DarqByte

So last Monday I was vacuuming when I got home from work. Actually, I was cleaning most of our downstairs because we had our financial advisor coming over. It needed to look good and our downstairs was pretty messy.

Over the course of the vacuuming, Pepper’s hair just stopped getting sucked up. Usually, if we haven’t vacuumed in awhile, I’ve got to do a double- or triple-pass over the section I’m vacuuming because there’s so much hair that the vacuum can’t get it all at once.

Well… I was to the point where octuple-passes over the carpet wasn’t working. It was really frustrating and I stopped trying and just picked up the pushed-around hair that I could by hand.

That night when Laura got home, I mentioned the issue to her and suggested we get a new vacuum cleaner. Here’s the part that sucks. Our first apartment together had one vacuum, and it died when we moved (just at a year). Then we had our current one (well, not current anymore) up until this last Saturday, so it lasted less than a year. So we would be on vacuum #3 after about 1.6 years of 2 other vacuums… Let’s see, $100 per vacuum per year… Yeah. Enough.

We bought a Dyson. The pet-hair one. The top-of-the-line one. And with a 20% discount at Bed Bath & Beyond too! Totally awesome. And the verdict on its performance?

Firkin rocked up the joint. We had to empty the canister five times over the entire house. And we should still probably go over all of it again because I’ve heard you should vacuum twice when you get a Dyson just so you can see how awful the place was with the old vacuum. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Not only that, but this last weekend was supposed to be all dedicated to a different major addition to the house: new couches!

We’d been using hand-me-down  couches since our apartment. We had two downstairs and one upstairs (that is still there, it’s not bad and the cover is good). We decided that replacing the couches was the next major purchase after the new TV and entertainment center. We were perusing some random ads for the President’s Day sales and RC Willey had a nice set for… Really damn cheap. Oddly enough, cheaper than the Dyson! Haha.

Laura jumped on it after work that day and they were delivered on Saturday, right after we got the Dyson to vacuum downstairs so the couches wouldn’t be sitting on pet hair.

They’re great! Comfy couches with plenty of padding, and you can lay down on them comfortably… I’m so happy with them. I’ve been desiring a couch that you could lay down on in one position for a long time and not hurt and whatnot, and they deliver. They look good and feel good and they’re just all kinds of awesomeness. Totally worth it.

So what do we have in store in regards to home improvement, be it structural or furnishings? Well, I think our immediate plans have new coach lights outside and bar lights inside. We’ll see.

So now four items in our living room have come from RC Willey: 2 couches, TV and TV stand. And I really never shopped there before…

So sue me, I couldn’t think up a cool catchy blog post title.

Oddly enough, even given this economy, Laura and I are finding some small ways here and there to get some home improvements done. For example, the curtain rod in our master bathroom was, well, kinda janky. Laura never saw the issue, but it fell once, and nearly on top of my head. It looks like KB Home tried to jam it into one of the walls because there are circular marks that look like the end of the curtain rod.

After it fell, the best I could do was prop it on top off the shower enclosure that sticks out from the wall. From that point, I was just careful not to tug outwards on the curtain because it could roll off, in theory. Otherwise, it seemed like a perfectly normal curtain rod.

I’d been wanting to get a replacement for some time, and those curved rods they have in hotels are nice. My Dad has one and it’s nice. I broke down yesterday and got one in Home Depot while I was getting plumber’s putty. I put it up last night at about 10:30. Used it this morning, and…

Wow. It’s nice. There is so much more room inside there now! It’s firkin awesome man. I also bought a scale since we didn’t have one, so now I get to know just how fat I really am.

Aside from that, we’re finally getting new couches! We’ve been running on hand-me-down couches for awhile. They’re not bad, just not nice. Haha. They’ve seen some mileage and wear and tear. But now we’ve ordered some new ones via an RC Willey President’s Day sale and they’ll arrive on the 28th.

We’re slowly making over our living room. The TV and TV stand both came from RC Willey via Black Friday, so they’re greatly contributing to our gradual home makeover via one-day sales.

Our existing couches are already spoken for. Poor Steven doesn’t have any and we’re handing them over to him, to use as a temporary stopgap until he can buy some good ones.

Let’s not forget that we got HD satellite hooked up recently as well as a nice new Harmony Remote. And I plan on getting our coach lights outside installed sometime by the end of March, and we need to install bar lights sometime soon too.

How are we affording all of this in this economy? Well, we’re planning well for these things and not rushing into anything. And we’re also getting a sizable tax return this year, which is how we’re getting the couches.