Gemini Rising

Home Improvement MAR 2025

Good day to all -- I'll try not to ramble, but I wanted to check in and do a post. This will probably be about Misc. things, but one of the big motivators for my checking in is --- did you know ---

There's a post 7 days in a Blog and get a merit badge? I had no idea. And it's kinda' motivating me to check in.

I've got lots of misc thoughts but I thought I'd ramble a bit about home improvements.

We've owned our home now for 25 years. I'm pretty impressed. We moved in DEC 1999. At time, we could barely afford it. We've refinanced twice, made it manage, and here we are. Our kids went from 0 to 23 and 18 in this house. It's a decent sized house, about 2700 square feet, but I've found that as we gotten bigger, the house seems to have gotten smaller. Heck, we thought it was HUGE when we moved in.

That said, 25 years in the same house and you're bound to have natural wear and tear. We replaced the dish washer, washer, and dryer at least twice. We've had the house repainted in 2020. The hubby painted inside about 10 years ago. And back in 2019 we had the AC replaced - and we needed to give it some maint. last year.

Now it's time for flooring. Our downstairs carpet has seen better days. There are 25 years of stains from pets and boys. Hubby and the boys are at the local flooring place looking at samples. It's the next great house adventure.

I just want to say it hasn't been easy being a homeowner. I think one thing we didn't think about was having a budget for "home improvement," and if I had to do it all over again, I'd set aside some money for home improvement. Mind you, we had some pretty lean years. I didn't figure out about 529 plans until Andy was in Jr. High. It was about that time I started setting aside a little money for the boys to go to college. I also started using an envelope system. I started putting cash in envelopes to help out with misc expenses like car maintenance, saving for my USC football tickets, emergencies, vacation air fare, and my 52 week savings plans so I have some spending cash at the end of the year.

Question for you: Does anyone else save using an envelopes?