the living room, again

After painting the dresser such a beautiful green last week, I kept honing in on how I didn't like it in the living room.  What if I just got a new rug? And new chairs?  I shopped like I was actually going to go out and drop hundreds of dollars on new furniture and rugs.  Because, you know, I'm ridiculous.

After a few days of insanity and sulking about the $1250 pair of blue velvet bergere chairs on craigslist rejecting my lowball offer of $300, I thought, WWGD?  (What would my Grandma do?) She would say paint the green dresser a color that will better fit in the living room, and try rearranging the furniture. (Duh.)

Lo and behold! I rearranged the furniture. For the 499th time.

 Despite the fact that my beta testers gasped in horror at the tv being in front of the window, I think I have a winner here.  I sold the Beast chair on craigslist for $5 more than I paid for it.  It was just too enormous in scale for this house.  I also like having the sofa facing the tv, instead of along the side.  I am all about the laziest tv watching possible.  I don't want to turn my head.

Then I painted the dresser and the  mirror over it Benjamin Moore Hale Navy. Although I am fan of more deeply hued cobalt blues, the Hale Navy is a muddy navy which goes nicely with the ugly beige on the walls.  It also complements the living room instead of fighting it.

Now the green painting feels like a pop of fresh color instead of the bookend of a competing Christmas color scheme.

Finis!

More beige and a Thai massage

Our landlord had the house painted--wait for it--a nice beige.

Every inch of our house, inside and out, is the color of Sadness and Mediocrity beige.

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Because of my frequent back and neck pain, I have had a membership to a national massage therapy chain for a few years. For anyone who hasn't had a massage, the masseuses at reputable massage parlors are generally very concerned with your modesty.  You are naked under the sheet, but the sheet is always draped modestly, covers you from neck to ankles, and there shouldn't be any body parts sticking out except for the limb the masseuse is working on.  

This past week, with temperatures in the high 90s, my massage place called me twice to cancel my scheduled massage because the air conditioner in the building wasn't working.  My back was getting very tense, so I called around and went to a Thai massage parlor nearby.

It was....a very different experience.

I was handed a pair of bloomers to put on before getting face down on the table. I was topless, as usual, since my back was the focus of the massage, but there was no sheet to get under.

The masseuse was a tiny woman about 70 years old.  She tossed a very large hand towel on my back (no queen size sheet here), jumped up on the table, and using bars affixed to the ceiling, started walking on my back.  There was much tut-tutting and "so tight! Your back is too tight!"

There was a lot of stretching and pulling and a few pretzel poses and a figure-four leg lock, but for the most part, it was the same as the national massage chain.  There was not, however, a ton of concern for my modesty or the placement of the extra large hand towel.

At the end, she told me to sit up, which I did, nervously clutching the hand towel to my exposed front.  The masseuse got up on the table behind me, put her feet in my back, grabbed both of my hands, and pulled back.  Like this, but I wasn't wearing a tank top.

via 

The hand towel fell down.

For the grand finale, she kept ahold of my hands, scootched her butt up closer to me while keeping her feet in my back and lying on her back (I can't find a picture of this pose), and HOISTED ME UP IN THE AIR ON HER FEET.  Take the above picture and just imagine that guy rolling onto his back and taking the woman up in the air, all the while she is being stretched on his feet and unable to free her hands to cover her front.

My mostly naked body was hoisted aloft in the naked-mermaid-on-pirate-ship pose.

You're welcome for that image.

I left without my dignity, but my back felt better.  I went back again the next weekend.    

Emerald green: painting everything

I've been mildly obsesssing on emerald green lately.  (Ikea sofa, anyone?)

Since my budget is limited to a can of paint, I bought a can of paint.  Benjamin Moore's Clover green.

I didn't test any swatches before buying, because I was READY TO PAINT!  It was....a little too kelly green.

I brought it back to the store and had them add more color to the can.  And then more color again, until they said "this is at saturation, we can't add any more. And the can is full."

I took one of the living room white diptych paintings and painted over it with green.

I also painted the dresser in the foyer, which is impossible to get a good picture of.

So! I love the green dresser, and I love the green painting.

I do not love the green in my living room. It looks very Christmas carnival with all the red and green.

Too many colors!  I can't tell you how many times in the past decade I have regretted buying a red leather chair.  It has dictated the design choices in every room it has ever been in.  If only I had bought it in a nice neutral brown leather. One of the design lessons I have learned is that colorful curtains and pillows are much easier to replace than expensive upholstered furniture.

I exhausted my burst of decorating energy with all that painting.  Christmas stays for a few days (only three months till Christmas!), or until I can figure out something else.

living room rearranging, paintings

Since I still don't like the living room, and don't want to spend any money on it, I rearranged it.  Again.  

Last we saw it, it was a box with too many straight lines and furniture that didn't quite fit or line up along pleasant sight lines.  And the paintings were meh.  

It is still a box with terrible sight lines, but I moved the tan sofa back into the reading nook off the kitchen, and brought the Beast and the red chair into the living room. 

It feels more open and less boxy.  

I also improved the paintings--I layered one of the white ones with about four more layers of paint.  I swapped out the other white one for the blue one that we made for Mother's Day a few years ago. 

I like the paintings together.  I want to get rid of everything else in the room and start over.  (Perspectacles, perspectacles, perspectacles....)

Perspectacles: living with ugly beige

The entire inside of our house is painted beige.  Flat paint, with swine-y pink undertones.

I admit defeat in the face of this unrelenting beige.

I like and own mostly clear, jewel-toned decor.  Clear, strong, vibrant colors that look good against white.  All these strong jewel tones look...off....placed next to a peachy, muddy-undertone beige.

Everything I do in this house just looks wrong. The furniture, the art, everything--it doesn't look good against the walls.  It is driving me nuts.

You might think this has an obvious and easy solution--paint the walls!  Sadly, under the terms of our lease, and our nitpicky property management company, we are not allowed to paint the walls a different color.  Even if we were allowed to paint the walls, I don't have a ladder that could reach the upper walls in the vaulted living space, which is nearly half the downstairs.  So, swine beige is here to stay.

The other obvious solution--get some muddy-toned decor!  Uh, no. I am not replacing an entire house worth of jewel-tone decor with muddy-undertone decor I don't want.

The real solution here is putting on my perspectacles, and be thankful we got this house.  It fits all our stuff. It has new laminate floors and easy to use brand new widows.  It has three toilets and a kitchen that works.  the air conditioning is cold.  When I turn on the tap I get running water--two kinds! Hot and cold!  When things break I am not responsible for fixing them. There are two parking spots in the driveway, and a bedroom for friends and family to visit.

In lieu of showing you something pretty in my house, here are two pretty living rooms full of beige and brown.  You'll notice that all of the complementary colors in the rooms are muted, muddy tones.

via BHG

via Katie Rosenfeld

What difficult-to-fix thing do you dislike about your house?

frugal living: tracking all the dollar bills

In the interests of frugal living, I decided that we needed to get a better handle on our money.  The Mister and I are not profligate wastrels, but nor are we all that concerned with balancing our books down to the penny. I balance my books to within a hundred dollars. Ish.  Mostly. An accountant I am not.

I have my own little system of accounting.  It is an Excel spreadsheet.  It has a list of bills to be paid, date paid on, confirmation or check number.  It served me fine for years.

The problem with the Excel spreadsheet is that it looks mostly backward.  The rent, the electric bill, the gas bill, the car payments....these are fixed bills that I can usually predict either exactly or near to how much money they are.

Then there is the credit card bill.  We use the credit card for 99% of our expenses.  We pay it off every month.  Using the credit card allows us to rack up travel points and track all our expenses.  This bill is a backwards-looking bill--on September 1st I will pay off the entire August balance.  I can see as August goes on that the balance is going higher and higher, and maybe that we are getting close to going over budget, but it doesn't tell me, unless I download all the transactions and sort and categorize them, what I am spending too much on. What I wanted was a forward-looking budget.

About a year ago, I started with my sister the engineer's monthly Excel spreadsheet, which was mildly more complicated than mine.  Too complicated. I used it for a few months but kept up with my own simple worksheet.  And it didn't help me track my approaching budgets.

I slacked off on that for a few months.  When we moved to this house I decided I had to get back on the horse and figure out how to budget.  I am 41 and hold an advanced degree, so you would think this would be simple at this point in my life, but I went to law school because my math skills weren't up to being an engineer like everyone else in family.

I am familiar with the cult of Dave Ramsey.  I read the book. Eh, its fine.  We don't have credit card debt, we live mostly within our means on a monthly basis, and I am lukewarm to the concept of buying everything with cash, especially in light of our using credit for travel points.  I didn't do much with Dave's favorite concepts.

There are plenty of websites that have already done the comparison shopping for you on different financial websites (see here and here).  I won't give a full breakdown, but I will tell you what worked for us.

A few years ago I tried out Mint.com but I wasn't that serious about it, and while it was a nice way to look at all of our accounts in one place, I wasn't all that into budgeting, and eventually it fell by the wayside.

When we moved a few months ago, I reactivated my account.  I also started using the budgeting function, which I like.  In fact, the budgeting function is pretty much the entire reason I use Mint.

When you log in, the budgeting page looks something like this:

Like I said earlier, I am not so much into tracking All The Pennies.  I also don't like being told what to do, even when I am the one telling myself what to do.  (Nobody puts Baby in a corner.) My "budget" needs to be structured, yet flexible. If I want to go out and have a $600 lobster dinner or Jimmy Choo shoes, I need a budget that will allow me to do so. (I haven't, and I won't, but you can't tell me that I can't, see?)  The budgeting system in Mint allows me to do so.

I set up my budget with our total monthly income.  Then I made up smaller budgets within the budget--rent gets a budget line, tuition gets a budget line, and all the other fixed costs get a budget line.  Then I set up categories that I know I use on a monthly basis but aren't a fixed cost, like restaurants and medical bills and haircuts, and give them an amount that I think is reasonable.  I can adjust them if I find myself spending much more or much less than what is budgeted.

Lastly, every dollar not already accounted for goes into the "Everything Else" budget.  If I go way over budget on a different budget, this is the category the extra gets pulled from.  For example, because our water company changed billing rates and billing cycles this month, we got two water bills in one month.  I took $50 out of the Everything Else category and allocated it to the Utilities budget.

Want to hear something interesting?  Our monthly discretionary spending has remained nearly the same for our entire marriage.  Ten years ago when we made a quarter of what we do now, we spent nearly the same amount on the "everything else" category.  (What do we spend the increased 75% on? Rent, tuition and medical bills.  Tuition tuition tuition.)

Things I really like about Mint:

• It logs into your banks/student loans/car loans/financial institutions automatically and gives you a picture of your entire financial picture.
• You can run reports with charts and graphs.
• It tracks every transaction you make (assuming you have linked all your accounts that you spend out of), so you can see exactly what you are spending on.  It was an unpleasant surprise to discover I spent $100 in a month on Sees Chocolates. (April was a difficult month. Don't judge.)

Things I don't like:

• Despite multiple attempts, I cannot get two of our loans that are handled through third parties to sync with the program. (It connects easily to most financial providers, but we have a car loan that is handled by a third party vendor and I cannot get it to sync.)
• Because it is a free service, there is a lot of advertising on the site. 
• The modeling projections for investments are kind of simple.

While trying Mint, I also decided to give a trial run to the You Need A Budget program.  Five years ago, I bought the YNAB program and just couldn't figure it out/get it set up correctly.  (Math again!) (Yes, I started both Mint and YNAB years ago and abandoned both of them.)

YNAB also has a crazy cult following.  I haven't run into crazy Mint followers, for some reason, but YNABers are a vociferous bunch.  They love that program and run all over the internet yapping about it.

I don't like it.  Luckily this time I just downloaded a trial version.

YNAB is not automatic.  You can download transactions and then import them into YNAB, but the program essentially works on "you buy something, you whip out your phone and record it in the app yourself."  Because it makes you more aware of you spending your money.  Or something.

I am all about lazy management.  I buy something, I whip out my phone and look at Mint, and hey, there it already is, done for me, and hey girl, best stop buying so much chocolate cuz the chocolate budget is approaching the limit.

Also, I admit defeat; I just couldn't get down with the math.  I had trouble again setting the damn thing up correctly, and in the end simply removed all the credit card accounts out of the budget.  There are many how-to videos on how to use it, but it was just difficult for me.  YNAB is set up on a zero-sum budget, which means you are living on last month's money.  My current system is half of last month's money, and half of this month's money.  It just gave me a headache.  I stopped using it before the trial was up.

If you like to plan your life down to the last penny, and enjoy doing all the work yourself, then YNAB may be right for you.  People who love YNAB REALLY love it. I am not a fan.

Lastly, I tried Personal Capital.  It is sort of Mint-y--it is automatic and tracks all your spending, but the budgeting function is meh.  However, it is REALLY GOOD at investment modeling.  How much will you pay in fees over the course of your investments? How much do you need if you have a drawdown rate of X or Y? What if you want to pay for college?  It is really good at modeling different scenarios.

Cons: Although it is free and doesn't have advertising, they make a concerted effort to sell you on their investment and financial services.

I am currently using Personal Capital to track our investments, and Mint for everything else.

Do you budget? Do you use a program, or just your own method? 

William Morris: we are (mostly) all out of crap

In direct contravention to discussion in previous posts, I went on a decluttering binge in the garage.  I'm not quite done yet.  But, for the first time in forever, as the song goes....I have enough empty space in the garage that I can park a car there.

This is the first time in my entire life I have not had a garage and attic and basement crammed full of stuff.

Clearly I can't park anything in there until I get those four boxes of old paper shredded and the uncomfortable chairs sold on craigslist.  But still! Get rid of the chairs and boxes, and (one) car would fit (in this two car garage)!

In one of life's little ironies, the garage door opener stopped working  the same day I finished the garage.