Caveat Emptor: Buyer Beware
By Shawn
Shawn is a personal friend of the Clever Dude and Dudette. At the time of writing this article, Shawn didn’t know he was going to be driving to the hospital that night to deliver his first child!
Latin for “Buyer Beware”, Caveat Emptor would have come in handy for me about a month ago.
Since we’re about to have a baby, I’ve been trying to find ways to cut costs associated with the new arrival (without compromising her safety, however). There are some things that you are warned against buying used, such as car seats and cribs, because safety requirements are constantly changing.
In an effort to save some money, we made a list of things that we could purchase used. One of the things on the list was baby gates.
Finding a Used Baby Gate
We have 2 rather large openings to 2 rooms that we want to block off when our little one starts roaming the house. The gates to fit these openings are pretty expensive. I did some searching on Craigslist, and I found a person selling a gate that would fit one of the openings at half the cost of a new one.
Retaining Wall (almost) Complete!
Our retaining wall
I mentioned that the second thing I did all weekend was “finish” our retaining wall, so I’ll explain a little more. I started digging the 55ft section of wall along our pool on May 2nd, and it took about 5-6 hours of digging over 2 days to square out the area for the retaining wall bricks and level it out. That was by far the hardest and most tiring work of the whole project.
Pulling in a close second to the digging would be hauling 3 half-ton loads of gravel in my truck, shoveling it out, wheeling it to the backyard, then hosing out the truck bed. It doesn’t help when I fall back first onto the wheelbarrow though. I gotta say that shoveling gravel is not the easiest job.
And bringing up third in the tough jobs would be hauling about three-hundred 22 lbs bricks (counting the first wall I completed) for a total of 3.5 tons. Luckily on the last 2 loads, and one of the other ones, I had my neighbors help. I thanked them with a restaurant dinner, but we each used an Entertainment Book coupon so I really paid for 1 meal (plus my own).
Closure: Amazon refunded the full amount!
About 2 weeks ago, I told you how my experience buying and returning heavy, expensive products to Amazon.com went. Well today I finally have closure of the experience when I saw the full $483.xx credit to my Discover card. They even refunded the $3.99 overnight shipping!
I shipped the product out of Staples on Monday, April 28th. It was received by Amazon 2 days later on April 30th (according to the UPS tracking code), but it took Amazon until May 7th to process the return and send me an email detailing how much would be refunded. I was glad to see they didn’t try to tack on a restocking fee.
And then this morning, May 9th, I logged into my Discover card account and saw the full amount was credited to the account. This was great because I the bill was due in a couple weeks and I didn’t want to have to send almost $500 to Discover and then have to get it refunded. However, at the rate we’re spending money for our outdoor projects (retaining walls), that $500 would be used up in no time.
50 Ways to Save Money by Not Wasting
As much as I hate clutter, I also hate wasting things. Granted, I do my own fair share of wasting water, food and energy, but if I at least keep myself conscious of ways I can cut waste, then I’ll help myself, the environment AND you, my fellow earth creatures.
So here is a big list of ways you and I can cut waste from our lives and help human-kind, and maybe keep a few more dollar bills in our wallets:
In the Bathroom:
- Turn off the water - When you’re shaving (men) or brushing your teeth, turn off the water when you’re not rinsing off the razor or toothbrush. If you want to know how much water you’re using by letting it run, put a container under the faucet for the amount of time you brush or save and see how much it comes out to be. For instance, if I left the water run while shaving, I use at least a gallon. That’s 365 gallons of water per year right down the drain!
Buying and Returning Heavy, Expensive Products on Amazon
So a couple weeks ago, I splurged on a Delonghi 10,000 BTU portable air-conditioner unit from Amazon for our upstairs. Right now, we have a window unit, and we wanted something that can be taken out more easily in the winter months and replaced in the summer. It’s unsightly, insanely heavy (even for a stud like me) and loud. So a portable unit fit the bill. Oh, and as a note, it often gets up to 95 degrees or higher upstairs in our bedroom since it’s an old Cape Cod style house with horrible circulation. The central A/C does absolutely nothing for the upstairs.
At the time of ordering (but not at the time of this writing), the A/C unit was shipping straight from Amazon (it’s from a third party right now). A month prior to ordering, I signed up for Amazon Prime, which gets you 2nd day shipping for free and next day shipping for only $3.99. I signed up for a 30-day trial (it’s $79 per year normally) and I got the A/C unit just a couple days before the trial period expired.
Growing Your Own Mini-Garden
The picture above is our own little onion farm. A few weeks ago, we planted a dozen white onion bulbs in an 18″ rectangular planter box we bought from Walmart for about $5. We got about 2 dozen onion bulbs for $4 and the planter fit half of the pack. Total cost of the “farm” = $7, but any subsequent planting will be substantially less since we’ve already paid for the planter. Oh, I didn’t add in the cost of soil, but it’s probably less than 50 cents since I bought a large bag of it last year for about $3.
So why onions? Well, we figured they couldn’t be that hard to grow and we didn’t want to mess with seeds just yet. Both of our dads have large gardens, but only a smidgen of that knowledge has been passed down to us. We figured we would start small and easy and work our way up to tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, etc.
10 Ways to Live Green and Save Money Indoors
With Earth Day this week, you’ll be hearing a lot about ways you can help the environment, but it doesn’t hurt to save a little green in your wallet at the same time, right? So here are 10 ways to live green as well as save some green, and they don’t just apply to this week!
1. Heating & A/C
If your furnace or air-conditioner are up for replacement, then it only makes sense to opt for a new Energy Star replacement. For the rest of us, though, it’s hard to justify trashing the old furnace just to save a few hundred dollars a year on heating/cooling costs, but spending thousands to do so. But if your current unit is 10-15 years old, and you plan on staying in your home another 10-15 years, then the investment now will pay off in the long run.
We Added $2000 in Credit Card Debt…
but we paid it all off the next day!
We put about $2000 on our Discover More card to get the 5% cash back on home improvement purchases this quarter (the first $400 of it. The rest is at 1%), but what did we buy? Well, I’ll give you an image hint:
Yep, we bought about 580 square feet of Pergo Meadowbrook Oak laminate flooring for our front room, hall, kitchen and dining room (they’re all connected rooms), in addition to molding and thresholds. This flooring was $3.27 per sq. ft., which is on the pricey end (for laminate flooring). However, Lowes had a 20% off sale that ended this past weekend that brought the price down to about $2.61 per sq. ft.
In addition, the flooring already has the padding attached which, according to my experienced father-in-law (he does this for a living), makes for a much easier installation. We’ll be doing the installation ourselves, which shouldn’t be overly difficult since both our dads will help and both have experience with laminate flooring. The biggest concern is whether the floor will match BOTH our cherry cabinets AND our rosewood dining room furniture.
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