bath house in Sun City, I recall my mother wondering why anyone would want a second bathroom to have to clean.

Today’s voguish “tiny” houses would have been cramped, even back in the day when people occupied lots less space. Tumbleweed is mounting 65- to 140-square-foot “tiny houses” on trailers. I couldn’t live in a 140-square-foot shed. But I would find many of the Sears floor plans quite comfortable. For one or two people, the Collingwood could certainly fill the bill.

Given the growing enthusiasm for small dwellings with small footprints, wouldn’t you think someone at Sears would think of reviving these kit houses?

In which I embrace my inner White Trash

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Daddy passed for white. Mommy with her Huguenot ancestry and her DAR grandmother was as European as they come. So I reckon I can pass, too.

Last night my long-neglected White Trash roots sprouted a sucker: tinfoil window covering.

Beautiful! An exquisite decorator touch. Eat your heart out, Martha! And Sarah, y’all come on over for coffee now, hear?

How do you like it? Ain’t it purty?

Yep. Tinfoil and Scotch tape: Early Hillwilliam. Sooo…. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is I’m getting might’ tired of waking up at 4:30 in the morning after five hours (at best!) of sleep. Especially when I keep reading those studies that claim old bats who sleep less than seven hours each night are at elevated risk of heart attack. These four-hour nights have been going on way, way too long. They leave me sick with exhaustion, and even if I get a decent night’s sleep it takes two nights of rest to start to feel normal. Two full nights’ sleep in a row is a rarity scarce as hen’s teeth.

Meditating on this state of affairs, it occurred to me that the problem has to do with the light that seeps in through the curtains every morning. For years, I’ve awakened at dawn. The first pearly predawn light works just like an alarm clock. The curtains on the bedroom Arcadia door, at the outset pretty skimpy, are made of beige coarsely woven fabric. Even though they’re lined, they don’t block much light, and since they barely cover the window, plenty of light pours in around the edges.

What if I could block early-morning light from getting into the bedroom? Maybe I could build curtains of outdoor fabric and hang them on the outside of the doors, adding a light- and heat-blocking layer on the exterior side of the perennially overheated glass. Combined with darker drapes on the inside, that might do the trick.

Actually, the curtain-rod hangers in there accommodate two rods, so I could in theory hang two pairs of curtains on the interior. The proposed exterior drapes would then create not one, not two, but three layers of fabric. Hm.

Well, before I go to the trouble and expense of making three sets of drapery and drilling holes in the exterior masonry to hang tacky-looking curtain rods, I figure I’d better find out whether this theory works. Hence, a little experiment.

Research question: Would a dawn-sensitive subject sleep a full seven hours if no light could penetrate the sleeping chamber?

Research methodology: Plaster the windows with tinfoil and then try to sleep through the night.

Preliminary results: Well, the subject did sleep seven hours last night. Nodded off around quarter to eleven and woke up at quarter to six.

Discussion: This, of course, doesn’t prove a thing. Now and again, I do sleep seven hours, and last night in spite of an hour-long afternoon siesta, I was dead tired. But there’s nothing (other than aesthetic queasiness) to keep me from leaving the tinfoil décor up for a few more nights.

So, the plan now is to wait and see. If, over the next week or so, I find I can sleep all night long in a room plunged into inky darkness, then by all means I’ll put up fuller, darker drapes on the inside. And maybe even build some exterior drapes, though it escapes me how these would be secured in the gale-force winds of monsoon season.

In between times, pass the moonshine. And why don’t y’all join me and Sarah here at the manse for some grits and coffee?

Image: Hillbilly Hot Dogs, State Route 2, West Virginia. Youngamerican. GNU Free Documentation License.

What do you reckon they’re doing with them hanging plants? My daddy would never in a million years have put up with them things, pullin’ the eaves down. Not unless they’re plastic, so’s you don’t have to water ’em.