Checking line by line through 80 pages of old bank statements might not sound like fun. Well, it basically isn’t (though I don’t really mind).

Recently I just finished up a personal project to get the period of time between Jan 2006 and Sep 2007 completely reconciled in my personal books. There were about 1,600 transactions to individually verify.

Once I had eliminated about a dozen small transactions (recording $20 of money spent twice, etc) that didn’t belong on my side, something interesting showed up.

It looks like there was a bank error that had been hidden by my own small errors. The reconciled balance from Oct 2007 through the present had always been within a small margin of where it was supposed to be. Once the little duplicate transactions were stripped out, a $500 bank error became obvious.

So in exchange for the mind numbing work, it looks like the process will net $500 in adjustments that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. It had always bothered me a little that I hadn’t ever reconciled these ancient personal bank statements, and I finally did it, and it looks like there’ll even be a payoff.

Just thought I’d share. And now I’d better go something completely non-bookkeeping related before I get too many funny looks.

Previously, I hadn’t quite been thrilled with the look of my fireplace. This fact, combined with the siren call of about 160 individual bricks and the giddy thrills of climbing 15 foot ladders led me to recently paint my fireplace.

Covering brick with latex paint is no special trick, and people do it all the time. The fun in this project was that I wanted to leave the mortar alone and only paint bricks. Each bring was lovingly painted about 2 square inches at a time in order to "color within the lines". The fireplace now matches the wall on the opposite end of the living/dining great room. The picture shows the project in progress before I replaced the trim on the paneling above it.

Also, this room got some new plants and I ran wiring through part of the attic to get the Bose really high up in the room. Maybe I’m getting the hang of this compulsive homeowner thing.