Money money money¶

Tags: house

Today a colleague (thanks, Arjan!) helped me out with his car. I don’t own one, I “only” have a bicycle. I do have a luggage cart that I can hook up to my bike, but that’s not an option for really heavy or really big stuff.

So we took his car and brought some stuff from our old house to the new and afterwards we visited two DIY shops (karwei and hornbach). A new cheap toilet, bucket upon bucket of paint, a new roof window to replace the broken-down existing one, a couple of tiles for the kitchen, stuff like that.

Nothing particularly extravagant. Well, the kitchen tiles were more expensive than I counted on beforehand. And we chose good quality paint instead of the standard DIY chain’s own brand. Our experience from the last time indicated that that can be a huge timesaver. Often you need just one layer of wall paint with the good stuff and two or three layers for the cheap stuff.

Offsetting that more expensive paint: that roof window means I’m going to put it in myself. Saving some good money there by doing it myself. And I picked a good brand, but not the more expensive market leader.

But still. What a load of money. “Just a couple of buckets of paint” means serious money if you need to paint the whole house, for instance. We budgetted for expenses, but it still freaks me out a bit to spend so much money :-)

Well, my wife consoled me by rightfully reminding me that we’re actually doing many things in a quite economic way. So on to more DIY work tomorrow!