Expensive Purchases

I have a slew of expensive purchases that I've recently made, or plan to make because even though we are in a recession, I'm rich, so I plan to flaunt it and take advantage.

During the remodel of our basement I bought:

new couch: $800
new window: $300
new drop ceiling: $300 (still to be installed)
outlets and paint: $200
plus probably $200 in trim and other related purchases... bring my spent total to $1800 so far.

But I'm not half done.. at least in my spending spree.

I'm going to get a TV to mount to the wall, luckily I'm taking advantage of Costco's generous return policy, so I'll probably only put out $600 for that. And I'm moving all my components out of the room and under the steps to hide them. This is going to require an RF remote ($450 including the ir repeater) as well as a bunch of other odds and ends. $30 piece to allow the playstation to receive ir signals, $30 usb hub so I can still play rock band (thanks drew for the idea) and hopefully that will be it. Of course I'm sure I'll be doing other things... I may end up moving the router downstairs if I can get verizon to send the internet through cat5 instead of coax, and that will be a few bucks for a cat5 cable, but oddly enough I will have more things that need to be wired to the internet in my living room than in my office.

Also on the purchase list is an HTPC. I've been toying back and forth with a bunch of possibilities. I've researched popcorn hour, the playstation, apple tv, the western digital box, mac mini and a home built computer. My requirements are the ability to stream every movie I have on my external hard drive whether it was ripped or downloaded, and access to hulu, and netflix streaming services. This leaves me to the mac mini or a home built solution because all other options are missing one or more of the features I want. I'm not spending $600 for the current gen mac mini, and they didn't update it last month, so I'll probably be exploring a hackintosh, which is something I'm really interested in trying out. This way I'll be able to built an HTPC for around the same price as a mini, only it will be a beast and not a 2 year old outdated junky computer.

All in all this looks to be ANOTHER $1800 in expenses on the downstairs, bringing my total to $3600. Hopefully I'm happier with the finished product more-so than I was the last time I re-did the basement. My roommate Sam was a huge help over the project and I couldn't have done it without him. The window in particular went from a 2/10 to a 10/10 easy. He also helped fix all the flaws in my original drywal installation and made that look like a million bucks too. Once we get the floor in behind the bar and drop ceiling finished, it's going to be a room I'm not embarrassed about anymore. It's crazy to think but 2 super bowls ago, Fuzzy and I were tearing out paneling and getting ready to put up drywall, and now it's finally almost finished.

After this I'm going to move on to the bedroom I believe. That's going to get a basic upgrade of furniture, and a paint job, I may look into replacing that window too since Sam did such a good job on the last one. I will also try to enlist his skills on fixing the terrible closet we threw together last time. It will be nice to have a completely finished floor of my house. then I can move upstairs. Oh and the front porch, and the shed. I'll never finish this house :)