Last night I decided that we needed some new pajamas for our son.  He’ll be one in a couple weeks, and this is the first time we’ve ever had to go clothes shopping for him.  This is due to the generosity of a friend who gave me her son’s hand me downs (which were given to her as hand me downs – we’re really into recycling around here), and to the fact that I believe that it doesn’t matter what babies wear as long as they are comfortable (thus you’ll never find me at the mall looking for cute outfits for him).  Anyway, after nearly a year, we had run out of pjs that fit.  So we headed to our two neighborhood thrift stores today, on a pj mission. 

I found lots of pajamas (including two piece sets that have not been treated with flame retardants, one of which had never been worn).  In addition to the pajamas for our son, we found all sorts of other goodies.  We spent a total of $46 between the two stores.  Here’s a look at our loot:

Two pair of zip-up pjs, a sleep sack, and a cute little shirt.

A Columbia jacket for me, two pair of shorts for my husband, a big saucepan for our solar oven, a yoga band, a garlic storage container (I currently store all of my produce in one huge bowl on the counter.  So my garlic snuggles with my mangos.  Now the garlic will have it’s own little home), and a Hip Hammock.  The Hip Hammock was only $3.50, and I tried it out in the store before I bought it.  I still love my Moby Wrap when we’re walking long distances, but it’s not the easiest thing to put on.  The Hip Hammock took about 5 seconds to get on, and our son happily rode around in it while we finished our shopping.  I checked it out online when I got home and found that some had been recalled a few years ago, but this one is a newer model that hasn’t had any problems.  Not bad for $3.50!

And more stuff for the little guy:  Two sun hats, a pair of swim trunks, two more sets of pjs, a really cool jacket that I think is handmade (it doesn’t have any tags or logos in it.  It’s amazingly well made), a pair of little guy slippers, a soft book with all sorts of little person-friendly activities that our son didn’t put down the whole time we were in the store, and a sweatshirt.

All of that for $46.  Have I ever mentioned how much I love thrift stores?  I can’t imagine ever shopping anywhere else.  Even if we made twice as money as we do now, I think I would always see it as a waste of money to buy things brand new.  Not only are there bargains around every corner when you shop second hand, but I love the idea that you never know what you’ll find when you go thrifting.  It’s always an adventure.

I sold our old bed frame yesterday, for $20.  I put it on Craig’s List and got about ten responses within the first few hours.  So I guess I could have sold it for more, but I really wanted to get rid of it, and the $20 price did the trick.  It’s nice to have it out of the house, not taking up space anymore.  And the $20 is nice too.

Selling the bed frame made me start to look around at the possibility of selling some of the other stuff that we’re getting rid of in our effort to declutter our house.  I typically just drop everything off at the thrift store, and rarely sell anything.  I thought about the possibility of a garage sale, but my husband pointed out that a garage sale does involve a lot of time and effort compared with just tossing everything in the car and taking it over to the thrift store.  And everything we’d be selling is small stuff – there’s no big ticket items.  This post from the Joy of Frugal Living sums up my thoughts on selling our stuff as opposed to donating it.

A few years ago I tried buying clothes at a low-priced thrift store near our house and then re-selling them at a higher priced consignment store in a nearby town.  It was ok, and I did come out a little bit ahead.  But when I factor in the time and effort, it was a pretty low-paying adventure.  I think that the same would be true of selling the stuff we need to get rid of now.  Most of it is clothes and small household items – things that would mostly sell for $5 or less.  We tried listing some clothes on Craigs List last year, and nobody contacted us at all, even though they were pretty cheap.  I think that a garage sale would be the best way to sell our stuff, and neither of us really wants to put in the time required to set up a good garage sale.

So yesterday I made a trip to the thrift store and dropped off a huge bag full of stuff.  As we continue the decluttering process, we’ll keep making trips to the thrift store.  It’s a Habitat for Humanity store, so the proceeds go to a good cause (as is the case with most thrift stores).  I figure I’ve gotten a lot of benefit from shopping at thrift stores over the years (especially that particular store), and it makes me feel good to be able to donate back to them.

I think that if we had furniture or expensive stuff that we were getting rid of, we’d try to sell it.  But we tend to keep expensive stuff until it reaches the end of its useful life.  I have some friends who sell stuff on eBay and get pretty good money for their stuff.  But their stuff was a lot more expensive than ours in the first place.  Just about everything we have was second hand when we got it, and didn’t cost a lot of money.  Maybe that’s why I’m ok with just donating it when we don’t need it anymore.

What do you think?  If you had a bunch of low-ticket items that you wanted to get rid of, would you hold a garage sale or donate everything to a thrift store?

We’ve had a very productive weekend, although I feel like I need another weekend so that I can have a little time for doing nothing!  We made another step forward in our house-beautification project.  I tackled our bedroom, and now we’re wishing we had done this years ago.  When we moved in, the bedroom was in desperate need of a paint job.  And for some reason, we picked a paint that was somewhere between light pink and off-white.  We painted the walls and trim the same color, and while it wasn’t horrible (like the mauve bathroom) it wasn’t particularly great either.  Add to that our random assortment of art, and a length of wood with nails in it that I had hung on the wall to hold my jewelry (I told you I’m low maintenance!).

Anyway, our bedroom got a makeover this weekend.  The walls are now a wonderful brown shade, and the trim is white.  We took down the faded plastic 1985 blinds and put up wooden blinds that we got at Home Depot.  (as an aside, I remember talking to a friend who had a window person come in and install wooden blinds in her house.  They look identical to what we have, and she said they paid about $2000 to have it done.  If you’re willing to install your own blinds and shorten them to the correct length, places like Home Depot will cut them to the right width for you and the overall cost is far lower than having them installed by someone else.  The blinds in our bedroom took us about 20 minutes to install this evening, and it will take us about 10 minutes to shorten them.  We’ve paid about $375 for blinds for six windows, which is all we need – the rest of the windows have curtains).

Our bedroom makeover cost about $130 and took the better part of a weekend.  We bought two gallons of VOC-free paint (I will never use any other kind.  Painting and not having a slightly sick feeling is priceless), a thrift store picture, and new blinds.  The trim paint was left over from another project.  We still have about half a gallon of wall paint left over, which will be perfect for an accent wall somewhere.  And the improved look of our room is not only great for us, but it should be a big help once we put our house on the market.

Here is a picture of our bedroom now.  I love how the bed looks without a bed frame taking up space.  I forgot to take "before" pictures, but you can use your imagination:

That picture over the bed came from a very productive thrift store trip we made yesterday morning.  It was $12, and makes the room feel much classier than the random art we had on the walls before.  Over on the dresser you can see a little wooden box.  That’s my new jewelry box, which is a step up from the piece of wood with nails in it that used to hang over the dresser.

I found the jewelry box at one of my favorite thrift stores yesterday.  It was marked $18, but it was half price day, so I got it for $9.  It was perfect timing, because I had just taken down my improvised jewelry rack, and had all my jewelry piled on the bed.  Now it has a home.  I love thrift stores.

My husband found a great toy for our son while we were thrifting yesterday:

It’s a keyboard, and our little guy loves it.  He had a great time banging away on the piano last time we were at my parents’ house.  Since we’re not likely to get a piano anytime soon, we had been looking out for a keyboard for him.  This one is battery operated, but we have rechargeable batteries and a charger.  I’m not sure which of the three of us has had the most fun with this thing so far, but we’ll say that it’s our son’s keyboard….

I was reading some other blogs just now, and I came across this post from Frugal Zeitgeist.  She included a link to the Hyper Homemaker, and I’ve been happily browsing that site.  I’m not even close to as clean and organized as the Hyper Housewife, but I am very inspired by her site.  If you’re looking for some motivation to clean, look no further.  I think I will even be washing windows soon…

I also checked in on Alissa at On Purpose Living.  Her baby is due any day now, and I absolutely love this post about how she had cloth diapers all packed to take to the hospital.  All the best Alissa, and we’ll be checking back soon to see your updates about the new little one!

Now that the bathroom is finished, I’m moving on to other sprucing up projects around the house.  As usual, I’m looking for ways to have a large impact without spending a lot of money.  Our bedroom is average size for a smallish house.  If we’re going to try to sell our house, anything we can do to make the room appear larger will be a plus.  We don’t have a lot of furniture cluttering up the room (although sometimes when I get behind on laundry, the laundry basket takes on a life of its own), but I wanted to make more floor space available.

Our bed had a black metal headboard and foot board made of curving pipes.  They didn’t look bad, but they did take up space.  I knew that if we replaced the bed frame with one that just went under the bed, without a headboard or foot board, the bed would take up less space.  Not the mention the fact that it’s a whole lot easier to make a bed when there’s no foot board.  I wasn’t ready to revert to the college apartment look with a mattress on the floor, so I began my quest for a bed frame.  I checked our local thrift stores a couple times, but didn’t have any luck.  So I asked my parents to be on the lookout for one, since they go thrifting more often than I do.  Within a week they brought us a bed frame that they found for $13.  We replaced our old bed frame with the new one and the transformation is dramatic.  The space between the foot of our bed and the shelves we made last year is about eight inches wider now.  The bed looks great and is much less intrusive in the room.  My next project is to sell our old frame on Craigs list.  I think I’ll sell it for $25, which will be a bargain for someone else, and will mean that we come out $12 ahead on this bedframe swap.

I highly recommend an invisible bed frame (second hand, of course) if you’re trying to make a bedroom feel more spacious.  And parents who like to scout around thrift stores looking for treasures are definitely a plus.  A friend called when we were setting up our new bed frame; when I told her what we were doing, she commented on how we were helping the economy by buying a new bed frame.  I laughed and reminded her that she knows me better than that!  Unless we’re talking about the second-hand economy, in which case I’m all about giving it a boost.

A couple years ago, my husband and I decided to sell my engagement ring and buy one with a man-made diamond instead.  We had paid $2000 for my ring, and sold it for $1150.  We then bought a new one from Diamond Nexus Labs for $231.  I’ll be honest and say that the number one reason I sold the ring was money – I didn’t like wearing $2000 on my finger, and felt that we could put it to much better use elsewhere (we ended up putting it into our HSA and and an IRA).  My husband agreed, and so it was done.

I liked the claims that DNL made on their website about environmentally friendly, and ethically produced jewelry, but money was the primary reason behind our decision.  Mined diamonds have no intrinsic value other than their usefulness in industry.  Neither do synthetic diamonds, but I like the price of the synthetic ones a lot more.  I’ll never buy another mined diamond, although I can’t imagine ever buying another synthetic diamond either.  That said, I didn’t do any digging around to find out the scoop on the claims DNL makes regarding ethics and the environment.

I got an email today from a lady who has apparently done quite a bit of digging regarding the various claims that DNL makes.  She has compiled her data here on her website (Moment Of Choice), and it’s absolutely worth a read.  Given the fact that it looks like quite a few of the articles out there in cyberspace about DNL are pay per post or written by people who are affiliated with DNL, I wanted to make it very clear that I have no association with DNL what so ever, other than being a one-time customer.  They have never paid me to write any posts, nor have they ever purchased links on my site.  I paid full price for the ring I bought from them, and I have no idea if they are aware of my blog or not.  The gift card that I gave away to a reader last year was sent out to all customers – giving it away on my blog was my own idea.

There’s a lot of not-so-flattering stuff about DNL out there.  And since I have no knowledge of the workings of their company, I can’t say whether any of it is true or not.  I can see how the negative reviews could very well be true.  But the skeptic in me can also see how DNL might have some very powerful enemies (all those companies that would like to convince people that it’s perfectly rational to blow tens of thousands of dollars on mined diamonds).  And spreading rumors online is even easier than spreading rumors in a 6th grade classroom.

All I know for sure is what I experienced as a customer.  I tried on several cz rings before I found DNL.  For the most part the bands were silver (or in some cases just a cheap plated metal).  None of them could be resized, and all that I tried on were available only in whole sizes.  The rings I tried on were much less expensive than the one I got from DNL, but they looked and felt cheap, so I kept looking.

I ordered my ring from DNL using the piece of string method to size my finger.  I came up with 5.5 and placed my order for that size.  When the ring arrived, it was beautiful, but huge.  I went to a local jewelry store and had them measure my finger using a ring sizer, and they got 4.5, which would explain why the ring I ordered was so loose.  I called DNL and they told me to just send it back and they would resize it.  Within a couple weeks, I got my ring back, and it fit perfectly.  As far as customer service, I have nothing but good things to say about DNL.

I have been wearing my DNL ring for nearly two years.  It still looks as good as it did when I got it, and I still get compliments from strangers about how pretty it is.  I am not a jewelry expert, and I have no idea what the stone is actually made of.  But I know that the setting is solid and secure, and the ring itself perfectly matches the white gold wedding band that we bought at the Shane Company when we got married.  I have no complaints at all about the workmanship of the ring.

Moment Of Choice has raised some issues that do deserve a second look, and she’s obviously done a lot of research (edit: and judging from the links on her sidebar, she and I have a lot of views in common).  Concealing the identity of company officers and having employees write “reviews” isn’t particularly appealing behavior.  As far as the incorporation issue, I do know that when my husband and I incorporated our business a few years ago, we read all sorts of stuff about the benefits of incorporating in other states.  We were blatently told that one of the primary values of incorporation was that the corporation becomes a separate entity from ourselves, under a concept known as corporate veil.  We did incorporate in our home state, but many companies do not, and this is not in and of itself a sign of anything untoward.

I doubt I will buy any more jewelry from DNL or anywhere else.  I just don’t wear jewelry other than my engagement and wedding rings, and some funky pieces that people have made for me.  I decided to write this post as a clarification, in case there are readers out there who are trying to figure out whether DNL is on the up and up.  To reiterate: I have no idea of the validity of the DNL claims about environmental and ethical standards.  I have no idea whether the company is shady in terms of business practices that don’t directly impact the end consumer.   I have no affiliation with DNL (or any other jewelry company).  I have been completely satisfied with my own experience with DNL, both in terms of customer service and product quality.

If you’ve had experiences with DNL – good or bad – please feel free to share.

Our dishwasher may have died, but I’m finding ways to give its parts a new life.  I’m a scrapbooker, and I love pens.  I do a lot of writing on my pages, and have quite a few pens.  Until today, they lived in a drawer, all jumbled together.  Now they are neatly organized in the cutlery holder from our old dishwasher.  It’s perfect – portable, organized, and big enough for all my pens with room to spare:

Here’s some good stuff I found around the blogosphere this week:

At Green And Crunchy, they are hibernating and making some amazing food.  Their pictures look like something from a food magazine.  I was inspired by their creations, and today I made bean burgers from scratch (with beans I cooked in the sun oven) and buns to go with them.

The Thrifty Chicks have a wonderful article about children and thrift stores.  I grew up shopping at yard sales, and I remember looking forward to it all week.  We would get the newspaper, plan our route, and spend all of Saturday morning at yard sales.  When I was in high school, we took a family vacation to a big city several hours from our home.  It turned out to be very touristy, and everything was expensive.  So on a whim, my parents stopped at a Goodwill.  We discovered that the city had several great thrift stores, and spent the rest of our vacation happily hunting for bargains.  After that we would return every summer for our thrift store vacation.  We never did visit the tourist traps – the whole family had so much fun in the thrift stores that there was no need for anything else. 

In the Frugal Blog Network,

Tight Fisted Miser has a compilation of his best posts from 2008 – check them out if you missed them the first time.

Almost Frugal is saving for retirement with a budget that is already so tight it squeaks.  A few years ago, we were working to pay off debt and didn’t have an emergency fund.  We set up an online account and put $100/month into it.  The payments went in automatically, and after a few raids early in the process, we managed to stop dipping into it 2 years ago.  It’s tough to build savings when you’re paying off debt at the same time, but the psychological boost is considerable, and I wish Kelly and her family all the best.

Frugal Zeitgeist did a little shopping.  I would say $1.09 over-budget is pretty darn good.  Well done, FZ!

Frugal Duchess has the scoop on how to watch the inauguration for free, in the comfort of your own home.  As much as I’d love to be at such an historic event, I think I’ll enjoy it more on my couch.

Not Made Of Money has written about paying down the mortgage early.  This is our number one financial goal at the moment.  We cleared out the rest of our debt in 2007, and we’ve ramped up our mortgage repayment schedule.  Even if we end up moving, we do not want to be making mortgage payments for the next 20 or 30 years. 

Last spring when we remodeled our kitchen, we bought a dishwasher that we found on Craigs List for $100.  It was about six years old, and the retail price was $600.  We replaced a 21 year old dishwasher that was loud and ugly and rusty but still working.  Our new (to us) dishwasher was amazingly quiet, very stylish, and worked great – until this week.  On Wednesday evening, I turned it on and nothing happened.  I pushed a few buttons and thought I smelled smoke, so I shut it off and went to bed.  My parents were planning to visit us on Thursday, and I wanted to get their opinion on what might be wrong.

When they got here, we pulled the dishwasher out and it took my dad about 8 minutes to find a very fried part of motor.  Dang it.  We briefly thought about trying to get a new motor, but since we didn’t know what had caused the motor to burn out in the first place, we didn’t want to put a new motor in and have it burn out again.

Since time was of the essence (we had to shut off the main water line to the house while the dishwasher was connected) we decided to go to Home Depot and just buy a new dishwasher.  Our fridge and stove are white, so we wanted a white dishwasher.  There wasn’t a lot of decision making to do, as there was a grand total of one white dishwasher in stock at our Home Depot.  We forked over $350 and brought it home.  Thanks to my parents, it’s now installed in our kitchen and working perfectly.

I don’t like buying anything new when there’s an option to buy used.  But convenience won out this time.  And it is nice to have a warranty on our new dishwasher.

We’re focusing on living very frugally in order to have money saved for a down payment if we decide to go ahead with our idea of buying another house.  And it would have been nice to be able to put that $350 into our house fund instead of buying a dishwasher.  (We don’t consider a dishwasher to be an emergency, so we’re using money that would have been allocated to our down payment fund rather than emergency fund money.  We’d rather delay our house purchase than deplete our emergency fund.)  But situations like this remind me of how glad I am that we worked so hard to get rid of our non-mortgage debt over the last several years and that we live below our means.  It’s a bummer to have to take a chunk out of the money that we’ll put into our house fund this month.  But it would be a much bigger bummer if we were also struggling to pay off consumer debt at the same time (we did have a few of those sort of situations arise when we were working to pay off debt, and they were even less fun then).

If you’re focused on off debt, I promise that the result is worth it.  Appliances will give out, emergencies will crop up, unexpected expenses will always show up when you have much better plans for your money.  By focusing on needs rather than wants, living below your means, and setting aside money during times when you don’t have unexpected expenses, life becomes a little easier when the unexpected expenses show up.

I noticed that this is my 500th post on this blog.  Better make it a good one.

Frugal Babe readers are probably well aware of our plans to keep our starter house and avoid the never-ending mortgage payments that happen when people keep upgrading to more expensive homes.  But we are considering another possibility.

We have found a much less expensive community about 60 miles from where we currently live.  It’s only nine miles outside of a city that we both really like, but it’s a small town (about 5000 people) and although it’s population has grown tremendously over the last few years, it’s been overbuilt and there are a ton of houses for sale.  The houses are literally half the price that they would be in the town where we currently live.

We went there last weekend and looked around.  There is a library, a grocery store, a post office, two elementary schools, a middle school, and land purchased to build a high school.  Although it’s a small town, it’s in the school district of the big town just down the road, and it’s a very good school system.

We would have to drive further to get to Costco, but we could get an efficient chest freezer and make our trips less often.  We would have to go about ten miles to get to Whole Foods, which is about how far we go now.  I could still walk to the post office and library, just as I do now.

Most of the houses we looked at are for sale for less than we paid for our current home six years ago (some are quite a bit less).  They’re roughly the same size (or a little bigger) in terms of finished square footage, but almost all of them have full, unfinished basements instead of the partial crawl space that we have now.  A basement room for our hydroponic garden would be a huge bonus.   We could walk around the plants to tend to them and harvest produce, instead of doing the crawl/butt scoot that we currently do.

Another bonus is that the yards are much bigger than what we have now.  Our current yard is literally six feet wide and wraps around two sides of our house.  The picture of the mini-greenhouse my husband built gives a good perspective on how much space we have to grow vegetables.   The houses we looked at have enough room for a huge garden in the backyard.  We’ve proven our dedication to gardening and supplying as much of our own food as we can – imagine what we could do with a basement and a large yard.

There would be some trade-offs.  We currently live in a town of 50,000 people.  It’s a suburb of a metropolitan area that has over a million people.  Moving to a town of 5000 people would be a big change, although its proximity to a large city makes it a much different environment than a small town in a completely rural area.  We think it’s very worth it, and are currently researching all of the details involved.

We don’t want to sell our current home.  We’re looking into the possibility of renting it, and have found that average rental prices in our neighborhood are actually a little higher than our monthly mortgage payment.  We’ve talked with a mortgage broker who is running some numbers for us to determine how much of a down payment we would need in order to qualify for a loan on one of the houses in the less expensive town.  Even with a 15 year mortgage, we should be able to get a monthly payment that is lower than what we currently pay (especially considering interest rates these days).  Of course we would be just as focused on paying it off as quickly as possible as we are with our current mortgage.

So here’s our current plan (Subject to change, of course.  That’s what keeps life interesting):

• We will make cash savings our primary focus for the next several months instead of paying additional principal on our mortgage.  We want to build up a good cash cushion before we make any changes (to cover a down payment and also have money to pay the mortgage on our current house in case it takes a while to get renters).  The amount is still to be determined – we’re waiting to hear back from the mortgage broker and then we’ll have some more concrete numbers.
• We’ll work on some home improvement projects that need to be done.  Our house needs a new roof, the bathroom needs paint, the garage could use some new shelves… things that would make the place more appealing to renters and less likely to be a headache down the road (the roof is a good example, as it’s on its last legs).
• We will continue to live as frugally as possible in order to build our savings as quickly as possible.
• We will thoroughly research all of the details involved in this process: mortgage lenders, property managers, rental income, interest rates, etc.

I’ll let you know what comes of this as time goes by.  We’re excited about the possibility of lowering our housing costs and at the same time getting more space to grow our gardens.  We could become nearly self-sufficient in terms of the produce we eat (which is by far the largest part of our diet).  There are still a lot of kinks to work out, but we feel like we can make this happen.  We both work at home, our son is still a baby – we have a lot of flexibility in terms of where we live.  So why not make the most of that flexibility and move to an area with lower housing costs?

Would you ever consider moving in order to lower the cost of your house?  Or have you already done so?

I hope that you’ve all had a good week, and are doing some relaxing and exhaling this weekend now that the hustle and bustle are over.  We had a very mellow Christmas with my family.  There were 11 of us here, lots of food, and of course lots of snuggles for the baby.  We went to a white elephant party last night, and then hung out with another group of friends tonight.  We’re normally homebodies, so this has been a busy week.

The house we were at tonight is beautiful.  We’ve known these people for several years, but this was the first time we were at their house.  They’re in their early 20s, but have a house much larger and fancier than ours.  And they have all sorts of great stuff – a treadmill, beautiful furniture, flat screen tvs…

Even though I love being frugal, and love our simple life, I’ll admit to a bit of coveting now and then.  Tonight I was loving the couch (a beautiful chocolate brown wrap around sectional), the treadmill, and the huge master suite.  For a minute, I found myself wanting those things too.  Then I reminded myself that I wrote a check today to pay and additional $2000 towards our mortgage in January.  I suppose we could have a new couch and a bigger house if we wanted, but we’ve decided that we’d rather own our house as quickly as possible.  That means that we’ll just keep on living the way we always have, buying only what we need, shopping in thrift stores, and keeping our expenses to the bare minimum in order to be able to put as much money as we can towards the principal on our mortgage.

Now that I’m back home in our comfy little house, I’m perfectly happy with our thrift store furniture and cozy rooms.  I like knowing that our house will be ours a lot sooner than it would be if we spent our money on things to put inside it.   And when I look at our son, I’m reminded that the best things in life aren’t things, nor can they be bought.  All we really want to do is be able to spend our time with him.  For us, that’s a huge motivating factor to live frugally, since it means that we don’t have to spend as much of our time earning money to pay for our lifestyle.  And it feels really good to know that we’ve managed to nearly triple our mortgage payment for January.  It required some scrimping, but it’s done.  Now to just repeat that process 11 more times next year, and avoid being tempted by wonderful couches…

Several people have asked to see pictures of the floors we put in last spring.  We did our whole upstairs with click together pergo-style flooring, and we’ve been very happy with it.  The first picture here shows our hallway, with the floors we installed, and one of the bedroom doors that we replaced over the last few weeks.  The doors came from Home Depot as bare wood – we had to sand, stain, varnish, and cut all the holes and notches for hinges and doorknobs.  Quite a project, but we’re happy with how they turned out.  The mirror on the wall came from a thrift store last week, for five bucks.

These pictures are the before and after of the end table that I found at the same thrift store, for four dollars.  I paid another three dollars for the drawer pull, since I decided the one that came with it was a tad bit dated.  We’re thrilled with how it turned out – all I did was sand off the old finish, sand down the wavy edges, and varnish the bare wood.  Our living room is looking much better.