It’s My Imagination

Some Home Improvements are not Worth the Money

August 20, 2008 on 4:14 pm | In Finance | Comments Off

Many years ago we were living in Houston, Texas. Houston is very hot and humid, but otherwise, a beautiful place to live. We had our home built from the ground up on a beautiful, tree filled lot in a wonderful sub-division very near to my husband’s employer. We both had good full time jobs, great neighbors and plenty to do. We really thought we would be in that house long term.

After living in our home for 5 years, we decided to take the plunge, literally, and have an in ground swimming pool built. My husband met with a pool builder and even helped design the pool itself. We got a home improvement loan and within a few months, we were swimming in our beautiful new pool in our own back yard. We worked hard and did all the landscaping around the pool ourselves. It was totally awesome, in every way.

Then it happened, my husband was very unexpectedly laid off from his job. Not only that, we had just learned that I was pregnant with our daughter. So, now we had a lovely home with a lovely pool and a lovely baby on the way, but the primary earner of our family was now out of a lovely job. My first thought was that we were going to be in need of debt help.

I have always been a very financially responsible individual and being in need of debt relief took me by surprise. Having just taken out a home improvement loan in order to put in the swimming pool, I had to look at other ways to keep ourselves afloat. One of the first things we did was to put our house up for sale, we figured we could always move into something smaller or rent, but the housing market in Houston was pretty flat. There was a lot of new home construction in the area which made it difficult to sell an existing home.

Over time, I managed to find methods of debt consolidation that worked for us.  We were able to pay off our vehicles, and my husband found a new job. We did end up selling our home and moved to Connecticut. It was all an extremely stressful time and a period of time I hope never to repeat.  I do know that we’ll never build a swimming pool ourselves again, it is not worth the money.  The house we have now was pre-existing and all ready had a pool.  That’s the only way to go in my opinion!

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