Tag Archives: Downshifting

Craigslist Lament

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The Shabby Chic table: Sold for $50.

  So, it’s been awhile since I’ve updated this blog and I thought I better get to it. This is the time of year when I feel most like doing nothing; just laying around in bed eating bonbons all day or looking at boats on Yachtworld.com ( a personal weakness that borders on addiction).  But since I don’t eat bonbons anyhow, and I am supposed to be using this blog as the proverbial fire under the hind end, I’ve actually been making progress at home, even if not on the blog.  See?  It’s working!

When I last posted, I was commenting on the sheer number of pieces of furniture we’ve collected over the course of a 29 year marriage. I’m coming to terms with disposing of some of those pieces and now I feel the urge to comment about the use of Craigslist as a tool for selling unnecessary items.  To be more precise, I feel the urge to complain about my Craigslist experience.

The promise of Craiglist, that of easy, free posting of unwanted items which will soon be sold to people just waiting to buy, is a fantasy. At least the second part is a fantasy. Yes, the posting is free, and fairly easy, even if it does take some time. But the part about people waiting to buy said items really must exist only in my rather too-vivid imagination.  To date I have spent around 4 hours photographing and posting items on Craigslist and I have sold exactly one item, a little white Victorian table, for $50, which is $25 less than what I listed it for. That amount of work has earned me $12.50/hour and 1.5 square feet of floor space.  I think the only reason the table sold is that I used the term ‘Shabby Chic’ in the title.

We’ve had a number of emails asking if this item or that is still available, and then when I email back that it is available….. NOTHING! What is wrong with these people? Or maybe they don’t actually want the item, only to know if we still have it, like they need to be reassured that it will be there whenever they are ready.Or perhaps they email only so they can laugh as they expertly dash our hopes of an easy sale.  Or maybe they are  lonely people who email others just for the joy of getting an email back.

I wonder if the problem is deeper than that, however. I wonder if our sales problem lies more within a change that appears to be happening across the country, if not across all western nations. I wonder if the problem we’re having with selling our ‘stuff’ to others is because overall, people are getting tired of accumulating all that stuff in the first place. It’s no accident that there are so many books on downsizing, clearing clutter, etc. and that there is a movement to build smaller houses. It seems like collectively we have already ridden the crest of the wave that allowed us to collect and sell lots of ‘things’. I wish there were data that compared the relative ‘success’ of a garage sale now to one held 10 years ago.

And although many people do not have the extra cash now that they did 10 years ago, this ‘buying less’ mentality is not limited to the cash-strapped masses. CnnMoney published an article this month stating that even the wealthiest people in the U.S. (defined as those making more than $130,000/year) will be buying fewer gifts this Christmas. Maybe I’m not defined as ‘wealthy’, but I can assure you I am among those who will buy less. Patagonia recently announced they are starting a new campaign to get people to buy fewer things, focusing on buying better quality and making those things last. Why, that’s downright UN-AMERICAN! Frankly, it looks like just a smart marketing strategy since, according to a recent New York Times article  people appear to be holding onto things longer across the board; making them last; repairing rather than tossing things and replacing them. Our mothers and grandmothers could give us a lot of advice about this.

Putting two and two together leads me to believe that his evolution of values we are experiencing means that eventually there will be fewer items for sale on Craigslist. So you’d think that people would be rushing to buy our things in anticipation of the times of scarcity! Don’t these people prepare for the future? Maybe I should re-title my listings: THE END TIMES ARE UPON US! BUY THIS NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. ALSO: SHABBY CHIC!!!  I’ve heard that the more exclamation points a listing has, the more people pay attention.  No? Okay. But if that doesn’t work, we’ll have to have a garage sale in December.  Cash only, you pick up at our Lakewood location. Haggling cheerfully accepted.

 

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Imagine the Life You Want to Live

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Preparing to Purge: The staging area.

As a psychotherapist I spend a lot of time asking my clients to imagine what their lives would be like if they made the changes they want to make. I ask them to imagine themselves living this new and improved version of the life they have.  I’ve spent much time myself imagining the kind of life I would like to live in the future; where I would go, what kind of boat it would be on, what it will be like swimming in warm water and living where the sun shines. Being warm.

None of this prepared me for reading the question in Peter Walsh’s book It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, the book I’ve chosen as my guide for the Great Purging.  He asks people to imagine their ‘ideal lives’. When I imagine my ideal life, the dreams always seem to include leaving my home and going somewhere else. And that probably tells you something about me. But that’s not what Peter is after. Peter wants people to imagine the ideal way of LIVING in their Current Home! WHAT THE F..?  I never once considered that question in terms of HOW I am living in the home I currently own. It was a jaw-dropping moment  when that hit me, I assure you. I had to have a long bath in order to recuperate.

No one has ever accused me of being organized. Creative, yes. Free-thinking, yes. Attention deficit disordered, yes. Organized? Definitely not. It isn’t that I don’t try. I have invented more systems for getting our stuff organized than I can count. But they never seem to last. And now, thanks to brilliant Peter, I know why.  It’s because I’ve always been focused on “the stuff”, as he says. This man, in one simple paradigm-shifting part of his book, (the Introduction, for those of you who are reading along) completely changed the way I think about clearing out all the stuff that clutters up our lives.

He wants me to imagine things like being able to find my keys, having decent work flow in the kitchen, and being able to sit down to a meal at a table without clearing it off first. He wants me to imagine flat surfaces that exist for their own sakes, a closet where clothes can breathe and I can find things I like and that fit me. He wants me to imagine living in my house free of the stress that comes from having to constantly negotiate the amount of clutter just laying around all the time, with no real place of belonging. It isn’t that I haven’t thought about and wanted those things. It’s just that I have not actually imagined what it would feel like, or how it would ‘look’ if life flowed that way at my house.

Peter wants me to imagine what it would be like if I had been able to move into this house with intention, being thoughtful about where things go and how things are done and then keeping those systems in place. This is the opposite of our move-in experience.

Eleven years ago we moved into this house on a holiday weekend. The house was a ‘fixer’. The only updates it had were done by the previous home-owner who apparently had no idea what the term ‘square corner’ meant. And it was filthy. I mean it. When my kids took showers the walls in the bathroom leaked nicotine from all the years of the previous owners’ smoking. It was just disgusting. It looked like the bathroom was haunted. Every wall in the house needed to be sanded, sealed, and repainted, including ceilings. We had to demolish the family room (one of those home-owner specials) and have it rebuilt. We had the master bathroom enlarged and the kitchen updated.  I’m pretty sure our kids hated us for at least the first 6 months as we all slept together on the floor of what would be the family room. It was the only room I could get reasonably clean.

During the remodeling years, (yes, plural) our things got shifted from one room to another. We lived in the house one way, and then lived in it another way, until the remodeling was finished. By that time we had collected more stuff and still had no system for living in the house. Kids grew up, went to college, came home, left again. These are the times when systems should be able to flex and change to accommodate new patterns of living. But if you don’t have anything solid to begin with, it’s pretty hard to get it to be flexible without the whole system falling apart. My attempts at organization were futile. Now I see that part of the problem is that I was always focused on “the stuff” and where to put it in the tiny closets. According to Peter, this will not cut the mustard.

According to Peter, if you focus on the kind of life you want to lead, getting rid of the stuff in your way makes more sense. So, accordingly, my wedding dress is now hanging in the garage with loads of other ‘stuff’ that is in the way of my living the life I imagine. The dress is in good company with stuff like the old sealskin coat from the 1930’s that I bought for 15$ when I was in highschool, two sets of china that are lovely but that I’ve used maybe twice in 10 years, and funky American pottery planters from the 1940’s that I used to collect and that now collect dust.
But what about the cool old Villeroy and Bosch majolica plate with a gnome on it? I love that thing and it’s so… me! I know it’s not on display right now, Peter, but surely you have a heart? In fact, he does. The gnome collection stays, in part. Only the ones dearest to me. And they will be packed away in the tiny house in the attic.Since we’ve now begun this Great Purging as the first step in our cunning little plan, I now understand that I must strike a balance between the vision I hold for living in our current home, and the one I hold for our future life on the boat, and into our next land based home, wherever that may be. As I go through cupboards, closets, and drawers, holding these visions before me, I ask about each one: Does this help me live the life I want to live in my home now?  Does this item belong in the life I will live in the future? If the answer to both of those questions is no, out it goes. Peter would be so proud.

He's living the life he wants to live.

First….Get a Million Dollars

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First…. get a million dollars. That seems to be our favorite saying around here whenever Mike and I start dreaming about our little cunning plan to live the cruising life on board a sailboat. This is a saying that reflects the daunting task before us: to uproot our lives and set sail to exotic (we hope) locations before we get so old our teeth fall out. It seems like if we just had a ‘million dollars’ the distance between our lives now and the life we want to lead would almost disappear. Heck, with a million dollars we could probably set sail tomorrow! Well, almost.

We’re classic. Really, we are. Both in our early ‘50s, after 29 years of marriage, child rearing, home ownership, and careers, the wick of the proverbial ‘candle of time’ is getting short. Also, we’re sick and tired of working. And I mean that to be inclusive of all kinds of working, including keeping up with all the stuff that owns us like the house and gardens and all the detritus of an American life lurking in the garage, attic, and various other areas with closed doors. Don’t get me wrong. We’re part of the lucky few who really do enjoy their professions. It’s just that if someone walked up to us and gave us a million dollars today, we’d retire.So what makes this worthy of a blog? It’s not like this situation isn’t repeated ad infinitum in households of 50-somethings all over the USA. We’re no different than any other couple our age in that way. Except that we have a plan! Cunning it may be, but it’s, well, complicated. There are lots of steps and they are not as straight forward as all the self-help books lead one to believe.

Here’s the crux of the matter: In 4 years, when our son graduates from Western Washington University (knock on wood), we want to be in a position to rent out our home and set sail. It sounds easy, no? No. It does not. Like I said, it’s complicated. First, we have to ‘downshift’ our lifestyle: reduce the amount of stuff we have accumulated over 29 years. I understand this is a freeing experience. At this point, I take other people’s word for it.At the same time, we must prepare our home to be a rental. This alone may take the better part of the next 4 years as we make needed upgrades and finish projects that have been waiting around twiddling their thumbs.  We’re talking refinishing floors, replacing flooring in the office, finishing the tile in the laundry room. You get the general idea. Oh yeah, I forgot finishing painting the trim in the family room. This requires a ladder taller than what we already have, which is why it remains unpainted after 10 years.Then there is the choice of boat. This is where the million dollars would really be helpful. At this writing we are the proud owner of a 1976 Cal 34, SV Moonrise. She is a great boat. We love her. She is safe and sea kindly. She is stout of heart and her V berth is as comfortable as our bed at home. But she is not really our choice of boat for the extended cruising we have in mind. She is almost paid for, though, and we struggle with whether we should take the plunge and get something else now, or wait. More on that later. Suffice to say that I wax and wane about this, knowing that whatever boat we have, we’re going to be working on it and upgrading it. We can work on and upgrade the Moonrise for the next 4 years and then try to get something else we’re more comfortable with, or we can take the plunge and buy something else now and spend the next 4 years upgrading that. Did I mention that we have a kid in college?

So, again, why the blogging?  Mike’s a computer programmer so he’ll give his own answer to that. For my part, I got serious about thinking about it while reading the book Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously  by Julie Powell. The book describes how Julie makes a goal of working through Julia Child’s cookbook on French cooking by systematically creating every recipe in the book over a period of one year. What struck me, other than the sheer genius and insanity of such an idea, was the support she received from the followers of her blog. It kept her on track; it motivated her when she wanted to quit. Selfishly, I want that. I think.

I figure this is a good way to keep myself organized, set goals, and if I put those goals in print, follow through with them. Our little cunning plan is a complicated one and will take a lot of energy and direction. We need to carry on with it in a measured way, accomplishing one small task at a time. So this blog is entirely a selfish exercise on the one hand.

On the other hand, I have noticed that with few exceptions, people who make these kinds of huge life changes talk about them after they have accomplished their goals. (One notable exception is the Robertson’s blog Log of s/v Del Viento. Check it out.) There are plenty of interesting blogs written by people who are already living the cruising life. Lots of their stories are punctuated with the advice that one should ‘Go now! In the boat you have!’.  Thanks for that. Give me a million dollars and I’ll ‘go now’, but not necessarily in the boat I have. I get the point, but it’s not realistic for us.  I believe there are many, many more people who are like us and need to take some time to extricate themselves from long and fruitful land-based lives than there are who can drop everything and go. So I will write things I think will be helpful to others who are in our same ‘boat’.

So this blog will be a little bit of  this and that and more than a little about our love of all things sailing and boats. It sounds like it’s going to be all over the map but it’s really not. All of these things will be involved as we implement our Little Cunning Plan. Stay tuned.