Major impulse buy

My wife got a call from her father this morning while we were still in "wake up" mode. He said that someone had just returned a gas dryer to his Lowe's store and wanted to know if we were interested in it. We showered, dressed, and rushed there.

Our current dryer works well enough, but the washer is quite old, small, noisy and inefficient. The dryer was marked as originally being $300, and on "clearance" for $99. Bigger than what we have, obviously newer, and most likely more efficient. It had some scratches and dings, but hey, for $99, as long as it works, right?

So, on to washers. We ultimately settled on a 3.5 cubic foot GE top-load model. Maybe a front-load or high-efficiency model would have been better, but at significant extra cost, and we've heard about a number of problems with front-loaders. Besides, this unit is Energy Star certified, which is a good start, and it's still far better than what we already have. $450 for that. $99.99 for the extended warranty with in-home service. $65 for delivery (which we'll get back via mail-in rebate). Toss in an industrial carpet to go under the pair, a new air filter for the furnace, a big carpet gripper for the rug in the living room, a couple new smoke detectors...

Fortunately, Lowe's is running one of their 12 months no interest/no payments deals for any single purchase totalling $279 or more, plus a $50 gift card (mail-in rebate style) with purchase of appliances totalling $497-$749. So we've got some time to pay it all off.

The dryer has a 1-year warranty on it. If it croaks on day 366, it was (basically) only $50, so it's not like we won't get our money's worth out of it.

Delivery next weekend. Finally, we can do large loads of laundry again!