Home Improvement Progress and Taxes Filed!

We didn’t get our floors finished this weekend, but we did make a lot more progress on our house.   We’ve finished the hallway, which involved lots of funky angles and doorways.   Last night  we finished putting the baseboard molding down in the guest room/office, so it is officially complete.   We had been using that room for cutting the boards and storing tools, so it was pretty dirty.   We moved all the tools to another room, cleaned up all the sawdust, and damp-mopped the new floor, which looks fantastic.   Then we were able to move my desk and the guest room furniture back into the room.   So it’s actually a usable room now, instead of a construction site.   We’ll be moving all the furniture out of our bedroom into the baby’s room in the next day or two, so we’ll be sleeping in the guest room for a few days until we finish the floor in our bedroom.   We still have a long way to go, but we’ve finished most of the hard parts, and it’s very nice to be able to see a finished room and know how good everything will look once we finish them all.   And I’m happy to report that  under  all the sawdust, there weren’t any scratches or dings at all in the guestroom floor.    The room  has been used for tool storage and construction work for the last week, and the floor held up very well under all of it.  

I spent part of the day yesterday putting cove molding around the floor in our kitchen, which gives the whole room a very polished look.   It’s amazing what a difference $20 worth of molding can make.   Slowly but surely we’re checking off the things on our to-do list…   Our midwives will be here for the home visit in mid-April, and our goal is to have everything put back together and respectable-looking by then.

My other big accomplishment this weekend was to get our taxes filed.   I mailed the corporate returns on Friday, and e-filed the personal returns on Saturday.   I use TaxAct to do our personal taxes, and I have to say that the $17 they charged me is some of the best money I’ve spent in a long time.   (they don’t pay me to write this).   Our 1040 + attachments was 13 pages long.   I sure would not have wanted to do it without software.   I did our corporate taxes by hand, but I was very grateful for TaxAct’s interview-format process when it came to doing our personal taxes.   I saved the returns in my email and on my computer (backed up with an external hard drive), so I didn’t have to print paper copies at all this year.     I got an email from TaxAct yesterday saying that our return has been accepted by the IRS and we should be getting our refund on 4/11.   We’ll be using the money to make our last HSA contribution for the year (we’re at $5000 so far, only $800 more to go), and the rest will go into my husband’s IRA.   Then we can move on to my IRA, in keeping with our financial plan for 2008.