I bought my first house when I was 24 years old and basically outfitted it in yard sale finds and Ikea furniture. Now that I’m on owned house number two and 15 years have passed… well, I still have a lot of Ikea furniture. However, I also occasionally buy something Nice.
Yes, with a capital N on that bad boy.
And let me tell you, most of the time it is not very fun to buy things for your house. Dropping a bunch of money on a hot water heater or heat pump is certainly not as exciting as putting that money towards a trip to somewhere warm and beachy. Having hot water in your shower and heat in the winter IS pretty nice though. When I sold my townhouse a few years ago, I basically shined that turd as much as possible before listing it. One of those ‘needed improvements’ to get it sold was to replace all the kitchen appliances with new ones with stainless steel finishes.
I actually didn’t/don’t even like stainless steel appliances, but everyone else that was looking for a townhouse apparently did. So I spent a bunch of money and upgraded it all. Which SUCKED. Because after spending a bunch of moola, I didn’t even get to enjoy it.
So, one of the things that Travis and I decided when we bought our current home was that if we wanted to upgrade something, we’d do it while we still lived there… rather than doing it for the next owner. Within the first couple years, we started slowly buying new appliances for the kitchen. They were all old with mix-matched finishes, so we replaced them one at a time with new models with black finishes. The microwave was fine, but we ended up buying a new dishwasher and also a new stove.
I really, really wanted a new refrigerator too… but ours still worked fine and new fridges are SO EXPENSIVE. Every time I’d be tempted by one, I’d think about how that money could go towards a trip to Disney. Or just look really sexy sitting in our savings account.
Little things started to really bug me though. First off, our fridge was so old that we couldn’t get filters for the water/ice maker. Travis didn’t really notice it much, but I could not stand the smell and taste of our ice. Also, every time I’d go in the freezer to grab something the skinny door would try to shut on me and suck me in. One top of those issues, the width of the freezer was so small that when I’d make treats for the holidays I couldn’t even fit a tray in there to freeze up (a necessary step for chocolate pretzels and also for snickerdoodle dough). It was SO FRUSTRATING, but every time I looked at the beautiful French Door refrigerators of my dreams, my brain pretty much exploded at their prices.
We happened to be wandering through Home Depot after Thanksgiving when we saw it. A super cool French Door refrigerator with a ‘black stainless’ finish. There was a ton of space inside with all the bells and whistles, and it was the right height and width for our kitchen. It was exactly what we were looking for, if we had been purposefully looking for it. The best part was that the original price was over $2,000 but it was on sale for $989 and had hundreds of online reviews that rated it 4 ½ out of 5 stars.
And now, I have my dream refrigerator. Because that’s a grown up dream if I’ve ever heard of one.
Isn’t it pretty?!
Is there a grown up thing that you’ve been wanting forever? Share in the comments!
You have to leave the fridge if you move out? Wow. Dishwashers I can understand cause they’re plumbed in, but here in NZ unless there’s an agreement about it (my parents once paid extra for the fridge to be left as it was a hard size to get), you take all of the things with you to your next house…
Typically when selling a house here the appliances go with the house. You can write it into the contract that you want to take something with you, but it’s not as common. =)