While The Cat’s Away…
…the mice will play.
Last week I went away to go visit my family for a couple of nights and whenever I do this Pavlo works extremely late nights on the house. Of course I talk to him several times a day while I’m away and we discuss what he plans to work on that evening, what he’s accomplished and so on.
I knew he had been working on some plumbing for the kitchen, for one of our upstairs bathrooms and for our washing machine, but definitely wasn’t expecting this:
Yup, those are speakers in my kitchen ceiling. Even when we lived in our previous house Pavlo was dying for a whole house speaker system. I always agreed with him that they were a nice feature in a house but wasn’t convinced that it would necessarily be worth the time or money. Basically, I didn’t think it was an item we would get our money back on. Even while we were touring homes at the East Beach Homearama he was in awe with the electronic set ups these homes had:
Given my stance on a whole house speaker system, was I upset when I came back from my little trip and Pavlo told me he had a surprise, ran down to the basement and I suddenly heard music (he purposely played a song from our past)? No, not at all, and absolutely not because the song that was playing had some meaning to me. It was because he immediately went into explaining how he got the system for a total of $0, yes you read correctly, zero dollars!
Here’s how the story goes: Pavlo had recently gotten a receiver that his parents no longer wanted. That, along with some speaker wire left over from another project were stashed away in our basement while he researched speakers and narrowed it down to the ones he wanted. He pulled the speaker wire in several parts of the house (kitchen, living room, master bedroom and outside where the deck will be) all while waiting (and hoping) for those speakers to go on sale. Well, they did, and I have to say he got a pretty great deal on them. A set of two speakers was just $50 so he purchased two sets and left it up to me whether I wanted to purchase more for the master bedroom (still deciding) or an exterior set of speakers for the deck (a definite possibility).
So you’re probably doing the math and thinking, “Okay, so he actually spent $100 of the house budget on something that was never even in the budget. Right?” Wrong. He outsmarted me and scrapped copper from the demolition phase which paid for the entire thing! Here’s hoping we find some more copper in future phases of the renovation so we can at least get the exterior speakers. Those would be amazing for entertaining!
Oh wow, listen to me go on about this whole house speaker system! I’m starting to sound like Pavlo has for the last 3 years!
