Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Target, eBay & Updates!

Sorry I haven't updated in a few days. Been kind of busy with work and such. Haven't done much this week until today.

Today we went back to Target and this time with a plan. To make a long story short... we got 150 jars of baby food, 3 pairs of baby pants, 1 shirt and $30 worth of diapers. Our total bill was $117, we left only paying $16 (: The sixteen dollars basically payed for the clothes and a pack of diapers. I will say though, the poor cashier kid had to put in 50 coupons by hand. He probably hates me, but at least he has a story to tell his friends. "Some crazy guy came into the store today..."

eBay. I'm going to talk about eBay now. I have successfully sold two text books for an accumulative amount of $1.04. I know they are worth more than that but oh well. I sold those about 2 weeks ago. Now for the interesting part; For our baby shower my family was going to buy our dressers we wanted for the nursery. They're not horribly over priced at about $230 per dresser and they match our furniture. We know they're sturdy and be put to good use for years to come. That being said, certain family didn't want to buy said furniture ahead of time in case they go out of stock or something. What are the chances? Well I'll tell you, the chances are very good. In fact, they are so good that one of our dressers went completely out of stock until February 2008. Back to eBay. We were frantically searching the internet for anyone that might have one of these dressers. We got "out of stock" from over 10 retailers. Our hopes were fading when we came across the ONE and only auction on eBay for this "golden dresser". It started at $1.00 and only had one other bidder. I outbid him at $50. He outbid me to $100, I went to a maximum bid of $150 (eBay automatically bids for you until it reaches your maximum, other users can't see this). He went to $130 and stopped. I was afraid he might "snipe" and try to outbid me in the last 30 seconds. I was not about to let that happen! I had two computers in front of me, one hand was hitting refresh on the browser while the other one was on the second computer ready to place a bid up to the store price of the unit ($240). It felt like my heart was about to explode from the anticipation. Alas! I won the bid! Hands down! $100 cheaper than store price! The dresser is supposed to arrive tomorrow, so I shall let you know if it came in one piece, if it's the right color and what the condition is. The seller is very highly esteemed on eBay with over 6,000 positive feedbacks (98% of the total feedback). We ordered the second dresser because we found it with free shipping, so each unit cost us about $230. We had to pay outrageous shipping for the eBay auction but it panned out.

Last week we also got the rest of the blankets for the crib, so that's done. Decorations should be near finished this week as we have letters ready to be painted and mounted on the wall and decorations ready to hang. We have the lamp and the window curtain. Last piece of furniture we need to get is the rocking chair for Courtney. We might get a book case from Target. (no, we can't get coupons for that!)

In other news, work is going well. Brian and I are about to finish a project (or two) this week and in the following week are looking forward to some massive upgrades to our video & design system with the latest and greatest technology to make our jobs easier and more efficient. We have a lot of bottlenecks in our work-flow right now and can potentially get things done faster in the very near future once our gear all comes in. I'll probably make a tech-geek blog about it when it's all setup. Right now all I have to say is "xServe" (x2).

Now some photos...







"Todays Target Run"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The baby room looks fantastic and 'welcome home-y'!

I've lost so many amazing things on eBay due to 'snipers', and I'm not suave enough to try it out myself! Congratulations on the win. From personal experience, I know all that anticipation in the last 30 seconds made the win THAT MUCH better!

Also, I wanted to ask. For your Baby Registry, do they automatically update it whenever someone buys something for you, or do I just have to guess at it? What do you need most out of all that page? Let me know!

Mark Malta said...

Don't feel obligated to buy us anything, but the gesture is always welcome (:

It does automatically update as long as someone goes through the registry. All the stuff on there is something we need or will need in the future. The things we need the most are expensive (ie: travel system) but we suspect we know who will get that stuff for us already