Hey, I may be old-ish, but I’m at least in the 21st century… I use email, Facebook and a Kindle e-reader. A smartphone helps me a lot with everyday life, even if it often annoys me by being smarter than I am. And I blog. (Oh wait, you already knew that. Since you’re, you know, reading my blog.)

I even shop online sometimes. This can save a ton of time, gas, effort, and even money, compared to driving around looking for stuff you need.

Case in point: moving from one house to another, we inevitably find that a few pieces of our furniture don’t work anywhere. At the same time, we have spaces in the new place that need a piece of furniture we don’t have, such as…

1) My office, where I have a comfy swivel rocking chair that needed an elbow-height end table for my coffee cup and books.
2) With a second guest room, we came up short of nightstands in the new house.
3) Good news: counter-height bar in kitchen. Bad news: NO bar stools.

Quick — to the internet!

First I ordered a 20″ high end table, which arrived promptly. But…

No. Just . . . no.

a) I assembled it, only to discover it was actually 28″ high. That bad boy towered over my armchair.
b) Days later, we saw the exact same table at Homegoods for less than half the price.
c) We decided it could work as a nightstand. A really overpriced nightstand.

Then we searched major furniture sites for 26″ bar stools. We wanted them in time for an open house we were planning.

a) Almost ordered ivory-finish stools but they would have arrived three days later, while we were in Washington for our son Eric’s Change of Command ceremony.
b) Decided to wait until we returned, 10 days before our open house. Plenty of time, right?
c) Went to Washington.
d) Changed mind about furniture color.
e) Returned to Texas and dithered about which stools to order.
f) Found perfect black ones at a major home-furnishings site.
g) Prepared to order but discovered these wouldn’t be delivered until at least four days after our open house.
h) Searched for same product at two other home-furnishing sites. Same story.
i) Wailing and gnashing of teeth.
j) Decided to go to Target or someplace and find something that would do.
k) Grabbed my purse and headed for the door… BUT on a whim, stopped first to search for the item on Kohl’s website.
l) Found the very same stools. This was too good to be true… wouldn’t they be much pricier? And would they arrive any sooner than the others??

Brent had these put together before I would’ve had time to find the directions.

Not to worry…. The price was just one dollar more than the other guys. Plus I had a 30%-off-entire-purchase coupon. (Score!)

Their delivery estimate was in 3-7 days, which means the barstools had a pretty good chance of arriving before the party guests. SOLD!

Better yet, the stools arrived early, in only two days.

Best of all, Brent got the three of them assembled that very night.

I’m no expert, but my advice is to price-shop an item you like at multiple websites. And it’s a good idea to read the product details and reviews to be sure you’re getting what you want.

Your turn: Do you shop online? Any tips, tricks, or little disasters you’d like to share? There’s room for you in the “Leave a Reply” box, bottom of the post.

Thanks for reading!
Jan