Why now is the time to buy cheap furnishings

When my husband and I moved into our first flat, £10 a month was all we had left over after all of the bills and mortgage had been paid. Whoop whoop- living the high life. :)

Due to our limited funds we relied heavily on hand me downs from kind relatives and friends to furnish our flat. This enabled us to have everything that we needed but not much of what we wanted.

When we finally moved into our forever home and had more than £10 a month left over we wanted to buy things that we wanted, things that we had actually chosen.

Our house was a fixer upper. Fixing it up was a long process, one that we still aren’t completely finished with, nearly a decade later! I know, don’t! Thankfully I’ve got the patience of a saint.

Anyway, when we first started to replace the carpets etc we wanted to have things that we really loved as honestly it had been a long hard slog and we had both had to work incredibly hard to afford the things that we wanted.

When it came to our bedroom carpet we had both fallen in love with a soft dove grey ulster carpet. It had an almost velvet feeling and an exceptionally deep pile. It was a lot of money but we had saved up.

I was slightly cautious about this considered purchase knowing that when babies came along they wouldn’t care that it was an expensive carpet and would probably be sick on it along with a whole host of other unmentionable things. Thankfully I was blissfully unaware of poonamis at this stage in my life.

My husband was all for investing in expensive items as he argued that it would be of a higher quality and therefore we would have it for years and years. Clearly from this statement you can tell before having our own children my husband had very little experience of children or more precisely- none.

We decided to go for the fancy pants carpet that we loved. It was the best feeling in the world ever to come home after a long hard day at work and lay on the carpet. Feeling my body sink into the deep pile and pushing my finger tips into the pile until I lost them, I knew exactly why I was working so hard.

However, as you know the kids came along. Our long term carpet that we would keep for years has had sick, milk, wee and poo on from the kids. The cat contributed by walking grease/oil all over it that he had picked up from the street outside.

It turns out that I am not the only one who enjoys sinking my toes into the carpet. This is also one of my cat’s favourite past times as well. Although we have a slightly different technique as the cat enjoys sinking his toes into the carpet and then pulling out big tufts of it in a frenzied scratching attack.

After having had lots of other bits and pieces ruined by the kids (and cat) and upon discovering lots of pins on Pinterest entitled how to fix things my kids have ruined we have now come to the conclusion that now is not the time to invest in pieces of furniture etc. Oh no, now is the time to fill our house with Ikea products that are functional and replaceable.

Although, I have been waiting to fill my house with beautiful things for...well forever to be honest. When you are little and imaging your dream house who pictures a £5 Lack table as your coffee table? Exactly! But given the choice of expensive furnishings or my children there is no question of which I would choose. My children bring me so much pleasure and fun and make life meaningful.

#children #furniture #carpets #investing #spendmoneyon