Category Archives: Organizing

In Praise of Quitting: Coming to terms with Sunk Costs

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Sunk Costs: Something to avoid in a sailboat

Sunk Costs: Something to avoid in a sailboat

On the way into work this morning I listened to a great Freakanomics Podcast on the economics of quitting. The Upside of Quitting is a great listen if you are new to the Freakanomics team of Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt.  They apply economics theory to a wide range of topics from hitchhiking to child rearing and make the application of The Dismal Science a compelling listen. Their book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, is an entertaining primer on practical economics.

So how does being a quitter and economic theory have anything to do with our plans, cunning or otherwise? Well, at some level, Melissa and I are trying to figure out how to quit doing what we do and living how we live. How does one quit living in a traditional house, going to a traditional job, and living a traditional American life? There are costs, financial, social and emotional, associated with such decisions and I am still struggling with how this is going to look on the other side.

In the podcast Dubner enlarges on the economic idea of Sunk Costs. Sunk costs are expenses that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. As we look around our home, I cannot help but consider what may well be considerable sunk costs for living as we have. The garage fills with more and more items that are destined to be sold at fractions of their original value or donated outright and it is liberating and crazy-making at the same time.

The trap of mourning sunk costs comes when we expend time or effort  to recover some of its value beyond an item’s worth. Anyone that has invested in a losing stock and held on to it as  a company spiraled into bankruptcy is familiar with the idea of the sunk cost fallacy. A purely rational evaluation of a the stock’s value and prospects should provide sufficient warning that the stock should be sold. But humans are seldom rational, and the sunk cost fallacy hinges on our optimistic valuation of the money or time we have already spent.

And so I look at furniture and other household goods being staged out in the garage and optimistically over-value its resale hoping to recover far more than I actually will. Likewise,  I continue with my current job at least in part because I have already put so much time in with this company and would hate to loose all that time and effort. These aren’t perfect examples of sunk costs but they serve to highlight our conflict.

Melissa has written about our furniture collection and the emotional process of letting go of items that she has worked so hard to restore. We both have put most of our adult lives into creating a space for ourselves and our children to grow and feel comfortable. Letting go of these sunk costs is not easy. Hard hearted economists like Steve Levitt might be able to jettison old furniture, but I hope Dr. Levitt will forgive us for lingering a bit over the loss even as we look forward to the the new possibilities our future life affords.

Collecting Furniture: One Family’s Story

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Living Room Furniture

The velvet chairs, an antique oak coffee table, and my mother's buffet.

We have a problem here at The Cunning Plan household. This is going to be a sticky one, taking all of my resolve and much of my energy in terms of putting the proverbial money where the mouth is, if you get my drift. I may have to rely on Mike for strength. To be succinct, our problem is that our daughter,Claire,  is moving home for awhile as part of her own cunning plan for the future. It’s not what you think. This isn’t a ‘rebound kid’ situation. She has a great job and is a fully formed grownup. We welcome her back and look forward to having her. But not her stuff. We don’t look forward to her stuff.

Actually, to be brutally fair, it’s not really HER stuff we’re not looking forward to. Oh, sure, there will be the usual transition time where we all learn to live differently in the house once more and people wrangle for personal space for their belongings (NOT in the middle of the sitting room, okay?)  But we’ll get through all that. After all, we’re all adults here. The real problem is that she is bringing home more of OUR stuff in the way of furniture. Claire has the most adorable apartment in the world. It’s in an old Victorian house, has a bay window, hardwood floors, and an exquisite little fireplace. And it’s almost completely furnished with our furniture. Ouch. She’s going to be bringing an apartment full of furniture back home. Do I need to explain this further?

How does a mild-mannered family of 4 collect this massive amount of furniture (asks the curious reader)?  Here’s the gist of that:  Mike and I have been married for almost 30 years. Most people collect a myriad assortment of furnishings over that amount of time. In addition to the sheer number of years, I have a tendency to be somewhat…’creative’. Yes. That’s the word. Creative.  And while I love really good, solid furniture that stands the test of time,  I am pretty frugal when it comes to purchasing furniture. Okay, fine! I’m cheap when it comes to purchasing furniture. There is something about putting down several thousand dollars for, say, a couple of chairs, that just gives me pause. I’m getting better about that as I get older, but for the greater part of 3 decades I have had an alter ego that has landed us in this mess. Who is this alter ego, ask the inquiring minds among you? Melissa White: Furniture Stripper!

So much of the furniture we now own are pieces that I found for almost nothing at a rummage sale, or thrift shop, or the like and then nursed back to life. Pieces like the solid maple gateleg table I bought for $25 when Claire was about 5. It had several layers of paint on it. I stripped it, sanded it, stained it and painted the legs black. It’s beautiful. Or how about the solid maple dressing table with Queen Anne legs that I bought from someone for 20$ when Claire was 3? It’s heavy as all heck and has graceful lines. Again with the stripping, sanding, staining. It’s a fantastic piece of furniture and has been used as her dress-up table, my desk, and a sofa table over the years. It’s very versatile.

Then there are the two overstuffed chairs with rolled arms I bought because I knew they were quality pieces. I paid the best upholsterer in town to do them in taupe velvet. They are classic. I probably cannot buy chairs of this quality anywhere. And there is the very old steamer trunk I bought when I was in highschool. It was my first ‘antique’. I refinished the wood on the outside, wrote my name on the inside, and took it to college with me.

More furniture

One of the many upholstered pieces I've resuscitated, and old chest that will likely go, and a corner of the steamer trunk.

This is only a small sampling of the pieces I must decide about. (Oh, those velvet chairs are staying. Let’s be clear about that right now.) So much of our family’s history is represented in these pieces. Many of them I bought when the children were young. We couldn’t afford to buy nice furniture without going into debt, and we didn’t want to do that. But I wanted nice things. So I became pretty good at something I enjoyed anyhow. And we ended up with a home filled with priceless pieces that are personal and lovely and somehow make our home warmer than new furniture ever could. I have an oak dresser that belonged to my parents when they were first married. I have two large book cases that my mom got in the early 1970’s. I have a solid wood buffet that my mom got when I was a young child, now refinished with funky green glass handles.  I grew up with those pieces, and they are really nice. I would choose them again today. They are irreplaceable. How could I possibly part with them now? These choices are going to be really hard.

I had a dream a few nights ago that I was back in college somewhere and someone had stolen my bike. I was late to class and arrived pushing a shopping cart with only one item in it: a bike lock. I pushed that cart across the front of the class, in front of the teacher, and then all the way to the back of the class before being seated.  That dream is pretty clear to me. I do feel as though I am learning new and hard things, lessons for which I am only marginally prepared. I have no idea how I’m going to get from one “class” to the next, as though somehow I’ve been too cavalier in protecting what is mine. I am left with the lock, but my bike is gone.  It’s apparent that between releasing myself from the ownership of things that are intimately entwined with my personal history and publishing this blog to share that process, some part of me is beginning to feel like a homeless person on parade.

I know this feeling will pass. I realize it’s all a part of the process of letting go. But I’m reminded, once again, that reading about something is so much easier than doing that thing. So Peter Walsh, if you are reading this blog (as if…) please be gentle with me. Because I’m not going to promise that I can let everything go in one fell swoop. Maybe there is a reason why this is a 4 year plan.

 

 

Organizing My Kitchen: Getting Rid of Clutter!

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Just because I’ve posted about the concepts of living in a ‘tiny house‘ and ‘visualizing your life‘ doesn’t mean I’m not doing the work! This plan is all about the work of organizing my house so we can live on board a sailboat. I’ve started in the kitchen and I’d like to share with you the ‘before’ photos of my cabinets. Mothers and grandmothers everywhere are shuddering bleakly as I open the dark recesses of my kitchen cabinets to the curious public. But, hey, whatever it takes to keep me focused and on-task. I ask only that you be kind in your comments. I’ve been living this way for years and have only now understood how I’ve created my own stress. It’s a significant blow to the ego and I need time to recover.

getting rid of clutter

It looks like I need help organizing my house!

Looking at the first photo, on the left, you will see a cabinet that is being used as a bookcase, a medicine cabinet, and I don’t know what else is on the top shelf.  Down below there is a basket of miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t have another home, some jars of home made jam and salsa, and way in the back, my box of cookie cutters, which I use approximately every decade.

Now lets turn around to get a load of the glassware cabinet, which is supposed to ‘add’ to the decor of the kitchen. Martha Steward I am not. (Although I could be if I had her staff.) On the top shelf are champagne glasses we use on Christmas day only. They are too tall for the shelf so you can see only their red bottoms.  Then there is the lovely teapot given to me by my daughter several Christmases ago and our good glassware.  On the bottom is more of our glassware, some cups (hanging) that I never use but like anyhow, and our tea boxes. There is also a tea canister with the word ‘Paris’ on it. Very chic, to be sure.

Organizing the kitchen

Organizing the kitchen will make me happy!

The cabinets below the glassware were equally ill-used. Heavy corning ware was stored with the waffle iron, crock pot, hand blender, and rice cooker, among other miscellaneous kitchen-related ‘stuff”. The snap-ware was jumbled in a basket. Suffice to say that whoever did the dishes on any given day used this cabinet as a catch-all for things that had no other place.

Clearly the only solution was to dump everything on the floor and start over.

I was ruthless when clearing these cabinets out. I completely emptied them, tossing things in the garbage or Goodwill box as I went. Peter Walsh was right. The garbage can IS my friend.  Out-of-date medicine? Gone! Broken binder with recipes printed out on computer paper with the little perforations on each side? Trashed! (For those of you too young to remember, computer paper used to come in one long sheet, with perforations on each side and at top and bottom. This kind of paper came along right after mimeograph sheets, which also no longer exist.) Stacks of dishes I found on the top shelf? Half in the staging area in the garage, half stored neatly in an appropriate cabinet. I tell you, I was without ruth!

Astute readers caught the illogical use of this cabinet for medicines. What you didn’t know is that the medicine chest in the main bathroom stood literally empty. I know, I know. Don’t hassle me with your logic, okay? I’m baring my soul here.

I got side tracked for a couple of hours while I searched for materials and then constructed another shelf for the medicine cabinet, but in the end, all the medication and first aid stuff fit very nicely, with room to spare. Between the two sets of cabinets I got rid of two large boxes of stuff and filled a huge trashbag. Misson accomplished!

The next question was how to restock the cabinets in a more organized way. This is where The Book comes in.  Because of internet information overload, I’ve chosen to stick with Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff.  There are many books out there, but I’m happy with this one and don’t want to clutter up my mind with extraneous information. So, in the chapter on kitchen organizing, Peter talks about the ‘magic triangle’ concept. I was familiar with the concept, but not in terms of organizing, only in terms of working. So when he said that the things you use most often need to be inside the triangle and the things you use least need to be way outside of it, that helped enormously with decision-making here.

The first set of cabinets is just outside my work triangle, so things I use but not very often can live there. I also needed a place to store all the canned goods I’ve been making this year, and it’s been a handy place for the cookbooks I do use.  At the bottom will go kitchen gadgets that I use rarely but still enough to keep them, like the waffle iron and the heavy casserole dishes.  We’re not living on a boat yet. You can see the results in this ‘after’ photo. I am determined to keep those voids empty! In the end there was plenty of room for the little red toolbox, which we keep handy with basic tools for quick jobs. Potatoes and onions and the like will be stored in the basket.

Clutter free and logical, too!

The second set of cabinets said goodbye to the crystal glassware, which was moved to another space. I had to put the cute teapot in the Goodwill box, with a slight sigh of pain, because we have an electric tea kettle we use all the time, several times per day. The teapot is pretty, but I can’t take it on the boat, and I never use it anymore. Gone, too, is the ‘Paris’ canister. Clearing this cabinet out gave me room to store the large pasta bowl that has lived above the refrigerator for 10 years. I use it infrequently now that we’re gluten-free, but it also serves as a good salad bowl. And I like the way it looks.

organizing kitchen cabinets

The organized cabinet.

This cabinet is not being put to its best use yet, but at least it’s cleared of clutter. I may put a door on one side and store my baking supplies here because this area offers much more counter top workspace than the area I generally use. This would also create more food storage space in the kitchen, a constant irritation. I’m going to save that for phase 2 of the kitchen reorganization.

The lower cabinets are now holding only the things we use frequently and need easy access to. Of course being easily accessible also means they will be easy to put away, a constant challenge in my family. The snap-ware is all organized and on one shelf, although Mike made a valid point that we likely could get rid of some of it. That could happen.

This organized cabinet is with arm's reach of the work triangle.

Mission accomplished in this cabinet.

Mission accomplised! With room for the Vitamix.

So we’re off and running with this whole ‘staying organized at home thing’! The hardest part so far is going to be finishing with one room before I go on to the other. Can you say “Attention Deficit Disorder”? I have a new mantra: “Must finish what I start. Must finish what I start. Must finish what I start”.  I might be losing that battle because I started on the closet in the family room already, and the kitchen organizing is still underway. I’ll do the walk of shame later, I promise.