Finance Gets Personal

I’m currently working on Apartment Therapy’s Eight-Step Spring Cure, which is an eight week process for making your home more organized, beautiful and healthy. I’ve been apprehensive about how much “curing” is going to cost, so I’m sharing my progress on trying to cure on a budget.

I am sweating my butt off thanks to extensive vacuuming combined with our refusal to turn on the A/C until it reaches 80 degrees outside. But, the living room is clean!

These are the assignments for Week 4:

• Clean up living room and related closets
• Repairs are being taken care of this week
• Declutter all books and media
• Cancel 75 percent of catalogs you receive
• Empty Outbox this week
• Confirm what you need to increase or decrease color in each room
• Identify what you need to increase or decrease softness in each room
• Cook three meals at home this week
• Send out your invitations

Somehow, our living room is the dirtiest room in the house. I suppose it’s because we spend the most time there, my husband eats his lunch on the couch when he works from home and because the doggie door leads into that room. It took a long time, but I washed the walls, cleaned the baseboards, vacuumed the couches, cleaned the fan blades and even fixed the massive tangle of cords behind the TV. I bought the following: Cord organizer ties (3 packages at $3.19 each at Target), a bamboo box to store PS3 games ($12.99 at Target) and a fabric-covered box to store PS3 cords and controllers (on clearance for $11.94 at Target).

I honestly haven’t made much progress on the repairs this week. Theoretically, I would be having someone “take care” of them this week and next week, but I can’t afford it without using some of my extra debt payment. I did replace another light bulb though

Decluttering books and media is a daunting task. I like the idea of getting rid of my CD collection and keeping them all on my hard drive/iPod, but my electronic organization system is chaos right now (for example, I’ve never even backed up this blog, nor do I really know how). My iPod is set up for a Mac, but I use a PC now (the Mac with all the music saved on it is in my stepson’s room). Once my husband gets his new computer, I plan on consolidating all my files there. As far as DVDs go, I am not allowed to get rid of any. My books are already heavily pared down from last year’s garage sale, and I don’t tend to be much of a book collector anyway. I do plan on going through these three categories for obvious “duds” sometime before our garage sale on the 16th.

Canceling 75% of catalogs you receive is something I may do in the future, but don’t have time for right now. In fact, I’ve done little besides clean the living room this week since I’ve been helping my husband plan the details of the basement layout (he took off work this week to do the framing). Trust me though, I’d rather be cleaning and organizing than drawing a bathroom and its fixtures to scale.

I’ll be emptying the outbox next weekend at my garage sale. I’m going to start pricing and organizing my items for the garage sale this week, and list some of the more expensive items on craigslist and eBay.

I’ve thought a little about color, but I haven’t spent any money in this category. Most of my rooms need a little more color.

“Softness” is added to rooms through things like curtains, rugs and pillows. My rooms are currently too “hard” since I don’t have any area rugs or drapes (most of our windows just have cheap white vinyl blinds - yuck!).

Of course, cooking at home was the easiest part of the week. I even did one myself! If sloppy joes count as a meal, that is…

I have no invitations to mail since I haven’t really planned a party. I think when I get finished I’ll start planning the cheesy board game night. I’ve just got way too much on my plate right now.

While some of my enthusiasm has waned, I’m halfway done, and things are looking great! This week I spent a total of $40.

On to Week 5, which focuses on the office. My main goal is to organize all the paperwork I have flying about the room, without much concern for aesthetics since we’ll be moving the office to the basement this fall (and getting real furniture instead of card tables and folding chairs - yay!).

Photo Credit: Kelley+Interior+Design,+rose+living+room by sarahleeab, used under Creative Commons Licensing.

I’m currently working on Apartment Therapy’s Eight-Step Spring Cure, which is an eight week process for making your home more organized, beautiful and healthy. I’ve been apprehensive about how much “curing” is going to cost, so I’m sharing my progress on trying to cure on a budget.

Whew. I just finished my assignments for Week 2. (I gave myself an extra weekend since we were out of town last weekend for Easter.)

These are the assignments for Week 2:

• Fix one thing in your apartment yourself
• Clean your kitchen from top to bottom and throw away old food
• Buy a water filter and use it
• Run your hands over every wall in your apartment (to feel which walls are cold or warm)
• Clear space for an Outbox
• Clear one surface and use the outbox
• Buy fresh flowers
• Determine your style
• Find a new recipe and cook one meal at home
• Choose the date for your housewarming

The first assignment was probably the easiest: I had a list of 71 repairs to choose from. Because I’m trying to do this on a budget, most of the repairs will be DIY (and some of the expensive repairs, like repairing the wooden floors, might be postponed). Because this week focused on the kitchen, I started with some easy repairs there: replacing the burnt out oven light bulbs, buying new energy-efficient bulbs for the fixture that my husband had to stand on top of a ladder to reach, touching up missing paint/rust on/in the stove/sink/dishwasher with appliance repair paint (Rustoleum), buying new tile to replace the missing ones above the sink, tightening the hinges on the cabinets, tightening the loose sink sprayer, and semi-fixing the stove drawer that keeps coming off the tracks (apparently the permanent fix would be to replace the stove). While this was a lot more than one repair, I’ll need to increase this pace if everything is going to be fixed at the end of eight weeks.

Cleaning and organizing the kitchen was the real bitch of this week. I worked on it all weekend, as well as three nights after work last week. I now have sparkling clean appliances, organized cabinets and a lot less stuff (though I did have to endure some screaming about what the hell I did with all the plastic cups/wooden spoons/second ice cream scoop). And my refrigerator is probably thrilled that I finally figured out where those coils that I’ve supposed to have been vacuuming for the past four years are (that was gross). I spent quite a bit of money this week on cleaning and organizing supplies: a new spice rack ($40 at Crate & Barrel), drawer organizers ($15 at TJ Maxx), canisters for the pantry ($20 at TJ Maxx), new drip pans ($13 at Target), dish soap dispenser ($13 at Target), penny jar to hold dog treats ($5 at Target), new salt and pepper shakers ($12 at Target), light bulbs ($27 at Lowes), oven cleaner ($5 at Lowes) and paper towels ($5 at Lowes).

My refrigerator already has a water filter, however, we’ve been ignoring the little red replacement light for at least six months. So we bought a PUR replacement filter from Amazon for $25. In the past, I’ve bought these from the Whirlpool website and they’ve run almost $35, so it was nice to find one that’s a little less costly.

My Outbox, i.e., crap I’m considering getting rid of, is growing daily. This is good, since our garage sale is less than a month away. I’m going to try selling some of our more valuable/specialized items on eBay/Craigslist over the next few weeks to make money for more curing (Hard Rock Cafe shot glass collection, anyone?).

My fresh flowers came from the grocery store again this week. White hydrangeas for $5.99. I’m starting to think grocery store flowers aren’t the freshest, because mine start dying in less than a week, but…whatever.

The fun part of the week was determining my style! After repeating the style quiz at Sproost about 10 times, I determined my style is closest to Vintage Modern (um, isn’t that an oxymoron?). It seems to fit though. So now, when I see something I would consider buying, I ask myself, “Would this fit in with my (imaginary) Vintage Modern home?” and if the answer is no, I skip it.

Finding a new recipe and cooking one meal at home was incredibly easy. I think Apartment Therapy assumes most of their audience are city apartment dwellers who eat takeout every night.

As far as the housewarming party thing goes, I’d like to have a low-key cheesy board game night with a small group of friends. But because six-seven weeks from now is Memorial Day weekend, maybe we should do a barbecue instead (or in combination with board game night)? Of course, we go out of town sometimes on Memorial Day weekend, so I guess I should check on that before I start making any definite plans.

OK, so that was Week 2. A lot of work and a lot of expenses (though most were somewhat optional). I was hoping to combine the dining room with the kitchen since there isn’t a dining room week, but that didn’t go as planned. That room mainly just needs to be cleaned though.

On to Week 3, which focuses on the entryway, entry closet and making a “landing strip” (AT’s term, not mine).

Photo Credit: Apartment Therapy