February Mortgage Update: Moving Money Around

Last month (January):
Balance:$31,114.84
Years left: 2.25
P =$1,079.06, I =$135.34, Escrow =$788.73

This month (February):
Balance:$28,026.73
Years left: 2.083333333333
P =$1,091.24, I =$123.16, Escrow =$788.73

One month’s prepayment savings: $7.90

Still pre-paying the mortgage.  But I did make one other big change right before the New Year.

Usually I do all my retirement stuff from September to September, ignoring the tax year.  But 2015 (and 2016) we’re going to be paying half of our taxes in a state with super high income tax.  So it makes sense to get our taxable income down a bit.  So I’m switching to 100% traditional 403b instead of half Roth.  On top of that, the 403b/457 amounts that you can save went up by $500, so I’m increasing the amount saved.

I was thinking about how on half my salary next year, we may [will] not be able to max out retirement *and* pay for health insurance and benefits simply because my gross pay once taxes are taken out may not be enough to cover all of that.  (DH’s retirement options suck.  Though our income might be down enough next year to be able to do a Roth again, something to keep in mind.)  So here we are making extra money now that we don’t need right now, but next academic year we may not be making enough to bring home any take-home pay from my paycheck if we keep things as they are now.

We already have a lot of cash just sitting in savings waiting to be turned into rent and deposits and daycare payments and state sales tax payments and all those things that we can’t afford on DH’s salary alone next year.  It doesn’t make any sense to just keep stock-piling in there when we can pile extra money into retirement savings *this* (school) year and keep money in the paycheck *next* (school) year.

So that’s what I’m doing.  I sent in the form to completely max out my 2015 403(b) from January to May (18K/5 = 3.6K/mo for the rest of the school year).  I still haven’t sent in my 457 plan increase because I’m not sure we’re going to be able to afford to do both plans for 2015– it’s going to depend on housing and schooling options.  If it turns out we *can* afford to keep adding to the 457 for 2015, then we should still be able to pay just it (and health insurance etc.) and still have at least some take-home pay left over.

So… from Jan [Feb paycheck] to May we will be:  Prepaying the mortgage, maxing out my 403b in the traditional option, saving to (but not maxing out) the 457 (half Roth/half traditional), and putting any extra $ in cash.  In May we will stop any substantive mortgage prepayment.  In September we will re-evaluate the 457 situation and decide whether or not we can afford to save to that option or not while we’re living in paradise.

I had been planning on having >80K in savings before we moved to Paradise (because we are going to be spending more than we earn this next school year), but now it is going to be less than that.  However, I will be getting half-salary (yay!) and (as of this change) won’t be making any 403b contributions during that time period, so our monthly take-home pay will be higher next year than I had been planning on when I set that savings target.

So, go me for shifting things around some.  I hope I’m making the right decisions and doing the right things.  I think we’ll be getting some pretty significant tax savings for the year from putting all this money in a traditional 403(b).  And I think we’ll still be in pretty good shape, so long as DH doesn’t lose his job.  (And if he does lose his job, Paradise is probably the best place for him to be to find a new one right away.)

[UPDATE:  I may be doing completely the wrong thing– I had assumed we would be counted as residents because of someone’s previous experience, but it looks like there are significant differences between that experience and this one (namely that I will not be getting any Paradise income during this time frame).  If I’m only temporary, then I should be funneling all our money into the ROTH choice to take advantage of lower tax rates.  If I’m a part-year resident, then I should not be maxing out my retirement now, but trying to make my take-home pay as low as possible when we’re in Paradise.  I think we need to talk to an actual tax professional about this stuff.]

UPDATE 2:  Talked to the Paradise tax board.  They are very confident that we will be nonresidents.  “You are not planning on a permanent move, it’s temporary.”  Which means a lot of the choices I’ve made (like timing donations, changing the IRA), were not great choices.  But hey, maybe one of my grants will hit and I’ll get summer salary.  I wonder if I should change the 403b back…

UPDATE 3:  Talked to someone in almost my exact situation from two years ago, and ze didn’t have to pay Paradise state income tax either.

What are your 403b/401K/457/IRA plans for the year?

January Mortgage Update: Getting ready to spend a year in paradise

Last month (December):
Balance:$34,190.77
Years left: 2.5
P =$1,066.94, I =$147.47, Escrow =$788.73

This month (January):
Balance:$31,114.84
Years left: 2.25
P =$1,079.06, I =$135.34, Escrow =$788.73

One month’s prepayment savings: $7.91

If we kept up with our current rate of pre-payment, we would be done with the mortgage completely in less than a year.

We aren’t going to do that.

Why not?  Because we need the money!  Why do we need the money?  Because I’m only getting half-pay and we’re moving someplace for the year where daycare and housing are both twice as expensive.  (It’s all official!)  And taxes are insane because they provide social services and things.  Crazy, I know!

So we will need that extra 2K/month to pay for goods and services instead of pre-paying our mortgage.

It seems like there’s always something going on with money–getting ready for DH to quit his job, adjusting to DH having a job, then adjusting to a year at half pay with bigger expenses.  Life is never really in steady-state.

There’s so much to worry about.  Housing, schooling, daycare.  Months worth of money posts, eh?

We still don’t know what to do about the house.  I’m strongly tempted just to get a trustworthy grad student to kitten-sit in exchange for free rent and taking care of the house and utilities (we’ll be bringing Little Kitty with us, but we can’t take 3 cats, so either the cat formerly known as mean kitty will have to go with a relative while we take nice kitty who pees with us, or we’ll leave both kittens with a sitter.)

DH thinks it will still be worthwhile to try to find someone to rent at market price, even though that means we’ll have to fix the bathroom, repaint, and keep things clean constantly (also probably pay for storage for our furniture).  I think we’ll end up probably doing a hybrid– posting to sabbatical and new faculty sites and then getting a house-sitter if nobody bites.  Possibly striking a deal with new faculty if they are amenable.  We’ll see.  We may not worry about this until March.  I don’t know.

The most we would get for renting the house would be around 20K.  DH thinks that’s a lot, but given the amount of work we have to have done first and the annoyingness of keeping lawn and house sparkling (not to mention housecleaning expenses), I’m not so sure.  But maybe if we avoid Craigslist and just stick to a few exclusive sites it won’t be so bad.  Maybe we’ll get lucky.

I hope this all works out!  But if it doesn’t, I don’t want to be stressed.  Based on my projected savings calculations and the savings we did when DH was unemployed that we never put away (because we knew this was going to be a possibility, though we *thought* it would happen last year), we should have about 85K in our emergency/to-spend fund by May.  Hopefully that will be enough to keep us from stressing out if we don’t find tenants along with the paycut and the additional required expenses.  Right now I’m hoping to continue contributing to retirement and the 529s (although retirement literally would take up all of my take-home pay, so I won’t be able to completely both max it out and do a DDA and pay for health insurance), but that’s another area we can loosen if we need to.

I’m both excited and scared.  But I’m not that worried about money.  Still, we’re still going to have to stop prepaying the mortgage sometime this summer.

(Technically if I had another 72K, or even another 48K, I would be less worried about money.  A lot of our problems would be solved if we could just afford 6K/month to rent out a furnished house from a professor on sabbatical.  Our friends say there’s going to be a market correction, but I’m not holding my breath that it will happen before we get to or even before we leave paradise.  Bubbles can take a while to pop.)

December Mortgage Update: And money and school zones

Last month (November):
Balance:$37,254.58
Years left: 2.75
P =$1,054.86, I =$159.55, Escrow =$788.73

This month (December):
Balance:$34,190.77
Years left: 2.5
P =$1,066.94, I =$147.47, Escrow =$788.73

One month’s prepayment savings: $7.90

DC1 currently goes to private school.  Ze goes to private school because ze needed to start K early and the public schools wouldn’t talk to us about that.

The public schools have now changed their tune.  They have a district webpage on how to start K early, how to skip individual classes, and how to skip grades.  They note that enough people have taken these options that they now offer 7th grade algebra and 8th grade geometry at the middle schools.

At the same time, while we’ve been living in this transition neighborhood (the last frontier not changed into student housing, though I’m fairly sure there’s a houseful on our block), our school zones have changed twice.  And each time they’ve gotten worse.  We are now in the worst elementary school zone, and the “athletic” middle school.  Note that neither of these schools are the closest to our house… no, we’re the “rich” neighborhood that gets moved every 5 years to even out the “poor” districts, instead of the actually rich neighborhoods that never get touched.

If DC2 doesn’t need acceleration, then we have a chance at lotterying into a bilingual program at one of the better elementary schools.  That still wouldn’t have been enough for DC1 (and hasn’t been enough acceleration for some of our collegues’ kids, though it did work out until said kids became fluent in Spanish, at which point the lessons became much too slow).  Of course, DC2 has been, if anything, hitting milestones earlier.  Hir birthdate means that maybe only one year of acceleration would be needed instead of two (ze just makes rather than misses a cutoff), but that’s still one year too many to be eligible for the bilingual program even if ze did get in.

So that leaves us with choices.  1.  We could move before DC2 needs to start kindergarten, which could happen sooner than we think.  If we’re going to do this, it might make sense to sell the house before sabbatical/unpaid leave so we don’t have to deal with renters, just storage.  (Untold moving costs, though we’d probably buy a smaller house if we bought again, but I’d probably also get a longer commute which would suck.)  2.  We could send DC2 to the same private school that DC1 goes to ($9K/year).  3.  We could not try to accelerate and see what happens with the bilingual program lottery.  (Free, except in potential future therapy bills)  4.  We could accelerate as fast as possible through the elementary school and just cope and deal. (Free, except in time spent in conferences with the school.)  We could also rent an apartment in a better school zone, but the quality differential isn’t enough for that to be a feasible option like it might be in a large city– none of the elementary schools are all that great.

And who knows, the school zones might change again.

I’m guessing we’ll probably just stick with the same private school if it’s still in business.  Who knows.

Why is this all so hard?

November Mortgage Update: And hypotheticals

Last month (October):
Balance:$40,306.31
Years left: 3
P =$1,042.82, I =$171.58, Escrow =$788.73

This month (November):
Balance:$37,254.58
Years left: 2.75
P =$1,054.86, I =$159.55, Escrow =$788.73

One month’s prepayment savings: $7.90

Man, it sure is nice to be getting paid again.  Beautiful beautiful paycheck.  Bank account numbers are going up instead of down again.  :)

I won’t find out whether or not I’m getting a half-paid sabbatical next year for several months.  However, I may take the year off unpaid *anyway*.  We have an awfully large savings buffer and DH’s company swears they have enough money to stay in business for the next two years even if they earn no more money during that time (and they’ve got grants out and products being made, so hopefully they’ll get more money).  And DH is one of their valued employees.  And he should be able to find new employment even if he loses his job depending on where we do the sabbatical.

There’s a lot of questions about where to go too, but I’ll defer that for a later post.  All of the places, however, have a higher cost of living than where we are right now (which isn’t difficult!)  Think double the cost of daycare, 1.5 to 2x the cost of housing for something much less nice than our current mortgage (even without the prepayment).

The hypotheticals I want to address right now involve the house.

We currently have 3 cats, one of whom still occasionally pees on a comforter or pile of laundry if we leave it out when she’s out and about.

Our house is also a superficial mess.  Yes, the carpet in the kids’ bathroom is gone and the vertical blinds that were in the worst shape have been replaced, but that’s only the tip of the home-repair ice berg.  The kittens literally shredded the master bathroom when they were still kittens.  It will need to have the wallpaper completely removed, patching done, and paint.  The entire house needs to be painted– it’s grungy and chipping in places and occasionally sports two year old art.  There’s a sizable black ink stain in the carpet in DC1’s room that won’t go away with steam cleaning (it, in fact, just gets bigger every time we try).  The deck needs painting.  The screens need to be replaced or patched.  The guest toilet is getting rusty.  And on and on and on.

We are not allowed to rent to students by HOA rules.  (Though we’re fairly sure there’s a group of students living down the street from us, but the HOA board is currently weak.  When strong it has brought lawsuits to such houses and won against them.)

Our house, in theory, if it were in good shape, would rent unfurnished for $2000/mo.  Though one year rentals may drop as low as say, $1600/mo.  (Note, our required mortgage is $2003/mo, though as you can see the escrow and interest are under $1000/mo.)  Storage for our furniture would cost something like $300-500/mo, give or take.

In bad shape, any house in town will rent for $1200/mo, possibly even $1500/mo.  Our house would be a bargain at that price, even with stained carpet.  Though we’d still have to repaint, I think.

We’re not sure if anyplace we go will allow 3 cats.  Two, yes.  We might be able to leave one of the cats at a relative’s place for the year (though the two black kittens are very attached to each other, and we’d be breaking that attachment– it is unlikely that a relative would take the incontinent kitten).

Our utilities range from $50/mo to $800/mo depending on time of year.  Lawn mowing costs $35/mo, plus weeding $50/mo, but only during the growing season.  Our lawn has to meet a certain standard or we get nasty letters from the HOA  threatening to take our house.

Obviously we’ll stop mortgage pre-payment for next year if I go on leave.

So our choices:

1.  Fix everything up, try to get market rate for the house.

2.  Fix some stuff up (painting, but patch instead of replace screens, put a rug over the ink spot etc.), put the house on the market for cheap.  Potentially offer a discount for renting it furnished rather than unfurnished.

3.  Hire someone to house sit.  Here we could either ask that they pay utilities and take care of the lawn or we could pay utilities and pay them to take care of the house and the two kittens.  If we pay them, then we could get the house fixed up while we’re gone rather than this year when we’re both living here and busy.  With infinite money we could even have the kitchen redone (except we don’t have infinite money).

So I don’t know.  We have quite a bit of extra money in savings right now earmarked for home improvement (we’ve only spent ~$3K so far), though some of that may end up going for rent next year depending on what we end up doing.  If we had a lot more money we’d pick option #3 no contest.  But while we could afford that option (without the kitchen remodel), it would potentially drain our non-retirement/non-529 savings (when combined with our living expenses for next year).  

What are your thoughts on the options?  What should we be considering to make the decision?

October Mortgage Update and Window Treatments

Last month (September):
Balance:$43,346.00
Years left: 3.25
P =$1,030.84, I =$183.56, Escrow =$788.73

This month (October):
Balance:$40,306.31
Years left: 3
P =$1,042.82, I =$171.58, Escrow =$788.73

One month’s prepayment savings: $7.90

Recall some of our windows.  We have two sets of these.:

So the first thing we wanted to do is get some of that professional reflective stuff put on on the outside.  One of the rooms gets really hot and no amount of crepe myrtle outside seems to be able to block the heat in the middle of the day.  Of course, that requires actually contacting someone and we’re still waiting for our bathroom flooring to show up. [update: they came, see last Monday’s post]  Redoing the indoors doesn’t require talking to anybody or waiting for anything, so that’s what we started with instead.

We tried going without anything on the top half circles for a few days.  It was hot and occasionally blinding.  Other viable options we explored were Faux stained glass film and plantation shutters.  We’ve looked into less expensive options like paper fans and turning regular paper blinds into half circle blinds… but none of them seemed worth it to us.  (The more crafty among you may disagree!)   Here’s a pinterest page with all sorts of stuff.

In the end, we chose Bali half circle faux wood blinds in coconut, with matching 2 in horizontal blinds.  Cost:  $108 for each small half circle and $160 for each small one.  Total cost:  $752.  Then there was a 20% discount (down to $602) and tax and stuff.  The blinds were:  $67 each for the 4 little ones and $96 for the 2 big ones, $460 total.  DH decided he liked the smooth finish better than the fake wood-grain finish.  I’m good with that.  Total cost including everything:  $1050.

After:

So a lot less expensive than roman blinds would have been, and I think roman blinds are kinda going out of style, so dodged that bullet.  Laziness for the win!

We still have the great room, and for that I really want to do something I recently saw at an upscale hotel, but I haven’t been able to find pictures of what I’m thinking of– perhaps it isn’t trendy enough yet.  Basically they had a rich grey thick outer curtain, a satiny translucent inner curtain, and a third white blackout curtain.  There was a nice grey rectangular valence over the top.  All curtains were openable with their own chains.  I can’t for the life of me figure out how to go about buying that kind of set-up without hiring someone or picking and choosing the separate parts through several different stores.  That kind of set up, especially with being able to open the curtains via chain, seems not to be available as a set anywhere, even though I would like to be able to just press a “buy this look” button and put in my particulars.

I think we’ll also replace the vertical blinds in the guest bedroom with a blackout curtain one of these years.  We’ll see.  My MIL got curtains to replace the blinds, but we didn’t take the blinds down because they didn’t block enough light even if they do look nice.

Something we noted when buying– the cheapest options on almost any site have a ton of reviews but some of the reviews say things like “blinds melted after two weeks.”  The more expensive options don’t have as many reviews and some don’t have any reviews, but they often tend not to have any negative reviews if they have reviews at all.  We rely pretty heavily on online reviews, which we believe have increased our quality of life in many areas (allowing us to pay extra for quality and to avoid hassle with returns).  So even if the most expensive options might be perfect and we might be willing to pay that amount if the quality is higher, if we have no information on the quality, we’ll go with the option that has 60-odd 5 and 4 star reviews over the option with 12 (or 2) 5 star reviews.  (And we’ll pick that over the 900 reviews where 5%, all from the South and Southwest, note that the blinds melt in direct sunlight.)  One of the online places we looked at didn’t have any negative reviews for even their cheapest blinds, so we really didn’t trust them.

Boy do we hate this sort of thing.  Why can’t stuff just last forever?  Or why can’t we have someone who loves to do interior design as a hobby pick stuff out for us?  I kept going, “You know, DH, we could just hire this blinds company to pick everything out for us.”  But… we still have to *pick* a company, and if we’re going to do that, we might as well just pick the blinds instead.  So we did.

How do you figure out these kinds of large home improvement purchases?  It’s easy to compare when it’s a water heater or what have you– but these kinds of aesthetic choices are so difficult for us.  Do you use online reviews (and what do you do when there aren’t any) or hire an interior decorator (and how do you find one)?  Do you just “buy this look”?  (And from where?)

September Mortgage update and long-distance landlording

Last month (August):
Balance: $46,373.71
Years left: 3.5
P =$1,018.90, I =$195.50, Escrow =788.73

This month (September):
Balance:$43,346.00
Years left: 3.25
P =$1,030.84, I =$183.56, Escrow =788.73

One month’s prepayment savings: $7.90

Disclaimer: We have ZERO desire to get into the landlording business. None. But #1 is tired of talking about her personal finances (as they relate to mortgages) for the nonce so you’re getting a post about housing instead. For newer readers, these housing posts on Mortgage day used to be more common before DH decided to quit his TT job, be unemployed, and get a new job. There will probably be more in the future as things get boring and settled again monetarily in the #1 household. But we’ll see, maybe we’ll actually do some home improvements some day (maybe by the time this posts, Home Depot will have found the vinyl flooring they ordered for us and it will actually get installed update:nope).

A recent working paper by Alex Chinco and Christopher Mayer suggests that investing in the market you live in is more profitable than swooping in from out of town to pick up “bargains” in another market.

Misinformed Speculators and Mispricing in the Housing Market

Abstract:  This paper uses transactions-level deeds records to examine how out-of-town second house buyers contributed to mispricing in the housing market. We document that out-of-town second house buyers behaved like misinformed speculators and drove up both house price and implied-to-actual rent ratio (IAR) appreciation rates in cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Miami in the mid 2000s. Our analysis has 3 parts. First, we give evidence that out-of-town second house buyers behaved like misinformed speculators. Compared to local second house buyers, out- of-town second house buyers had worse exit timing (i.e., were likely misinformed) and were also less able to consume the dividend from their purchase (i.e., were likely speculators). Second, we show that increases in out-of-town second house buyer demand predict increases in future house price appreciation rates and IAR appreciation rates. A 10%pt increase in the fraction of sales made to out-of-town second house buyers is associated with a 6%pt increase in house price appreciation rates and a 9%pt increase in IAR appreciation rates over the course of the next year in that city. Third, we address the issue of reverse causality using a novel econometric strategy. The key insight is that an increase in the fundamental value of owning a second house in Phoenix is a common shock to the investment opportunity set of all potential second house buyers. If changes to fundamentals were driving both price dynamics as well as out-of-town second house buyer demand, we would expect to see large jumps in house price and IAR appreciation rates preceded by increases in out-of-town second house buyer demand from across the country. The data do not display this symmetric response, and are thus inconsistent with reverse causality. We conclude by discussing both the economic magnitudes of out-of-town second house buyer flows and the broader applicability of our econometric approach.

In short:  Out of town investors don’t know the market, so they make mistakes in purchasing and selling.  Additionally, out-of-town investors drive up prices within a town.  Bottom line– even though there’s diversification risk in one market, there are benefits to sticking with what you know.

What do you think about landlording/flipping houses locally vs. long-distance?

 

August Mortgage Update and what to do with the 30K in the home maintenance fund

Last month (July):
Balance: $49,389.48
Years left: 3.75
P =$1,007.01, I =$207.39, Escrow =788.73

This month (August):
Balance: $46,373.71
Years left: 3.5
P =$1,018.90, I =$195.50, Escrow =788.73

One month’s prepayment savings: $7.90

As I hinted at last month, with DH employed, we have accumulated a lot of money in our savings account just sitting there (or, more accurately, we didn’t completely de-cumulate our savings from saving up for him leaving his job before he got a new one).  Some of it is tagged for specific things, like tuition and the emergency fund… I guess that’s really it.  So in addition to the amount that’s legitimately in savings, we have more than 30K that’s loosely been earmarked for home maintenance repairs.

Now, before you go and say, “30K?  You should invest in stocks/pay off the mortgage with that are you crazy?”  Note that we have owned this house for almost 10 years and we didn’t change a thing when we moved in.  The only maintenance we’ve done has been completely reactionary:  fixing leaky pipes and faucets, fixing a leaky skylight on the patio, replacing the water heaters when they died, repairing and then replacing the dishwasher when it gave up the ghost and then fixing the new one, replacing the microwave multiple times, replacing the a/c in stages as it died, replacing broken fence pieces, replacing a broken board in the deck, and a whole ton of yard work usually when the HOA sends us a nasty letter.  We also touched up paint in the kitchen once.  And we always seem to be replacing the innards of two of the toilets (DH thinks this may be a waterflow issue).  You know, standard everything that breaks when you’re a homeowner stuff.

During that time we’ve had two kids potty train, and at least 6 cats coming and going.  We have carpet in two of our bathrooms.  We have aging vertical blinds.  We have peeling wall paper.  The paint is coming off in the kitchen.  We have an electric stove.  The kitchen triangle is messed up and the countertops are the cheap kind that turn yellow when you use bleach and, although we have gas hookups in the kitchen, everything is electric.  The kittens have destroyed the master bath, though really the cabinets in there have water damage anyway so it’s not all their doing.  There’s stains on the carpeting and drawings on the walls.  And many more things I haven’t mentioned.  At this point you may be thinking, “Only 30K?  Are you crazy?”

So we’re obviously not going to do everything.

DH has identified as priorities replacing the bathroom carpet with something that isn’t carpet and window treatments.

Warning:  the next few visuals are NOT PRETTY.  Look away now…if you can.

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Bathroom carpet + potty training is not a pretty sight.

 

Even if you’re in the minority of those who like vertical blinds, these are starting to get ratty.  See the watermarks from leaving the window open when it’s raining?  Oops!

And then there’s the tops of our window treatments. We have two sets of these lovely windows. Those half circles at the top are a pain to cover.

Here you see the needlework skills of the previous owner. Even if you love these top things, they’re kind of dirty and we have no idea how to go about cleaning them. We suspect the fabric will disintegrate if we try.

I’m going to save you the master bathroom pictures (aka “kitten island”) to present another day.  They’re pretty stunning, but we’re doing baby steps here.  And we don’t want to overwhelm you with awfulness all at once.  We’re thinking of your health here.

So, our first order of business is the kids’ bathroom.  We spent a few weekends looking at sheet vinyl while getting completely ignored by sales people at three different flooring stores in town.  At the first store it sounded like this was going to be a $600 project and we were all, why does anybody do this themselves (as in, why save $300 at most, though DH points out that $300 is a lot for a lot of people and the work isn’t as daunting for people who know what they’re doing better than we do).  But then we gave up on the local flooring places and just went to Home Depot, where the guy was incompetent, but the contractors he sent to the house weren’t.  After the measurement, the estimated cost is $900.  (So according to the home depot invoice, we’d actually save $500 in labor doing it ourselves.  But we’re not gonna, not this time.)

DC1 picked out this tile, or, to be technically correct, ze picked out this sheet vinyl.  It looks a lot nicer in the picture than it does in the sample, but having mosaic actual tile (like DC1 really wanted) is not a good idea for a children’s bathroom because it’s hard to clean and gets slippery.  Vinyl tiles look better, but they only look better with bigger squares and DC1 really likes the pattern of little squares.  Plus sheet vinyl, is again, much easier to clean.  It’s also the least expensive option.

And they’re going to destroy our beautiful baseboards and replace them with ugly quarter-round.  I think this is why people do everything in their bathrooms at once.  DH thinks he can handle getting, painting, and putting in nicer baseboards so he’s going to ask them to omit the quarter-round moulding.

While they’re doing this, we’re also getting a new toilet.  Not only is the current toilet kind of gross, but it has been nothing but a graveyard for new toilet innards.  I swear, the thing breaks every 3 months or so.  So after some research, we picked out this Toto toilet, complete with the stain guard (because DC2 is still potty training).  That’s $300.

So the jack and jill bathroom flooring + toilet is going to cost something like $1500, depending on how much the fancy moulding costs.  We probably should have done it years ago, but $1500 is a lot of money!  Still, not as much as we thought it would cost.  Sometime in the next month or so, we should no longer have carpet in the kids’ bathroom.

As for the window treatments… we’re not sure what we’re going to be doing there, so any suggestions you make now could influence what we do!  There are a lot of options out there, and some of them are better than others.  But that’ll probably be the topic of another post.

What are your thoughts on our home improvement plans?  Any suggestions?