Clothes and furniture are often at the bottom of my priorities. Not always the wisest choice but, oh well. Keeping the wife happy, house and cars maintained, and then my toys are at the top. oh, and good beer+scotch.
I hear ya on that one.
Not long after I bought my first house, I got some advice from one of my neighbors. He was an old ranch hand - he told me that no matter how insignificant a thing you are looking at getting, if you are spending money on it, it's worth it to get the best you can. You may sigh at spending the money at the time, but you won't regret it down the road.
And he was right. I stopped buying cheap cloths, cheap furniture, cheap kitchen tools, etc. A lot of that stuff I'd just get the cheapest thing I could find and call it good enough, because who needs a $30 pancake flipper really? But, as I started doing that, I found the stuff lasts way longer, and probably far beyond the benefit of that - I don't have to fight with the stuff constantly struggling against it or trying to fix it.
Now, I'm not using cheap to just mean money - just because something is expensive doesn't mean it's well built - I use the word cheap as opposed to "high quality". I tend to do a lot more research before I buy something - just recently it was an olive oil sprayer... When we moved into this house about 3 years ago, we needed a new dining room table, wife found a nice solid oak table on the local for sale ads. We go to look at it, it needed a bit of hardware tightened, but the elderly lady said she and her husband bought it when they got married, he had died a few years ago and she was to the point where she was moving closer to the grandkids. The table was bought in 1961, Still looked almost new. I think with a bit of wood polish we could probably keep the thing until we retire and downsize as well.
More to the point of the story - for our second or third wedding anniversary, I can't recall which, I got my wife and I a hardwood desk / cabinet set for the home office. It wraps around 3 walls - has plenty of cabinets and file storage and the like. The stuff going on 10 years, survived a move with no issue, and with any luck will outlast me like that oak dining table and get passed on to the kid or sold to some other lucky couple I imagine. It wasn't cheap - not $10k fortunately, but a good deal more than Ikea would have run.
