Housebroke

Housebroke is a term that a coworker reintroduced into my vocabulary yesterday. In our usage is means that home ownership is breaking you financially, mentally, and/or physically. I find it to be quite apt and applicable to all three categories.

We went to Home Depot last night. My mother-in-law and her boyfriend gave us a housewarming/college graduation gift of a $100 gift card at Home Depot. It was a thoughtful and practical gift. Last night we put some of it to use. We're still attempting to prioritize some things, but we were able to purchase a few things we needed.

One of the things I did while there was price some lumber. I did a rough estimate on the amount of lumber I was going to need to put together the bookshelves. After marrying up my estimates (plus extra for scrap) and the prices I saw there, I came up with a pretty conservative estimate of $150 - $200 for supplies. Which is well more than I want to spend on bookshelves in the kid's room. So, now I'm thinking I'll look into either doing some garage-sale shopping or looking for a cheaper set of shelves and then modifying/reinforcing them to suit my needs.

But modifying another set doesn't accomplish my ulterior motive -- cutting my teeth on a project like this. See, we have a dining room that we're going to use as a reading/computer room. I want to build some floor-to-ceiling shelves in that room and wanted to use the kid's room project to learn. The reading room project is going to be another $100 or so more expensive because I plan on using more expensive materials. But it's going to be in a room a lot of people will see (everyone who visits), so I need to ensure it looks nice.

Anyway. I'm housebroken. But I'll keep all of you updated.