Our condo is getting some major work done, paid for by the HOA, but we’ve lost use of our family room for a couple of weeks.

The splurging all began when, in the process of moving our furniture out of the family room, we broke our cheap IKEA entertainment stand. We found a nice, smaller replacement stand for only $99. Not bad, but we figured our 15-year old speaker towers and clunky 4-piece stereo/DVD system was going to look poor on the new stand, espcially hooked up to our 1-year old plasma (last years splurge). So, we bought a 5-channel Panasonic Home Theater System at Costco for $399. It’s sweet, and here’s how we rationalized the purchase:

Pros
Nice sounding and looking
Requires less than 1/2 of the space as our old system
iPod hook up so we can have all of our music available at the touch of a button
$60 of the cost was covered by selling our old stereo system

Cons
Price
Our old system still worked

We probably could have got away with using our old system a couple of more years but what the heck, we treated ourselves. We can’t wait to get our family room back so we can watch a movie using our new home theater system. It will also be nice to have more space in our little condo.