As you may remember, I was telling you a very long and drawn out story of how we came to desire to own less stuff.
As you may remember from last time, we got to Washington with little more than a car full of stuff and a few small boxes waiting at my brothers house (these were things like my wedding dress, a few really cute baby girl clothes since we knew that our family wasn't complete, and some picture albums). Once we moved into our apartment in Washington I was amazed. Do you know why? In Idaho our house was pretty much always messy. We cleaned frequently, but then it went right back to crazy in a matter of minutes (and we only had one child!) and I was constantly overwhelmed. But in Washington Our house was almost always clean and orderly! Was there something in the water than made me suddenly a super homemaker? No, there just wasn't very much to clean! After we got there we used some of the money we'd made selling our stuff to get a few pots and pans (the cheap-o set from Walmart, which we still have) a simple vacuum, and some basic dishes (before we left Idaho we got rid of ALL our dishes and started fresh). We still didn't have a TV until my parents let us use a little black and white one they had. So I would make dinner (from scratch), we would eat, then I would clean up our little girl and the table and floor around the table. Give the little one a bath, family scriptures, read a book, sing a song, and then she was down for the night. So I would do all of the dishes (easy since we hardly had any) wipe down the counters and the table (also easy since we had nothing on them) then I'd sweep and vacuum and maybe dust if I could find any dust and sit down to read, write in my journal, or maybe sew (my hubby was usually gone working in the evenings) . It was a very peaceful time and I enjoyed the simplicity, as well as having a clean house with little investment in time. Our meals were also simple and we had a lot of leftovers. A lot of this was because this was 2008, if you remember that year, and the economy went south really quickly. Add that to the fact that more than half of the salesmen for that area quit and went to a different company right as the season began. So that meant each installer was lucky to get one install a day, Monday through Saturday. Thankfully we didn't have to pay rent or utilities, but hubby did have to have a higher quality cell phone for the job so that cut into expenses for that high bill. Plus we'd made the mistake of having credit cards for emergencies and then using them, but of course if we had money to pay the credit card bill we could have saved up to avoid an emergency, so we had big credit card bills too. If you remember 2008, gas prices were enormously high, even higher than now if that's possible, and hubby had to drive to each install and traffic was horrible. So the majority of our money went toward gas. This left about $25-$30 a week for food, for one toddler with a healthy appetite an enormously pregnant lady, and a grown man. It was interesting to say the least. My parents helped by feeding us dinner on Sundays, plus a group called Gleaners would bring bread and sometimes bakery items that had reached their expiration date to church so we could get a few things each week that way if we got in line quickly enough. We kept a happy attitude, reassuring ourselves that this was temporary and business would pick up soon.
Business didn't pick up.
Our beautiful baby boy was 10 days overdue, but worth the wait. When he was a day shy of two weeks old, the manager of the installers called my hard working husband into the office and told him that they had to cut more people (they had already laid off several people) and laid him off. Then he informed my husband that since they were paying for the apartment, we had up to a week to move out. Yes, you read that right: two week old baby, one week to move, no money, no job. So we moved in with my parents. The four of us stayed in their guest room (used to be a kids room when we were growing up) and constantly tried to get enough money to move our on our own. In the midst of more layoffs we managed to make a dent in our debt, but not get out of their house. My husband got a better job and we started earning more money and then my parents house got flooded. There was about 3 feet of water in the room we were staying in. We had put stuff up on our bed, but it wasn't high enough. You'd think I wouldn't be upset about losing stuff after what we'd been through, but seeing my baby boys cute little clothes all drenched in nasty water really got to me. So, despite getting more stuff that made our lives a little "easier" for the previous few months, we had to get rid of a lot of stuff AGAIN! After staying at a friends for a while, we knew we couldn't stay there any more and my parents house had to undergo serious renovations, including taking out parts of the floor and having exposed wiring to replace the electrical sockets that had been fried by flood water. We determined that wouldn't be a very good place to take a toddler and baby back to, and we couldn't afford an apartment there on one income, so we knew it was time to make the move we'd planned on before. In case you haven't guessed, the job in Arizona completely fell through. We prayed and prayed and researched and got the answer that we needed to move to Texas. We had received a lot of great baby stuff and good Christmas presents right before this, but we couldn't afford any kind of U-haul or anything. So more stuff got donated, a few boxed mailed to my aunt and uncle down here, and we packed the car again for another long move in just our little car. We literally had only a few days after deciding this before we moved. It was crazy and stressful, but we did it!
Tomorrow I'll talk about how minimal we had to live after we got down to Texas.
Part 1
Part 3
Showing posts with label De-clutter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label De-clutter. Show all posts
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Journey toward minimalist/simple living, part 1
This is a long bit of my life history, so I'm breaking it up so no one falls sleep reading.
There's an unconventional concept that I really would like to sink my teeth into, and that's called minimalism. Basically, not owning very much stuff, not being cluttered, not being consumer-driven, usually having less impact on the environment, and not spending time on things that are really unnecessary. Most minimalists you read about are either single or maybe married, and maybe one or two children. Minimalism lends itself very well to a nomadic lifestyle, which is great if you know you're going to move any time soon, but one thing that really appeals to my husband and I is that it makes things easy to clean and doesn't look cluttered (he had ADHD so clutter is REALLY distracting to him). I wish we could say that we were really good at this, we're not, but we're trying.
I think we both were raised with a fairly practical approach to stuff: spend what money you have on things you absolutely NEED (like food and the electric bill and mortgage), if you can't fin all your stuff in your closet, dresser, toy box and shelves then you need to give some things to charity, re-purpose things you already have, and so on. When we had been married for nearly 3 years, we were living in an apartment that was about 1200 square feet, three bedrooms and one bathroom, had one child and another on the way, and our apartment was FULL of stuff! We'd been wanting to de-clutter for a while, but it was a slow process because one of us would have sentimental attachment to it, or we would think that it was something that we would use "someday" or whatever other reason that I don't even remember. We were also dirt poor. In Idaho where we were, jobs are few and far between and even though our rent and utilities were very inexpensive, we couldn't keep up. We knew something had to change and were desperately looking to find an answer to our prayers. We decided at length to go with a security company that is always hiring for the summer. They had been trying to get my hubby to do sales for a few years, but sales is just too unreliable income for us since it's purely commission based. So we went with installing security systems. There are supposed to be 3 of 4 times as many salesmen as there are installers, so even if some salesmen aren't making it, installers still get good work, and get paid by the install. The man who recruited us was going to Milwaukee, but said that we could go to other places if we wanted. Since I was due to have our second child a little over a month after the summer season started, we decided to go to the Seattle area, since that's near my parents so someone could help us out after the baby was born. The company would pay for the apartment and a few rental furniture pieces (a bed, kitchen table and chairs, couches in the living room, etc.). Most people just go for the summer and then go back to their regular homes in Idaho or wherever after the summer. We were not going to school anymore at that time so we didn't have a reason to move back to Idaho. We also had wanted to move somewhere warmer, at the time we were thinking Arizona, and we had a satellite job unofficially lined up for after the summer. So there was our plan, go to Washington for the summer, then move to Arizona and live down there. We felt good having a plan, but the thing is, we had to cover the expense of going to those respective locations ourselves. There are many ways to make moving less expensive, but most of those ways were still our of our price range. So we decided the only thing we could do was to get rid of almost everything and fit just ourselves and what stuff we could into our little 1995 Oldsmobile Achieva S and drive.
We decided this about 2 months before we moved, and on one hand we really didn't want to get rid over everything too long before the move. I'm not sure why, though I could understand the bed part, I was very pregnant after all. So we just started going through the stuff we were sure we really didn't want or didn't need. Dishes were one of the first things (our water heater didn't work very well and we had to wash our dishes by hand, plus neither of us like doing dishes, so they would pile up quickly.), though I still kept some dishes at first, then papers, papers, 50 extra birth announcements from when our daughter was born that we never sent out, some craft supplies that I'd never used, cord that I didn't know what they went to, and in the process our then almost 2 year old daughter decapitated a statue of a couple that my husband had given me in a way that made superglue ineffective, so that got tossed too. We also had to almost immediately sell our large flat screen TV that we had bought on clearance and on sale the year before with our tax return, to get money to pay enough of the electric bill to keep our electricity on (it was February, and there was about 4 feet of snow on the ground, and we had electric heat). About a month before we left we posted everything we thought we could sell on the electronic bulletin board at the local university and did sell quite a bit. We donated more and more stuff to charity (my brother worked at the local thrift store at the time and he was wowed with all the stuff we were getting rid of.) It was getting hard. Then we decided that we didn't have a way to take our bikes and the bike trailer along, so we had to sell those too. That's when I got really emotional. I loved going for bike rides with my little one in the little bike trailer, plus I was pregnant and that thing held two kids, not to mention the out of control hormones that go along with pregnancy. I just kept telling myself "It's just stuff, it's just stuff, it's just stuff..." that helped quite a bit. I had always liked to think of myself as being above hyper-consumerism and achieving some sort of status or worth from material possessions, but this was a lot harder than I'd anticipated!
When it came time to load up the car and move, surprise surprise, we couldn't fit it all in! Part of the added challenge was knowing that we were about to have another baby. If we knew it'd be a while before getting pregnant again, we could easily get rid of the little baby stuff and have just what we needed for our toddler. So we had to take the infant car seat, newborn clothes, some baby blankets and such. The crib did not make it on the list as it was a little too...loved to move. We also got a car topper and left a few boxes ay my brothers house that my parents agreed to pick up next time they went to visit them.
Getting rid of so much stuff was hard, but pregnancy hormones made it harder, toward the end of it all, I started to cry about throwing away my baby girls broken crayons. My husband got a little concerned about this and said he'd take over and told me to just go to my brothers house and rest. Such a good man. The next day we were cleaning, but it took forever (I think largely because we were SOOOOOOOOO exhausted) and we left later than we wanted to. We tried to get the whole 13 hour car trip done in one day, but of course got a late start, I don't even remember why) and by about 3 in the morning, we had to stop at a motel to get some sleep. Luckily, my dad had sent us his gas card and subway card so we could actually afford to pay for a cheap motel. The next day we made the last 4 hours of our car ride.
Tomorrow I will post about minimalism or simple living when we got to Washington
Part 2
Part 3
There's an unconventional concept that I really would like to sink my teeth into, and that's called minimalism. Basically, not owning very much stuff, not being cluttered, not being consumer-driven, usually having less impact on the environment, and not spending time on things that are really unnecessary. Most minimalists you read about are either single or maybe married, and maybe one or two children. Minimalism lends itself very well to a nomadic lifestyle, which is great if you know you're going to move any time soon, but one thing that really appeals to my husband and I is that it makes things easy to clean and doesn't look cluttered (he had ADHD so clutter is REALLY distracting to him). I wish we could say that we were really good at this, we're not, but we're trying.
I think we both were raised with a fairly practical approach to stuff: spend what money you have on things you absolutely NEED (like food and the electric bill and mortgage), if you can't fin all your stuff in your closet, dresser, toy box and shelves then you need to give some things to charity, re-purpose things you already have, and so on. When we had been married for nearly 3 years, we were living in an apartment that was about 1200 square feet, three bedrooms and one bathroom, had one child and another on the way, and our apartment was FULL of stuff! We'd been wanting to de-clutter for a while, but it was a slow process because one of us would have sentimental attachment to it, or we would think that it was something that we would use "someday" or whatever other reason that I don't even remember. We were also dirt poor. In Idaho where we were, jobs are few and far between and even though our rent and utilities were very inexpensive, we couldn't keep up. We knew something had to change and were desperately looking to find an answer to our prayers. We decided at length to go with a security company that is always hiring for the summer. They had been trying to get my hubby to do sales for a few years, but sales is just too unreliable income for us since it's purely commission based. So we went with installing security systems. There are supposed to be 3 of 4 times as many salesmen as there are installers, so even if some salesmen aren't making it, installers still get good work, and get paid by the install. The man who recruited us was going to Milwaukee, but said that we could go to other places if we wanted. Since I was due to have our second child a little over a month after the summer season started, we decided to go to the Seattle area, since that's near my parents so someone could help us out after the baby was born. The company would pay for the apartment and a few rental furniture pieces (a bed, kitchen table and chairs, couches in the living room, etc.). Most people just go for the summer and then go back to their regular homes in Idaho or wherever after the summer. We were not going to school anymore at that time so we didn't have a reason to move back to Idaho. We also had wanted to move somewhere warmer, at the time we were thinking Arizona, and we had a satellite job unofficially lined up for after the summer. So there was our plan, go to Washington for the summer, then move to Arizona and live down there. We felt good having a plan, but the thing is, we had to cover the expense of going to those respective locations ourselves. There are many ways to make moving less expensive, but most of those ways were still our of our price range. So we decided the only thing we could do was to get rid of almost everything and fit just ourselves and what stuff we could into our little 1995 Oldsmobile Achieva S and drive.
 |
| This is not a picture of our old car, but it's the same kind and the same color! |
We decided this about 2 months before we moved, and on one hand we really didn't want to get rid over everything too long before the move. I'm not sure why, though I could understand the bed part, I was very pregnant after all. So we just started going through the stuff we were sure we really didn't want or didn't need. Dishes were one of the first things (our water heater didn't work very well and we had to wash our dishes by hand, plus neither of us like doing dishes, so they would pile up quickly.), though I still kept some dishes at first, then papers, papers, 50 extra birth announcements from when our daughter was born that we never sent out, some craft supplies that I'd never used, cord that I didn't know what they went to, and in the process our then almost 2 year old daughter decapitated a statue of a couple that my husband had given me in a way that made superglue ineffective, so that got tossed too. We also had to almost immediately sell our large flat screen TV that we had bought on clearance and on sale the year before with our tax return, to get money to pay enough of the electric bill to keep our electricity on (it was February, and there was about 4 feet of snow on the ground, and we had electric heat). About a month before we left we posted everything we thought we could sell on the electronic bulletin board at the local university and did sell quite a bit. We donated more and more stuff to charity (my brother worked at the local thrift store at the time and he was wowed with all the stuff we were getting rid of.) It was getting hard. Then we decided that we didn't have a way to take our bikes and the bike trailer along, so we had to sell those too. That's when I got really emotional. I loved going for bike rides with my little one in the little bike trailer, plus I was pregnant and that thing held two kids, not to mention the out of control hormones that go along with pregnancy. I just kept telling myself "It's just stuff, it's just stuff, it's just stuff..." that helped quite a bit. I had always liked to think of myself as being above hyper-consumerism and achieving some sort of status or worth from material possessions, but this was a lot harder than I'd anticipated!
When it came time to load up the car and move, surprise surprise, we couldn't fit it all in! Part of the added challenge was knowing that we were about to have another baby. If we knew it'd be a while before getting pregnant again, we could easily get rid of the little baby stuff and have just what we needed for our toddler. So we had to take the infant car seat, newborn clothes, some baby blankets and such. The crib did not make it on the list as it was a little too...loved to move. We also got a car topper and left a few boxes ay my brothers house that my parents agreed to pick up next time they went to visit them.
Getting rid of so much stuff was hard, but pregnancy hormones made it harder, toward the end of it all, I started to cry about throwing away my baby girls broken crayons. My husband got a little concerned about this and said he'd take over and told me to just go to my brothers house and rest. Such a good man. The next day we were cleaning, but it took forever (I think largely because we were SOOOOOOOOO exhausted) and we left later than we wanted to. We tried to get the whole 13 hour car trip done in one day, but of course got a late start, I don't even remember why) and by about 3 in the morning, we had to stop at a motel to get some sleep. Luckily, my dad had sent us his gas card and subway card so we could actually afford to pay for a cheap motel. The next day we made the last 4 hours of our car ride.
Tomorrow I will post about minimalism or simple living when we got to Washington
Part 2
Part 3
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