I did some bookkeeping today.  I worked out my budget for May, which will be a tight one, but that's okay, because we have everything sorted out and should not have to make any large purchases for a few months now.  But we will be paying off nearly $3K of charges we made this month.  I do have the money in savings, but I prefer to cash flow it.

Then after I sorted May, I went on and revamped my budget template for the rest of the year.  Sort of.  For the next few months anyway.  We made a decision on the bathroom fund and a couple of other funds.  Since our goal for the bathroom was to save $15,000 before we started looking around for someone to fix it, we made a decisions last night.

We have already saved $12,000.  We also had $1775 saved up in my new bed and frame fund and $260 in our beach vacation fund, which would have gone for a little getaway for DH and me for a couple of days since I was too sick on our anniversary to do anything.  And we have $1000 in the snowblower fund, because we never bought one last year.  So that is $15,010.  Which is enough money for our goal.  And then if it were to become necessary we have $4000 I would be willing to borrow from the Emergency Fund.  So we have decided to shuffle all our envelopes around and do that.

In doing that, we can then start saving back for the bed and frame and the snowblower relatively quickly as well as putting money into the Emergency Fund.  The snowblower will take two months of saving $500 each, so that will be fast and done well before winter.  And we will continue to put $500 into the medical fund to start building up for next year's deductible and out of pocket max.  I still hope to be able to get Invisalign braces next year, but that would be an additional $6000, if it hasn't gone up in the last 2 years, I would have to come up with, so unless MIL starts handing out money again, that may be a couple more years yet.

We now have to find someone to build the bathroom and get quotes for what we want to do.  I wish we could do it ourselves.  It would be so much cheaper.  It's mostly just not feasible to do much these days, being old and broken.  Could have done most of it when we were younger, though.

What I am concerned about is finding someone just as we are going into the height of construction season.  And someone who speaks English.  We are not getting into a situation again like with the roof, where only one guy speaks English, he starts the crew in the morning, leaves for the entire day, and then comes back at the end of the work day to check over the work and you can't communicate about anything all day long with the workers.  My Spanish is not good enough for that, though I am working on refreshing it again.  No problem with the work, but it is beyond frustrating when all of a sudden the crew is just gone mid-day and doesn't come back until morning and you don't know why.

I suppose we could check with our local big hardware store and maybe Lowe's and Home Depot, too.  They might have small scale construction people or handymen who do this sort of thing that they know of.  I know the local one has a bulletin board you can put your advertisements up on where you tear the little phone number strips off to call.