Game Room

Today, we piled the family in the Bravada and went on a little adventure. Our first stop was to the Lowes where we needed to return fireplace doors. Jenn had ordered a nice set of fireplace doors from the Lowes website. They were special ordered, and we waiting anxiously for almost a month for them to arrive. To our major disappointment, the website failed to notify us that these doors were for installation on a MASONRY FIREPLACE ONLY! Crap! We have a prefab fireplace, and there was no way it was going to work. So today was our day to trudge into Lowes to return the doors. We were afraid it was going to be a big hassle, as they were special order. Lowes impressed us again with their customer service. They took it back and gave us a credit on our credit card, no questions asked. We so prefer going to Lowes over Home Depot for their service. The local Home Depot has terrible service. We went there one time to price carpet, and it was as if we were asking the guy to give blood or something. No one wanted to help.

I'm rambling. Back to the adventure. Our next stop was to eat some lunch (Burger King), and then over to Watson's. Jenn had read that Watsons was at one time a vendor for fireplace doors for our particular model fireplace. Turns out, they stopped selling them a couple of years ago, but we still had fun wandering around the show room. Then, we got into trouble. We saw a display room, a game room, that had everything we wanted for the basement. There was a pool table, a card table, a bar, an electric fireplace, a wall table, bar stools, chairs, and gaming equipment. It had the works. And it was only $7,500! We were sooooo tempted to break with our budget and buy it all, but reason got the better of us. It is getting close to Christmas, and we had already set our Christmas budget, which was nowhere near the cost of the room. We're still paying on the car, and we are overpaying on the house payment so we can get rid of our PMI. Our budget is really tight right now, and to get the game room would have been fun, but it would have been murder on our money situation. Still, we drove home trying to think of ways we could round up that kind of money in a hurry. There was another room there that was priced $1,000 lower, missing just the fireplace and wall table. That would have been just as good. We mulled over getting extra jobs, asking for extra hours, garage sale.... how could we do it.

By the time we got home we realized that there were other things on our agenda that we needed to look after first. Sure, it would a TON of fun to get a fully equipped game room. However, I've needed a new office suite since we moved back from Maryland. We also want to get a sunroom / deck for our backyard. That is something that we budgeted for when we talked with our financial advisor. I just got a nice table topper for my birthday too. That will be great as a card table when we want to have folks over to play. We'd still love to do it, but I think we're going to have to put it off for at least another couple of years.