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The Danger of 12 Months No Interest Financing for Appliances

When we decided to start a kitchen remodel, we knew we would finance our appliances in some capacity.

We could make up many reasons why that was the case, but the simple answer was that the appliances we wanted were expensive (read: ~$25,000 in total) and we didn't want to blow through our cash savings to buy these outright.

So when it came to looking into financing, we considered the spread of options be it putting them on a credit card, taking out a home equity line of credit (HELOC), and 12-month, no-interest financing from the sellers.

Ultimately we went with the zero-interest financing from the retailers because 0% interest sounded pretty good to us. But this comes with one big caveat that is often not discussed but really needs to be addressed- that “12-month term” is disingenuous at best!

  • Note: We are not financial planners. This article is more about conveying our experience in taking 12 months same as cash financing and is purely anecdotal. Your mileage may vary. When in doubt talk to a financial planner before making any major purchase decisions. 

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Hipster Homesteaders Year One in Review – Getting Started

We founded Hipster Homesteaders in late 2021 to chronicle our somewhat different approach to urban homesteading on our ~0.13 acre lot in Pittsburgh. 

Our goal here is not to be 100% self-reliant on food grown in our yard, but rather to maximize our urban gardening as best we can while supplementing it with local produce (via CSAs), local meats (via area farmers), and cutting out intermediaries when supporting other non-local businesses (such as buying seafood direct from fishermen in Alaska over factory farmed products in the grocery store). 

Now that we are winding down our first proper season after launching this site, we thought we'd review everything we have added to our homestead in the past year!

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5 Raccoon Repellants that Didn’t Work (and One That Did)

We are quite fortunate to have a south-facing deck that is large enough to allow us to container garden in the summer and fall. Every year we put out many pots of tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and other items to enjoy the bounty of our prized deck.

In a recent season, however, we had a problem. A big problem in the form of a cute raccoon that decided to call our deck home and eat everything in sight. As it turned out, grease from our smoker had dripped onto the decking and attracted a raccoon, but the plentiful tasty fruits and vegetables caused it to stick around.

It came back again and again and again and virtually ruined our entire season.

After trying many raccoon repellants, we quickly learned that most did not work for our scenario. But after trial and error, we found one that worked. So in this one, we wanted to share what we tried, share why some items didn't work, and discuss why spike strips were our answer.

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How Long Until a Sparkling Water Maker Pays Itself Off?

Raise your hand if you are mildly addicted to sparkling water.

This was us at the beginning of the COVID pandemic when we found our consumption of sparkling water increasing to record proportions (often to the tune of four or five boxes a week). So when we realized just how much money this was costing us, we thought there had to be a better way.

Enter the Aarke sparkling water maker, and after just a few minutes of research, we knew acquiring one of these seltzer makers would really be a game-changer for our consumption.

But the real question to us after the fact was not “how good is the machine?” (we love it), but whether or not it was actually a worthy investment to begin with. So we did some math to see what the payback period would be for different scenarios!

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Graywind Motorized Curtains Review – Game Changer for Sleep

Three of the main reasons we purchased our house is that it is south facing, gets a ton of natural light, and has an exceptional skyline view (check out our Pittsburgh webcam view here)!

For the longest time, we simply did not have any blinds on our windows because we loved having the view and all that light come in. But after a while, especially in the summer months, the early wakeups due to the sunrise became old- we simply wanted to start sleeping in more.

So when we decided to get customized curtains for our bedroom, we decided to go for the motorized blinds and drapes route. We ended up purchasing electric curtains from Graywind as the price increase was not as much as we would've otherwise expected for motorized blinds versus conventional custom blinds. Now that we've had both electric drapes and curtains for several months, we thought we'd share a bit about what they are like in this review!

Note: Photos in this review were taken during the day as nighttime photos are impractical because, well, our room is so dark! As such, it is worth noting again that our house is south facing and our rooms can get exceptionally bright, so when we talk about breakthrough light keep in mind that we are on an extreme end here. 

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