Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Net Profit

Costs (tangible, intangible) of the outdoor project:
  • One tetanus shot, for her
  • One hammer, shattered
  • One silver SUV, interioraly trashed
  • About $1500 in lumber and rentals, invested
  • About $1100 in patio-building supplies, invested
  • About $600 in landscaping costs, invested
  • Two months of weekends, gone
  • Three pairs of men's shorts, ripped
  • Three pairs of work gloves, ruined
  • One riding mower tractor, bent under the weight of patio remnants
  • About $450 in extras, table, grill, hot dogs, beer
  • Two months worth of full trash cans, full of old deck bits
  • One heirloom 1970s circular saw, dead
  • One rose bush, mercilessly slaughtered
  • One college t-shirt, stained
  • One false alarm that we were done, emotional toll
  • Remove obvious death threat and add power source for bumpin' tunes, $225 (electical)
  • Permit, $71
Revenue (tangible, intangible) from the project:
  • About 350 square feet of outdoor living space that we are not ashamed of
  • New view, lovely
  • Marital bonding, jump ahead to year three-levels of marital wisdom
  • $18.52 in Google Adsense revenue
  • Added property value, doesn't matter - we will never move
  • Deck-building, patio-building knowledge
  • Local economic growth, all major purchases made at locally-owned stores
  • Ten more years of being tetanus free, for her
  • Two egos, inflated
  • Years of grilled pizza, in our future
  • Light, won't kill us
  • Tunage, wattage
Net results: Positive, totally worth it.

You might notice the electrician's fees in there. Electric Dan is coming by Friday to hook us up with a new light that won't be such a buzzkill (get it?). Ever forward, people, we move ever forward.

We also got word from the inspector that there is a slight dip in one set of stairs, but Hubs remains confident that this will be an easy job. I bit my tongue and did not remind him that we said each little process in this big project would be easy. It's never easy.

3 comments:

  1. You got a tetanus shot? Just precautionary or did you step on a nail?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes ma'am. I took a rusty nail to the thigh during demo. The bruise was quite henious and my husband had me paranoid about getting lockjaw. Cheese milkshakes just didn't sound appetizing.

    ReplyDelete

 
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