Long Weekend Expenses

I spent the Labour Day long weekend catching up on some house and garden work. There was a dead patch in the front lawn where the council had removed a dying Eucalypus tree, so I bought a packet of lawn repair seed/soil/fertilizer at Coles supermarket for $8.00. It only covers two square metres, so I'll need another packet later on to finish the job - I'll see how well the grass takes in the half I've sown. I already bought some broom handles for $2 to use as stakes to rope off the area of lawn being treated - otherwise the postie will drive his motor bike over every day when delivering the mail. My dad said it would have been cheaper to buy some turf squares instead of seeds - but I don't think he includes the cost of time and petrol going to buy the turf compared to just picking up a packet of lawn seeds at the local supermarket.

We also bought a new leather-fronted gas-lift office chair for the home office. It was on special at Big W for $49 ($10 off), and I've seen similar chairs in the office supply depots for $100 or more. The old office chair had been given to me by DW seven or eight years ago and it had started to fall apart. The back had to be repaired when we moved house a few years ago, and recently the casters had started falling off every time you moved the chair. We'd tried removing all the casters, but the central shaft of the chair then extended below the level of the caster arms, and we had to sit the chair on a thick piece of packing cardboard to stop the chair marking the polished wooden floor. I haven't had time to assemble the new chair yet, but should get around to it after work this week. The old chair won't be thrown out - DW wants to put in on the front porch!

I also had to spend $43 on a 10kg tub of pool chlorine granules - now that the weather has warmed up the pool was starting to turn green. I fished out most of the debris that had accumulated in the pool over winter, but I'll have to spend some time cleaning the pool filter candles next weekend. Unfortunately the diatomaceous earth filter is a rather poor design. After a few years of use the plastic "head" assembly inside the filter that holds the filter candles in place starts to crack, and the filer candles tend to fall out during reassembly. I'll probably have to glue some of the candles in during reassembly to get it put back together in one piece. One day I'll have to buy a new filter "head" - but this one plastic part costs a couple of hundred dollars! The multi-way valve is also starting to leak, so I may look at the cost of replacing the whole filter unit with a new sand filter.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007