I saw in the flyers this week-end that one of my favorite stores was discontinuing a line of furniture and that the white nightstand above would be on clearance at 30% off. Today, on the way home from Latin class, we decided to take a peek at them. Sure enough, the white one was very cute but the price was higher then I expected it to be despite the sale. In fact, they only had the display model on hand which could not be sold. No matter, the pink one above was available and the price slightly less.We grabbed it. Then we headed over to the other branch of this same store across town which was almost on our way. There they did have the little white one in a box to be assembled.We took that one too. When we got home, we spent about 30 minutes trying both nightstands in both of these girls' rooms. Of course we just had to imagine how the white one would look as it was still in the box. We had to discuss all the nuances and subtleties of which one should go in which room and why and what could be stored on or in each.When the older girls found out how much they had cost (59 and 69 dollars),they were shocked. They said that no way were they worth it and that I should go to a yard sale or Goodwill to get something for 20 dollars or less and paint it. I began to realize that if I took out that nightstand with the light attached (above right), I would then have to go out and buy a new lamp to place on the new nightstand. It began to dawn on me that my husband would have to work all day to pay for these nightstands that in 20 minutes would be so covered with clutter that you wouldn't be able to see them. I thought that I would keep the small white one for the older girl and pass her small brown table ( made by hand for us by a friend about 15 years ago) to the younger girl, and take the pink one back. When Larry got home (from a two hour commute-not his usual- but kind of pertinent when talking about the value of money), he quickly observed that he and I have had the same mismatched ,different sized and even different height nightstands for 20 years. In fact, we have NEVER bought ourselves nightstands, ever. We just improvised with furniture that we came upon that would do the trick. That settled it. We packed both of these cute pieces of furniture into the van and returned them right then and there.When I got to the store, I took these pictures so that I could share about how I almost wasted some money today on something that would be nice, but that we absolutely didn't need.
