Little Women
• Oct. 28, 2008 - How my carpet reflects the broader economy
You can learn a lot about our economy, by looking at my carpet.
When we bought the house a few years ago, we knew the carpet wasn't new. However, it took some time to show up the shape it's really in. No investments have been made in it's infrastructure for quite some time. Only the parts that show were done with good quality carpet, in the first place. The rest was pretty cheap, as it wasn't that important.
No problem--we had a home equity line on our mortgage, and could get it fixed at any time. Life was pretty good, and very busy, so we didn't worry a whole lot about things like this. The basics were OK, at least, and we didn't really have time to deal with it, right now.
Until the day the bottom fell out of the housing market, and the post office lost one check. We had fixed the problem within 2 weeks, but because of the tight credit market (caused by the poor lending practices of the bank where we obtained the loan), they yanked the home equity line of credit. They gave us back the late penalty, because we were good payers, but the HELOC was gone for good.
So, here we sit, with an uncleanable, crumbling infrastructure of carpet, caught in limbo by the current credit crunch, and the carpet-sellers and installers are out a fair amount of work, as well.
On the other hand, it saved us from putting $10,000 on our home loan debt, which is probably a good thing in the long run.
(How was that for the "blogger challenge" of writing about carpet? :) That was pretty fun, actually.) |
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