I Cannot Carry a Queen-sized Box Spring Alone, And Other Things I Learned This Weekend
1. I cannot carry a queen-sized box spring alone
In my head, a box spring was just a hollow wooden frame and therefore totally a thing that I could drag six blocks from Liberty Department Store to my home. The owner of the store had some idea about the futility of my plan, which he shared by saying: “You know once I have your money, I’m done with you?” I nodded. I knew it wasn’t going to be “fun” or “easy” necessarily, but it seemed totally doable. The owner even let me try to move the thing before I bought it. It moved! It moved a few inches. SOLD.
In five minutes I made it half a block. Doable! Just slowly. I paused for moment to breathe and very nice man about to cross the street looked at me and asked if I needed help. I said: “No, thanks! I feel like I deserve this.” He ignored me and lifted the front of the box spring and we carried it six blocks over our heads. It was heavy. We got to my house and I said I could take it from there and could I please give him some money? He said no. I didn’t give him a hug but I wanted to. I spent the next hour trying to navigate the thing up my stairs. I don’t know how it worked, but it worked. My mattress is now six inches off the ground, and it feels great. (Box spring, $79.99)
2. It is possible to go to Ikea and not buy anything
I went to Ikea. I did not buy anything.
3. Cash is better in theory than it is in practice
On Friday I took $100 out of the ATM and had the delusional idea that it would be all of my money for the weekend. By Saturday afternoon I was down to $8 and was positive that I lost at least one twenty and maybe two. I’m still not entirely sure. Maybe I did spend it all (likely) but this is all I can remember:
$8: sando and iced coffee from Pret
$26: repaid Mike Dang for spotting me Thursday night
$3: ice cream cone with sprinkles after work on Friday
$4: Gatorade from the bodega and something else, maybe ice cream (probably ice cream)
$16: brunch
$10: plant in a little terra-cotta pot from a garden store in Red Hook
$3: coconut gelato cone
$18: two dish bins and a plastic bowl and two forks and some garbage bags and some ice trays and a metal pan to put ice in and some sponges, preparations for me to start eating food at home (the dish bins are to keep my food in so I know what is mine and eat it instead of opening the fridge and assuming everything is my roommate’s and then go out to dinner), all from the 99 cents store
That’s $88. Plus the $8 I had left when I noticed all of my money was gone is $96, and that other $4 is probably in change in the bottom of my bag, or I rounded down in my price recall, which is likely, if not certain.
4. Sometimes you actually need cash and in those cases maybe you should hold onto it and not spend it all on ice cream, just a thought
All that cash that I frittered away on ice cream and junk had an intended purpose, so I got another $120 out of the ATM (plus fees, it was too hot to walk to Duane Reade).
$22: laundry (I drop it off, and I know there are a lot of people who are very against this idea but to you I say: No. You’re wrong. This is a totally legitimate use of money.)
$60: haircut. I got it cut by this girl in her house and it was $40, but then I felt like I had to tip her (even though that $40 was going straight in her pocket? Unclear). Normally I would have totally tipped her the full $20, but I am trying really hard not to be a crazy tipper so I asked her if she had change for a twenty. She didn’t so I gave her the twenty.
$6: iced coffee and bagel with cream cheese and tomato
That’s $86. I have two twenties in my wallet. I have no plans for it, necessarily, but I’m sure I’ll figure out something. It happens to be a talent of mine.
5. Thinking I would only spend $100 this weekend was really rich
$88 (spent out of first hundred) + $86 (spent out of second $120) +$79.99 (box spring, debit) + $6 (flowers to bring to a friend’s house, debit, I was “conserving cash”) = $259.99 (I’m going to go vomit now, see you later.)
I support dropping off your laundry. Not having to sit in a laundromat and deal with quarters is worth that much.
@thewurst And it comes back folded in a nice cube! And somehow not wrinkled! It really is magical.
@thewurst But how many loads does $22 get you? One? Urgh I hate to be the judgey person here but that is crazy talk.
That is allllll of my laundry. Two huge bags, one of towels and sheets and one of most of my clothes and all of my underwear. BARGAIN.
@Logan Sachon I support that one. Yes $22 gets you one load, but it’s a BIG load. I do it when I wash my comforter and bed stuff because it never comes out as well when you do it yourself.
But also, $22 is a lot. I don’t know! Depends on how much you wash your laundry?
@jacqueline yeaah the dude and i did 7 (!) loads of laundry this weekend and it was $17.50. but, we have laundry in our building, i cannot empathize with the hell it must be to have to take your shit to a laundromat.
@dotcommie That’s true. I’m also lucky enough to have it in my building and operating on a card-loading system (not quarters), so I can’t speak to the horrors of laundromats.
But if I were trying to save money, laundry service would be the first thing to go – NOT TRYING TO BE JUDGMENTAL BTW, not at all, just saying what I would personally do.
@jacqueline Hello other Jacqueline!
In Logan’s defense, whenever I’ve spent $22 on drop off laundry…it’s at least 20 + pounds and six weeks or so of laundry. So much laundry!!
@thejacqueline One nice thing about being a freelancer is that you can actually do some hard math about what your time is worth! If Logan saved more than an hour by dropping off the laundry for $22 (and let’s face it, of course she did) I think it’s not a terrible way to spend money?
I’m a freelancer and I have washer and dryer in my home and I am the family launderer and I cannot emphasize enough how little work I get done on laundry day! And yet I always forget this and plan a full spectrum of work for the day anyway.
@jfruh I think it also maybe depends on what your typical drop-off load looks like. I usually don’t spend more than 14-15 bucks when I drop off my laundry because there are certain things like jeans, blankets/comforters, and nice dresses that I would rather wash myself or have dry cleaned–so it’s essentially underwear, tops, socks, gym clothes, and towels. And the cube! Sorry, I love that it comes back in a cube.
You can go to IKEA and not buy anything, but you cannot find your way out of that labyrinth in under 40 minutes… or is that just me?
@Spinach Party Also, $260 is less than the extra $300 or so you have now that you sold your car? Yes? Yay?
And yeah, I think I’ve written then before but anytime I have cash on me it literally just disappears… I don’t know where it goes…
Yes I do- impulse food- always always always. 10% of the time I need that food to live. 90% of the time I do not.
@Spinach Party I once successfully walked into Ikea and out of it within 20 minutes and that included spending five minutes trying to track down a dolly for the furniture I was buying and partially failing at keeping my blinders on in the kitchen section. I was very proud.
@thewurst That is very impressive! I think I walked in once to buy light bulbs, which was on the very first level. I grabbed them, turned around and tried to walk out the way I came in and discovered they only had an “up” escalator running from the front door. It took my 40 minutes to find a “shortcut” exit to avoid walking through the whole store…
They have excellent store engineers to make to you look at eeeeeverything and see the high-end items first. I tried to buy a cheap lamp once. Picked up the cute $25 on at what I thought was the only selection of lamps, then kept rounding the corners and finding cheaper and cheaper options. I think I switched lamps 4 times until I found the $5 one at the very end.
one thing that has helped me with cash budgeting is splitting it into weekend and week spending. I used to take out money for the entire week and whether I started the week on Monday or Friday, I never had enough money left for the second phase. I would either spend too much on the weekend, or spend too much during the week.
@redheaded&crazy That is a very excellent idea. I also tend to think of my weekdays as “necessary” spending and my weekends as mostly “fun/splurgy” spending.
@redheaded&crazy What we do is $200 a week for joint food and entertainment expenses – some weeks we spend less on groceries and eat out more, some weeks it’s the other way around. We make exceptions for treats that are more rare – $80 for theater tickets a couple of weeks ago for example. And then I do a smaller budget -$100 per week for stuff I do on my own – meals with friends where my boyfriend isn’t there, books, mani/pedi, etc. Take the money out on the way to the store on Saturday morning, and when we run out of cash, we stay home for the rest of the week.
@sony_b my main financial/budgetary roadblock (i mean, akin to tipping too much or wanting to buy my friends things) is that I don’t like missing out on fun things. So if I run out of cash, staying home for the rest of the week takes a lot of will power. I usually end up taking more cash out. So that’s why breaking up my spending into weeks and weekends has worked well for me!
Also, I am getting slightly better at saying no to things. Sliiiightly.
Although my friends are usually pretty good about finding cheap entertainment options.
Oh, yikes. A $20 tip on a $40 haircut is a 50% tip. That’s insane. 20% is reasonable. If you’re going back to that girl, leave her 10% next time, and explain why (so that she doesn’t fuck up your hair later in revenge). Then stick with 20% from there on.
Everything else…actually seems pretty reasonable to me? I mean, yes, eat at home, blah blah blah, but honestly, as a long-time single (or singleish; right now I have a girlfriend but still live alone four days a week) person, I have to say that cooking for myself still gets expensive. And depressing! If what you want in a moment is a bagel and cream cheese a couple of tomato slices, it’s not really more cost-effective to buy a six-pack of bagels and a tub of cream cheese and a whole tomato, because no one will help you eat the other five bagels or the rest of the cheese.
@Quinn A@twitter Yeah the 50% tip was the one part that really made me cringe, but at least this time around Logan knew that was an insane tip and tried to get change to make it more reasonable (vs. last time Logan let us in on her crazy-generous tipping)? Maybe for future reference, making sure you have some small bills on you to tip is a pretty reasonable excuse to get ice cream on the way to your hair appointment? Is that good advice or just further enabling? Sorry, it’s so effing hot everywhere, I can only encourage all the ice cream purchases.
OK, i totally get the desire to tip service professionals. but tipping $20 on a $40 haircut IS COMPLETLEY OUT OF CONTROL. especially when it’s under the table in the first place. I could go to a salon and pay less, still including the tip. You fell for the classic ploy. she had no change so YOU ended up with less money? if the person you are paying can’t make change, THEY miss out, not YOU. It’s their business, it’s their burden to make change. do not let hair dressers and cab drivers manipulate you into giving them more than they have earned.
I have two stories to relate:
1) When I moved to Portland, my apartment was across the street from a mattress store, so I bought a mattress and asked the guy if he could help me carry it across the street. He said “No problem,” and put the queen-sized mattress ON HIS HEAD and carried it by himself across the street and up a flight of stairs to my apartment, and then wouldn’t take a tip.
2) One time I lived in a house for a year and when I moved out, I was totally psyched at how well I’d treated my room, but then I lifted up my box spring and it had a stray screw on the bottom that had gouged GIANT CHUNKS out of the beautiful wood floors. I literally cried when I told the landlord, and he was very nice about it and gave me my whole deposit back anyway but I still to this day feel terrible about it. Those were the prettiest floors I’ve ever seen, and I RUINED THEM. Learn from my mistake and put something under that thing (if you have wood floors).
I once paid a guy $75 to help me & my guy carry our box spring up four flights of steep outdoor stairs that are almost impassable if you have a giant wooden frame to push around the corners—and also somewhat impassable if it’s dark, which it also was by the time we realized we needed help. Sooooo bad. It was leave the thing outside all night, which seemed like an especially bad idea, or pay the nice guy from CraigsList to show up at 8pm on a Saturday night (and he drove to downtown San Francisco from Vallejo, I feel compelled to add. I only found that part out after the fact.). He’d have probably done it for less, but I wasn’t about to insult him. Hell, I still think we got a better deal than he did.
I feel bad about the haircut tip, because I think Logan got scammed. (In that, I do not believe that the girl didn’t have change.) I think it’s hard enough for her to override the impulse to overtip that the minute someone nudges her to feel badly about that, she’s likely to crack. Don’t waste time feeling bad about it — just make sure you have small bills next time.
The thing about the haircut is that you could get a professional salon haircut for less than you paid for this one, even without the insane tip. It’s nice to support your friend or maybe you really like how this chick cuts your hair, but just so long as everyone knows that not all salon haircuts automatically cost 90$ for girls.
That being said, I am impressed re: Ikea, because I’ve never left without SOMETHING
If you’re not getting a whole new style, just go to Supercuts for your haircuts and trims.
@Slutface This is typically my route. Recently I upgraded (downgraded?) to buying a pair of inexpensive scissors and got one of those plastic hair cutting guide clip things (the CreaClip) online to cut and trim my hair myself.
This only works because I’m letting my hair grow freakishly long and my only “style” is a long side bang and long layers to take the weight out of my really thick curly hair. Plus I’m lazy and keep my hair tied up 90% of the time anyways.
2. It is possible to go to Ikea and not buy anything
I went to Ikea. I did not buy anything.
I don’t believe you. At all. In fact I avoided Ikea trips for 2 full years out of fear of buying $1000 worth of lamps.
Also Logan I had an idea! Since you like treating your friends to a round of drinks, do you have a place you go to that has good deals on a pitcher of beer or margaritas? I am not in-the-know about NY drink prices, but surely you can get a pitcher of light summer beer for $15-20 that would serve 3-4 people. I know we all like our specialty drinks but I’ve always found offering to fill someone up with beer is rarely an offer that gets turned down.
OR what about finding a place that has amazing happy hour deals and once a month you buy an affordable round there?
Man, $100 doesn’t buy you ANYTHING anymore. Makes me mad.
That’s why I started buying more expensive clothes/shoes/bags. These things last, you guys, unlike ice cream and artisan soda and the once-in-a-while pilates class.