Budget for Each Room

It is so hard to decorate your new living space.  And not only is it challenging to find perfect pieces, but it is also expensive.  My husband and I try to keep costs down by budgeting for each room.

So after all of your furniture and things from your move have been delivered, then get settled in.  Live in your new home and see what you need day by day.  And do lots of online shopping and searching.  My husband and I are always online looking at different pieces of furniture.  We also make many visits to local stores.  Shopping around is important so you get an idea of what you like-it also helps make sure you get an awesome deal on your things.

To budget for furnishing rooms, it is best to look at what you need for each room and set an actual budget.  For example, we need EVERYTHING for our master bedroom.  We need a headboard, footboard, dresser, two night stands, a chest, etc.  To decide on a fair budget, I advise that you do research online and in stores to see what an average going rate is to furnish each room.  Then, I try to stay in the average/below average range.

Please subscribe to my blog to gain access to my free checklists that I will exclusively send to my email subscribers!

 

Basement Kitchen Appliances

I know this may sound odd, but my extra kitchen appliances are downstairs.  I don’t like to clutter up my kitchen counter by putting so many appliances all over.  I also like to only keep the appliances and kitchen tools I use in my kitchen for every day.

So, the extra appliances that I don’t use every day are in the basement.  I have used these old book shelves that I had from college.  They are cheap and black.  I was able to put my toaster, griddle, extra coffee maker, cupcake and lasagna traveling containers, and pitchers on these shelves.

This makes it easy for me to store and use them when I need them, but they aren’t cluttering up my kitchen in the mean time.  This is the book shelf that I used, you can buy it on Amazon for a great price!  I took the shelves out of the book shelf to fit my appliances.  The small square tv stand next to it is on wheels.  I took the shelf out of that as well to fit the blenders and crockpot.  They are cheap and great to organize spaces.

Take A Tour of My Basement

Check out a complete tour of my basement and see how I organized my unfinished space!

 

Organizing My Gift Wrap

 

 

I have used two long plastic boxes to organize my gift wrap.  In my past apartment, I kept  both boxes under my bed in our master bedroom.  I have one for general gift wrap for birthdays and showers.  The other box has all Christmas wrap.  I keep all of my ribbon and bows in a big bag right now.

The plastic boxes are great to see what type of wrapping paper and bags I have inside before even opening the box.  I would suggest getting these boxes.  They are on Amazon and are so easy to stack and store anywhere!

 

Organize Basement into Boxes

My basement is a storage/bar area.  Our storage area consists of my old teaching boxes, holiday decorations, wires and cords, suitcases, and gift wrapping supplies.  The bar area has all of our old bar glasses and tables.  We put bar stools and some old chairs that we don’t use anymore in that area.

It took me about 5 hours to get it all organized.  I bought lots of plastic boxes to put the storage items in.  I get clear boxes instead of solid colored boxes so I can see exactly what is in the boxes.  Even when I use painter’s tape and a sharpie to label the boxes “Christmas” and “Halloween,” I like to see exactly what is in them specifically.  That way I will know what to bring up if I needs lights or stockings.

These are the boxes that I used for the basement storage.

My Almost Ruined Weekend

My husband and I thought we were going to have the best weekend yet, but as soon as we got internet, things went down hill.  All of a sudden, we were rearranging our cords behind the tv.  And that’s when the trouble started…

Somehow making the cords more organized behind the tv turned into NO TV at all!  The satellite lost connection and the worst had happened-NO SIGNAL!  Our most wonderful weekend at our new house with internet and cable was now turned upside down.

We panicked and my husband frantically tried to fix the cords.  We had to call Direct TV and make an appointment for Sunday morning.  Which means officially the entire weekend is ruined.

We were so bummed, we just figured we would give up and go to bed.  The weekend was ruined.

By 9:30 p.m. my husband decided not to give up and again after hours of working, he decided to give it just one more shot to redeem the weekend.  And by 10 p.m. we were back on track!  We got our satellite to connect and the cords and wires to work-phew!

What a relief-the weekend has been restored!  Thank goodness!

Positive Moving Vibe Friday

Happy Friday!  Check out my new video and subscribe!

My 4 Week Wait for Internet

It has been four whole long weeks since we have moved in and the entire time we have had NO internet.  We have been using our hot spot on our phones.  We have run out of data and I was doing all of my internet surfing at coffee shops.

Not only was going out for coffee at coffee shops starting to get costly, but it was also getting costly to park.  Believe it or not, in the small town that I live in, the meters don’t have a credit card machine, they only accept quarters.  And since, I NEVER have change, I would end up begging cashiers to let me over-pay on my credit card for coffee and get quarters for meters.  It was getting to be intense.

It was a pain.  It is really a nightmare to not have internet.

Finally, the internet company sent out an employee for our modem and router.  When my husband got home from work, it took us a while to fix all the cords and hook up the internet, but we did it.

So after about 30 days-which felt like 30 years.  We have internet-it is such a relief!  Having no internet is such an inconvenience these days.

How To Figure Out What City/Town Is Right For You

 

Barely Holding On With No Internet

Getting our Cable set up was difficult because there are only small cable companies where we live.  So, it looked like everyone in our neighborhood was using satellite or Direct TV.  We decided to use Direct TV since we had used it when we lived in Maryland in few years ago.  In about a week, we had the Direct TV worker here setting up the tv and satellite for Direct TV.  It was so hard to live without the tv for the week we didn’t have it here.  It makes us feel so much more moved in now to have the tv working in our rooms.

The real nightmare has been the internet-we still don’t have internet.  I have to use my hotspot every time I blog or have to surf the internet.  It has been so hard to not have internet this whole time.  It has been a couple weeks and we are struggling.  First, when we called the internet company to set it up, they said that it would take a couple days for them to set it up.  They said they would call us when it was set up and ready for someone to come out.  We also said that we would like to buy the router, and they were going to ship it to us.  About a week passed, and we spoke to them to arrange the set up day.

I was so excited for the set up day!  The morning of the set up day, my husband called to confirm the time with them and during this called they asked if we had the router.  We reminded them that we told the representative that we would buy the router and then we were told that it was supposed to have been shipped to us.  Unfortunately, the company failed to ship it to us.  So then, they had to cancel the set up day.

They have now set up a new day to come install our internet.  And we were told the router should be here, the day our internet gets set up…I’m not going to hold my breath.  I am so disappointed with the lack of service we have gotten from this internet company. I am really hoping that we get internet this week.  Otherwise, it will be going on a full month of using up data and being off the grid.