The Reality, She Bites

We had someone stop by our place last night to provide us with an estimate for finishing our basement. We had visions of a bathroom, an office, a storage room, and a bar. Open play spaces...

He told us that our house hadn't been built to code so they had added structural support beams, which would lower our ceiling to 6'6" in areas. At least now we know what those beams are all about. We hashed through 'Could we put this here? And a wall here? What about this?' for forty five minutes. Then he wrote up his estimate and told us.

And it was twice what we had been thinking. We looked at our budget, and realized that not only could we not afford that, we were actually living beyond our means i a lot of places. So we're cutting back, scaling down. It's not a bad thing, but it's not something we've really done. Even with Esposo in school, when we should have done it, we didn't reduce enough.

Sitting down to look at what you spend where is a scary thing. Like finding out you were spending $340 on gas for your cars each MONTH. Talk about dependence on oil. $420 in food and foodstuffs. Being aware of what we're spending is the first thing, and now we have to act on that information. Which won't be easy for either of us, though neither of us is the type to spend with reckless abandon. We've been aware of our non-essential spending, but not of our essential spending and how we might reduce those costs.