Window Treatment Sticker Shock — $13,000 for Living Room Drapes? Seriously? Sheltering at Home Week 29

October 2, 2020. Sheltering at Home Week 29

Thirteen thousand dollars.

I’m not kidding. $13,000 is what the guy at the shade shop said draperies for our living and dining room would cost.

Where I come from (and when — which would be the 1950s), $13,000 could get you half of a brand-new house in the suburbs.

Our new remodel left us with four big windows to cover — a combined width of 28 feet. Which meant this project was going to cost us. Maybe as much as $4,000 — I thought.

So, I was ready for some big, bad news when we stepped into a local shade shop last month. We gave the man our measurements. A few days later, an estimate arrived in my in-box.

Window Treatment Sticker Shock

Thirteen grand was the bottom line — $12,739.92 to be exact.

You gotta be kidding! What’s happening? Is this inflation run amuck?

It might be.

I had been sticker shocked last spring, when replacing an overflowing sewer line cost us $7,333.

And again the other day as I paid $200 to a seamstress to hand sew a sleeve onto a vintage quilt we wanted to hang on our new dining room wall.

As for the house remodel, it cost way more than we expected. About double. So did the new patio that’s being installed as I write.

Am I turning into my mother? By that I mean, as I’ve packed on the years, have I lost the ability to move with the times — and the relentless progress of inflation?

My mother, born in 1917 and a survivor of the Great Depression, was an astute shopper. She knew what things should cost and where to get the best prices.

A Shopper in Training

In 1959, while shopping at J.L. Hudson in Detroit with my mother, I learned that $20 should get you a decent skirt. Later, as the years went by and inflation had its way with us, my mother and I were OK with pulling out our credit cards to pay $50, then $60, then $80 for that same skirt.

Finally, as my mother approached her 90s and neared the end of her life,  she became less and less willing to pay the going rate for the nice slacks that had replaced her 1950s skirts.

When the price on slacks finally breached the $100 mark, my mother blinked. She refused to pay. She turned to the cheaper racks and bought garments she would not have settled for in her middle-aged years.

Is this what’s happening to me? Have I lost my resilience? Am I no longer able to keep up with — accept, move with — the cash realities of now?

A phone call to a financial planner pal shed some light on those $13,000 draperies and my window treatment sticker shock. Blame it on the 2020 tariffs on textiles from China, he said.

Retirement Sticker Shock

But higher tariffs don’t explain away the high cost of everything else — the new stone patio, the 8-foot sliding doors, the redwood decking, the 40-foot sewer line.

Jon and I had thought we were pretty comfy and ready for retirement. We thought we’d stashed away more than enough to cover the cost of all the skirts, slacks and sewer lines we could ever want.

We thought we were sitting pretty. But with draperies costing $13,000 and patios costing more than what an entire house once cost, maybe we’re not as comfy as we thought.

More about retirement at “Retired Is a State of Mind — Six Ways to Know If You’re There Yet.”  More about the Newhall family budget at “When Your Six-Year-Old Wants to Talk Money.”