Yesterday we came home and found we had acquired more yard.

The badger fence guys had finished our fence extension. At first when I walked out of the garage and saw that our fence had moved, I initially thought, "why is the fence gate open?" and then I realized, "Wait the whole fence is gone!" and then, "hey our yard is bigger, sweet!"

Dora also seemed to like it quite a bit as well, a lot more space for her to run around in.

The old fence would have been at the bottom of this photo

In other house news, our kitchen counter tops are scheduled to be installed this coming Wednesday. We're looking forward to it. Don't take your kitchen sink for granted, it sucks not having one!

Also, sorry to keep you waiting on the spin dryer post of glorious awesomeness. We will be doing laundry this weekend and I will supply video. Promise.

Yesterday our centrifugal spin dryer arrived.

We haven't used it yet because we don't have enough laundry for a full load. Since the point of this thing is to save energy, it's kinda wrong to not do a full load of laundry just to use it, right?

But SOON WE WILL and we will all behold the POWER OF CENTRIPETAL FORCE!

No not our Jetta, sadly. The new 2009 JettaTDI runs on diesel and gets 60 MPG and will be available for purchase in the US this summer. This car burns ubiquitously available fuel and gets better mileage than the Toyota Prius Hybrid. In fact there are many such vehicles that have been available for purchase in Europe for years. VW had to make some modifications to the engine and reduce emissions of Nitrogen Oxide in order to bring this car to the US market. Thanks US emissions laws!

My previous question still remains, if we can get better than hybrid mileage out of diesel burning engines, then why aren't we making diesel burning hybrids?

You may notice that I have made a slight change and addition to the site. On the right side bar now you can see a section called "I'm reading" with some links under it. This is a feed from my Google Reader. As I'm reading things in reader I can choose to share the article or blog post I'm reading and it'll show up in that list. Cool.

On Friday, while driving back from the grocery store in my Taurus, we went over some bumpy railroad tracks and something snapped in the rear driver's wheel and began rubbing against the wheel. I quickly pulled over and got out. I couldn't see anything under the car in the wheel but when I got back in and started driving again there was definitely something rubbing in the wheel well and it was getting louder. I pulled onto a side street and parked it. The car was undrivable and had a nice full load of groceries in the back. Luckily we were only something like eight blocks from home. Still not a fun distance to walk carrying groceries, especially when you got a great deal on ten pounds of meat.

We made it home okay and had a great weekend sans-taurus as we didn't want to pay to have it towed on a weekend. This morning we called a service station near us and told them where the car was and what had happened, we went and dropped off the keys and went to work.

I got a call around lunch time today. The spring had snapped and the strut was fubar as well. I'd have to get new springs and struts and some other junk on the back wheels. In addition the front struts were nearing the end of their life as well. Plus there was a hole in the muffler (which I already knew about). The cost for just the minimal repairs to get it drivable again before the front struts break or the muffler falls off is $1200.

According to kelly blue book, my car is worth maybe $2000 if I'm lucky and if it wasn't busted. Last December we spent $800 on it getting stuff fixed. Plus we replaced some tires on it recently as well. Is $1200+ worth spending to restore this car to us now? Well, the main question is, "do we need this car?" and the answer to that question is, "very rarely." We carpool to work every day, almost always in the Jetta. The only reason we drive the Taurus on occasion is the keep it running. What? Does that even make sense? In the last nearly two years since we've begun carpooling we've only needed to use two cars at once maybe two or three times. And if we hadn't had the second car, I'm sure we would have figured something out.

So we decided to not do the repairs and donate our car to Rawhide instead. They'll even come pick it up for us, how nice of them.

In addition to not spending money to keep this car running, we'll save on no longer insuring it as well. We also get a tax deduction for donating it, and we get a bunch of extra space in the garage to fill up with crap!

One part of me is a little sad to see it go, I've had the car for eight years and have some good memories associated with it. It wasn't my first car but it was my first new car, and may possibly be my last new car as well, considering how much of a terrible investment buying a car new actually is. In the end though it's just a thing and it's better to let it go now than to continue to pay money just to keep owning it for no good reason.

Update: One of the mechanics where we had the car towed to has expressed interest in purchasing the car from us. So we may be doing that instead of donating it, real money is better than a tax deduction.

Re-update: we sold the car this morning, we are now officially a one car family. If we ever need to get another car, I'd like one of these please.

In Milwaukee garbage is picked up once a week and recycling is picked up once every other week. For us I think a reverse of that schedule would be more beneficial. Especially recently as we've been tossing in the trash (or just holding) a lot of stuff that could be recycled but our recycle bin is full to over flowing.

I'm planning on finishing making a spinning compost drum this weekend so that's going to be even less stuff going into the trash bin.

I've been reading a lot of personal finance blogs lately. I find them rather interesting, probably because both Anne and I are pretty frugal and don't like spending money if we don't need to. Anyway, we have been spending a lot of money recently. New kitchen cabinets are really freaking expensive. Our cabinets cost more than our appliances, that's just insane if you think about it. Our counter tops are in the process of being cut, and we also hired Badger Fence to extend our fence to enclose most of our side yard as well. That's a lot of money to be spending!

That's not what I'm happy about.
What I'm happy about is that so far, we haven't had to interrupt our regular monthly savings regimen (which is something like 25% of our income) or take any money out of our savings to pay for this stuff. A lot of that is thanks to our tax return money which was quite nice and received at just the right time. The coming economic stimulus rebate will also help us out.

This weekend was a cabinet installation extravaganza! We worked our asses off and we are nearly finished installing all of the cabinets.

We ran into a bit of a snag with the last hanging cabinet on the sink wall. This is a 15 inch wide cabinet and it turned out we were hanging it inside a 24 inch span between studs, ie: there was no stud behind this cabinet to attach it to. Anne came up with the idea of attaching a 2x4 to a bunch of studs adjacent above the cabinets and then attach the 15 incher to the stud. This worked out beautifully. You can see a bit of the 2x4 up above in the photo below, however this should be hidden when we install the crown molding.

All of the uppers installed for this wall.

The worst thing had to be installing the sink cabinet. I didn't want to cut huge holes in the back of the cabinet to accommodate the plumbing as it was so instead I turned off the water and used my torch to remove the bulkier pieces of piping. I then measured and drilled smaller holes in the cabinet and with a bit of finagling, kicking, swearing and pulling on pipes we got it into position with the pipes coming through the holes I had made for them. That wasn't so bad. The thing that really sucked was reattaching the copper pipes and soldering them together. Seriously, working with solder sucks. I was honestly amazed that when we turned the water back on there were no leaks.

The sink wall, completed!

After finishing with the sink wall we moved on to the fridge wall, of which ther was a tall pantry cabinet, two uppers and one lower surrounding a space for the fridge. This wasn't too difficult other than attaching a three-inch strip to the pantry cabinet and sawing a bit off the window frame to accommodate it. We did run into one snag towards the end of our labor. A misery having to do with the fact that none of our walls are plumb. The left-most upper cabinet sticks slightly over the edge of the wall near the top, by about a quarter inch, at the bottom it lines up just fine. We're going to overcome this with a strip of wood eventually, but it was annoying to discover, who built this house?

The fridge wall!

The lower cabinet next to the fridge is just sitting there and we need to screw it into place yet. However, before we do that we need to deal with the HVAC vent that exists on the floor behind it. We've decided to move the air under the cabinet and vent it out at the kick board so we'll have to modify the cabinet a bit to accomplish this. It'll be my first foray into HVAC work, so that will be exciting. We decided to wait until tonight to finish this up since by the end of the day on Sunday my arms were seriously hurting when I was holding the drill up to put those last screws in. We also have to install the backer board for the tile we're going to put up for the backsplash.

On Tuesday the guy is coming out to measure the cabinets for our counter tops and then it will be a few weeks before they get installed (by someone who isn't me, thank God).

Update: HVAC work sucks, or at least the cutting of metal venting sucks. All of the cabinets are installed and the guy measured for the counter tops this morning.

Today is Arbor Day, this past Tuesday was Earth Day, wow, this past week has been like Holy Week for hippies and environmentalists or something. Are you going to plant a tree today? If you do Al Gore's head will award you with an honorary carbon credit. Today only! Planting trees on other days gets you NOTHING.

(Some restrictions apply, see official rules for details. Al Gore and Al Gore's Head are fictional characters, any relation to real people or events is entirely coincidental.

As I mentioned previously, our new cabinets arrived last Friday. Prior to that I spent some time destroying the remainder of our lower cabinets. Getting the sink out was the most difficult task, but Anne helped me and we got it.

Not having a kitchen sink kinda sucks, I don't recommend it for everyday living.

Dora is skeptical.

Our new cabinets arrived, and there are a lot of them, most of them are currently residing in the dining room waiting to be installed. They look great and the finish matches with the island we previously bought really well, so we were happy about that.

In with the new.

Last night we hung a couple of the upper cabinets, it was a fun and exciting time of holding these things up on the wall and screwing them into the wall studs, yay! Making sure they lined up on the face was the most annoying, since the wall certainly isn't even. Now that we've got a few under our belt, I'm hoping the rest will be a bit easier, or at least require fewer trips to the basement (or Home Depot) to get some tool I didn't have upstairs.

Two down, eight to go.