Showing posts with label money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label money. Show all posts

Monday, May 28, 2007

Painting your house and make it a Home for Pennies




Ok, so you want to remodel/redecorate your house, or you just bought a new home and you're tired of the white walls that stare back at you each night, but you don't really have the money to hire an interior designer to make your home to look like one of the rich and famous. So what can you do? Well, you can go to your nearest home improvement stores like Home Depot or Lowe's and get yourself a few cans of paint and get those design juices flowing and before you know it, you can transform your living from white walls to a warm welcome home:








Jon and I learned a few tips along the way on how to paint like the pros. Well, we did have some problems with bleeding edges in the living room, which was the first one we did (see pics above), but with the family room and our master bedroom, there was much improvement. Jon discovered this little tool, what we call the "edger," and instead of painting with a brush, he applied paint directly onto the edger (thickly) and that used the edger to apply paint on all the walls. This seemed to work better and was less messy than using a brush and also saved a lot of paint from getting trapped in the brush and thus wasted.

Picking paint colors will probably take another post to discuss (the choices were overwhelming!), but we decided that our goal was to achieve a relaxed and warm home so we picked natural/ neutral tones for our rooms and are pleased with the results. We bought all our paint at Home Depot for their Behr brand (Lowe's American Tradition was a close second, but HD was a few dollar cheaper for equally good paint). For our living room, we used Behr's Satin paint in this color called "Promenade." For our family room, we used Behr's Satin again in "Pecan Sandie." For the master bedroom, we used Behr's Satin yet again (basically, we did not want flat paint for any room because it feels rough to the touch) and chose "Gypsy magic."

Overall, we were successful with this home improvement project and highly suggest any of you wanting to spruce up your home or add some color and personality to your place to try painting your house because it is one of the easiest and least expensive way to make your house a home.

joy

Monday, May 21, 2007

Watching TV online for FREE!

Another way I've been living within a tight budget and still having a good time is to watch TV on the internet. The proliferation of TV shows available online has been a wonderful thing. Afterall, I usually don't have time to watch TV at scheduled periods of time, say, every Thursday night at 9pm for Grey's Anatomy or every Wednesday night at 10pm for LOST. I often forget to catch shows when I have to remember to watch them at set times and sometimes things come up so that I can't get myself in front of the tube right when I need to. I know a lot of people subscribe to TIVO or Comcast On Demand, but if the point is to live simply, live cheaply, save a lot, so I can travel more, retire earlier, and give out of my savings, then I am going to avoid any outlay of money as much as possible, especially if the same services or similar entertainment can be obtained for free! So I was delighted when a year or so ago ABC rolled out their version of on-demand TV where several shows including my favorite at the time, Alias, was available for viewing soon after a new episode has aired each week. I was able to watch all of the current season of Alias last season, and when Alias ended, there was still Grey's Anatomy which I continue to follow every week. ABC offers many more shows now than they did when they first started. Pretty much all of their prime-time shows are available. LOST is a really good show that I did not follow until recently when a coworker with whom I eat lunch regularly got me interested and I spent one weekend watching like 6 episodes to catch up on the plot she was describing to me. What a great thing this online TV phenomenon has become! NBC has started showing their shows online as well. Although my experience is that their portal is not as good as ABC's.
Finally, there seems to be other private companies coming onboard to provide online TV viewing services for a fee or for free besides the network companies. Read more about sources of free TV online here.

Enjoy!

joy