Christmas came early at the Smith house…

Isn’t she gorgeous? I fully admit that I’m in love with an appliance. Now, this is one big fridge. At 31 cu. ft. I’ll have plenty of room to store all the delicious food I plan on cooking in this kitchen. For anyone who’s interested, it’s a Kenmore that we bought from Sears. I researched just about every fridge on the market through Consumer Reports and this model best matched everything we were looking for.

Today, I want to share with you a couple tips on buying a big ticket item. We got this fridge for 50% off the manufacture’s price just because of these few tips.

1. Stalk your prey. 

This isn’t just limited to the jungle. In order to judge when an item is at it’s lowest price, you have to know what it normally sells for. I’m not talking about the manufacturer’s price, I’m talking about the general-every-day price. For this fridge, it hovered around $2,600. There was NO way I was paying that much for a fridge, so for a few weeks I watched the price to see if it fluctuated.

2. Don’t be fooled by a “big” sale.

We bought this fridge a week before Black Friday. Sears wasn’t having any blowout sales at the time, nor had they released their Black Friday prices. I knew not to wait for a Black Friday sale because I had been watching the price for weeks and when it dropped to below $2,000, I knew it was a good buy. The cheapest I had seen it before was around $2,300. Sure enough, when the Black Friday ads came out, it was on “sale” for $3,000. I’m sure a lot of people thought they were getting a great deal, but we paid over $1,000 less with tax and delivery and didn’t even have to fight the crowds.

3. Even after you buy, keep checking prices.

This is THE best tip so even if you don’t do anything else, do this. A lot of stores have a price guarantee. If you buy an item and it goes on sale within a certain amount of time, they’ll refund you the difference. We bought our fridge on a Sunday. A couple days later I happened to go onto Sears.com to check the price of the fridge. It had dropped another $140! I grabbed my receipt and headed straight for Sears. A hour later I had $140 back in my pocket!

The bottom line is, take your time when making a big purchase. Check back every couple days for a few weeks and you’ll start to learn what a great price is and what a “sale” price is. With the internet, I’ve seen prices fluctuate several times in a day. Also, look for coupons you can stack on top of each other to get an even better deal. Lowes and Sears both give you 5% off if you have a credit card with them or if you join Ebates.com, you’ll get money back every time you order something online. There are lots of ways to save if you just keep your eyes open!

What about you…do you have a great tip that’s saved you money? Or did you get a great deal that you’d love to share?

I’ve had a lot of people ask me why I kept saying this was THE best birthday I’ve ever had.

Well, it’s because WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

More specifically, we had our offer for a house accepted on my birthday. In the past week, we’ve been through the inspection, re-negotiated and have moved on to all the joys of mortgage paperwork!

To say we are excited is an understatement. We are completely in love with this house. It was actually the first house we went to look at and we just knew it was right for us. Some call that crazy, we just call it luck. We’re both pretty picky about what we wanted in a house, so when we saw this place we jumped!

We are confident this is where we’re supposed to be (40 min North of Atlanta for those of you who are curious) and can’t wait to start moving in. We have lots of ideas for projects we want to do that I will of course share with you guys on here! On a sidenote, I seriously can’t stop watching the DIY network and going to Home Depot to look at things like door knobs and tile samples. It was bad enough when I was an interior designer but add to that being a homeowner…I’m in trouble! I have a feeling I’ll be DIYing in my sleep…

I’ll share a tour of the house as soon as we officially get the keys in a few weeks. Just curious, what was the first project you tackled when you moved into your new home? Did you put up a fence, re-paint or do something crazy like renovate your kitchen? I’d love to know!

When I started planning this surprise trip to Raleigh, I would pull up a map and just stare at it for a while. I knew we could take a direct path to Raleigh, but where is the fun in that? I wanted to find THE best places to stop along the way. Enter, Asheville. Remember when I posted the { mashed cauliflower recipe }? Well, I adapted it from this book…

I LOVE this cookbook. It’s a great resource for upscale Southern comfort food. When I saw that we could detour to Asheville, I knew we had to try this place out. I mean, it would have been wrong to miss it. Seriously, wrong. We knew when we first walked in the restaurant that we were going to be happy customers. The place itself had a really neat vibe. They used old screen doors and windows as partitions. I would SO do that if I had a restaurant.

And as if the decor hadn’t already begun to win us over, they brought us a basket of biscuits and homemade blueberry jam. O.M.Gosh. I have a weakness for fluffy, salty biscuits. I’m not a jam girl so I went for the good stuff…Tupelo Honey. Good gracious…

Fluffy biscuits with Blueberry Jam.

These were some of the best biscuits I’ve ever had, which is saying something since just a few weeks ago we went to the Loveless Cafe. The Loveless Cafe supposedly has the best biscuits in the world and let me tell you, Tupelo Cafe gave them a run for their money.

For my main course, I didn’t have much of an option for what to order. As soon as I saw they had fried chicken with a mushroom Marsala sauce, I couldn’t even think of ordering anything else. It was good. Like, so good you don’t want to share. The sauce was rich and creamy and the chicken crunchy and cheesy. Is there anything more you could want in life? The chicken came with a side of mashed cauliflower…the recipe I adapted and put on this site. Justin and I both agreed that we actually liked the texture of my version more. If you haven’t made it yet, you can find the recipe { here }. It’s delicious!

Fried chicken w/ country ham and mushroom Marsala sauce. Side of mashed cauliflower.

Justin ordered a catfish taco with salsa and a lemon aioli. I think we both agreed it was the best fish taco we’ve ever had. Light and fresh, it was a complete opposite of what I ordered. I managed to sneak two bites of his taco and would have eaten more if he wasn’t paying such close attention. Guys can’t hear 100% of what women say, but they can guard a catfish taco like it’s their firstborn child. Go figure.

Catfish taco with salsa and lemon aioli.

The morale of this story is to take a trip to Asheville and eat at the Tupelo Honey Cafe. It’s ridiculously good food that will haunt you for days. Luckily, I have the cookbook and can recreate some of these dishes at home. Tomorrow I’m sharing a recipe inspired by the restaurant. Trust me, you won’t want to miss it! Have you been to Asheville? Do you have a favorite restaurant that you’ll drive two hours just to eat at? I’d love to hear!