Tag Archives: Downsizing

Ho Ho……Holy Crap!

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Tis the season, as they say. Sleighbells ring, jingle bells, deck the halls, Santa Claus, and all of that stuff. And the long, dark nights of the year. I’m excited because soon the winter solstice will be upon us and we can celebrate the return of the sun. I’m slighly pagan at this time of year, in spite of my traditional Christian upbringing.

The downside to all this festivity is the decorating. Yes, I certainly DO enjoy beautiful holiday decor, and I enjoy all the pretty lights this time of year. I even smile at the pitiful rooftop santas. But it’s hard to bring a smile to my lips as I’m faced with the sheer number of boxes of Christmas crap that are stored in my attic. I took down 15 boxes of Christmas stuff, collected over the 30 or so years of marriage and two children who loved crafts. I felt like the beast of burden who carried Mary, heavy with child, as I carried each heavy box down the attic stairs and deposited it on the family room floor. At least the donkey could deposit Mary and then rest. At least Mary had Jesus to look forward to after her labors. All I had at the end of my labor was a big mess. And a determination to get rid of half of this stuff.

“Are you getting rid of all your cute little Christmas Village houses?” my neighbor asked. “I don’t know.”, I said. I say this when I am afraid to commit myself to dumping things that I can still visualize being ‘cute’ when set up a certain way. But the ancient and frightening stuffed vintage Santa? Out! The victorian house cookie jar? Gone. I’ve never used a cookie jar in my life. Cookies don’t last long enough in my house to warrant a jar. Any cookie that is going to last that long has to be stuffed into the back of the freezer in a ziploc bag.  Also gone is an entire box of ornaments that I’ve always kept because I bought them when the kids were small, along with a box of ornaments I used when Andrew was too little to be trusted close to a tree with breakable ornaments. I haven’t used them in years, but I always felt like I had to keep them. I’ve decided that rule is silly.

Instead I’ve created a small box for each child to store the precious things they made over the years. Claire’s box will have her little stuffed santa, and the pinecone wise men and wizards. Andrew’s box will have his little clay candle holder, his styrofoam heart with smelly potpourri glued to the outside, and his salt dough dinosaurs in fancy colors.

Those boxes will also contain all of the ornaments I’ve bought the kids over the years so that they would have a box to take with them when they have their own homes. We’ve had a tradition in our family that on Christmas eve each child receives an ornament and a new pair of pajamas. We allowed them to open these two gifts by way of bribing them to sleep late on Christmas morning. Now that they are 19 and 26, I feel sure I can forgo the buying of more ornaments that will mean more to me than to them. I might still consider pajamas, though.

Among the things I’m keeping is my collection of miniature ornaments. I always look forward to these each year. They are made by Hallmark, and I used to buy them every year. I think I can find a place on a sailboat for these little ornaments so that we can have an actual Christmas tree, no matter where we are in the world. I didn’t even consider getting rid of any of them.

The results of my labors are such that I will have maybe 3 or 4 boxes of actual ornaments to go into the attic at the end of the season. Half of my Victorian village made the cut, so I get to have my cake and eat it, too, on that subject. If it’s too much of a pain to set them up and pack them away this year, then they’ll go after the holidays. In all, a fairly rewarding purge, and almost painless.

Update on the furniture situation: thank God for sisters! Between my two sisters, over the Thanksgiving weekend I parted with two chairs, a cabinet, a rug, a desk, a set of china, a silver tea service, and various other bits and pieces, enabling me to move even more stuff into the garage staging area. The great purge continues!

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.

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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