Adventures in Domesticity

Saving a Big Chunk O'Money

I've dithered about our landscaping plans and what they're going to cost in the blog before.  This time, we've finally bit the bullet and decided to get it done, hopefully sometime next summer.

This is one of the things we're not really comfortable with doing ourselves, so we're going to have to save up the cash for a landscaper.  From what I can tell, we have reasonable quotes, but this sort of thing just adds up.  I'm not going to name the total sum, but it has more than four figures and less than six.  For some people, it's probably not a huge hurdle.  For us, though, it's a chunk.  We don't have it just lying around and we refuse to take out a loan for this sort of thing, so we need a plan.

I'm the money person in our household, and I like to think of myself as a reasonably frugal person.  I'm not dumpster diving or eating rice and beans for every meal, but 80% of the movies we see come from the library and I religiously save my Cool Whip and yogurt containers for future use.  We have a budget.  I come from a family known to speak in reverent tones of someone who put cardboard in his shoes to cover up the holes in the soles.  My grandfather the Ph.D. got his clothing from the church rummage sale, but only on the last day, when everything was half price. 

I've got the basics down, but I've got my issues.  I'm willing to eat out at the drop of a hat despite having a freezer full of food and a meal plan, and my nascent crafty side thrills to the siren song of fabric and yarn.  Magazine subscriptions just seem to multiply.  Craig has toned down his purchasing sports memorabilia a lot, but will still shell out for little pieces of cardboard with pictures of men on them.  (They just have to be the right men.)  I long to be able to practice the kind of "cheerful frugality" that Meredith at Like Merchant Ships demonstrates.  I know it takes time and effort, but it just seems like so much fun as I lurk around similar blogs.

The bottom line is that this is something we KNOW we can do, we just have to set our mind to it.  We can reach about 75% of our goal simply by putting away a piece of each paycheck.  It's just that last 25% that's going to be hard, especially as we continue to work on the basement and contribute to our other savings.  We both have enough work with our full time jobs and neither of us wishes to revisit the retail hell of our college years (even for a few months), so we're going to have to get creative.  Selling off stuff, paring down bills, everything is fair game.  It'll be an adventure with a barbeque at the end.

As of today, we've saved $250 toward the goal.  Ready, set, GO!

Stopgap

Every so often, my mind starts to boil over with random items that MUST be shared.  I've been waiting for some good pictures to post, but that will probably not happen until this weekend.  So, here's the rundown of what's happening in my brain.

• A belated welcome to Steian!  According to Carl, he is currently for sale, but Craig says we can't buy our friends' baby.  We will have to settle for visiting.
• I have been spending money like it's going out of style, mostly on mediocre restaurant meals that I feel guilty about two hours later.  We're usually very careful with money and don't eat out much.  The checkbook and the scale are screaming in pain.  This must stop.  The problem is that after a certain point, I know I've been bad and screwed up, and I just don't care any more.  So I go to Barnes & Noble and buy a few things, which is also out of character.  I'm hoping to get myself back on track soon, lest I become a modern-day cautionary tale about not living within my means and the dangers of large portion sizes.
• During one of my "oh, I just don't CARE anymore" trips to Target, I tried on a few spring skirts and wrap dresses and emerged grumbling and hissing.  Not only did these things not fit, I couldn't figure out HOW they were actually supposed to fit.  It was a complete and total disaster.  I'd been itching for a crafty hobby, though, and this was the impetus I needed to make me start learning to sew my own clothes.  I had a sewing machine and some knowledge of how to use it, so I just dove in.  I bought a few how-to books and some cute practice fabric (see previous post, again), and have managed to bang out an a-line skirt in the last few days.  I'm ridiculously excited about this, and just need to take some pictures before I can explain it here in excruciating detail. 
• Crafting and sewing blogs are some of the best eye candy on the web.  During lulls at work I often find myself visiting Folded Gingham or domicile and just following their links to other creative bloggers.  My mind wanders to the time when I can quit my job and spend time in a bright and sunny room making cute crafts to sell online.  I hope there's a market out there for shoddily constructed A-line skirts...
• Craig and I finished up the electrical on half of the basement.  We now have 9 working can lights on a dimmer switch and a heck of a lot of outlets.  Pictures to come.

Backyard Dreaming

Landscape Plan
Originally uploaded by Craig and Ellen.

Last summer, we had a landscape plan drawn up.  The idea is that it will help me avoid some second guessing and worrying about plant placement over the years.  I probably won't follow it exactly, but it will at least give me something to work from. 

The landscape plan has given me a visual representation of what I'd like our backyard to be - a green sanctuary where we can have friends over to grill, read a book, or have a glass of wine without feeling like we're on display to all the neighbors. 

Unfortunately, the necessary components of this vision - a small patio and a privacy fence - come with a pretty hefty price tag.  A five figure price tag, and that's not even counting the plants.  I don't think we're quite up to patio physics, so this is a contractor job. It might be do-able, but would require superhuman feats of saving money and delaying gratification.  In the meantime, our backyard is really bare and depressing.  There are no flowers or shrubs, just a rectangle of grass being taken over by Creeping Charlie.  (My vegetable patch is by our carport, and isn't shown on the plan.)

The gap between money and desire is nothing new, but it brings up the question how much money we can reasonably put into a 1,300 square foot house in a nice-ish part of a city (the -ish is pretty key there).  What if we need to move in five years?  I can just see myself sobbing over the new basement and beautiful new patio that consumed most of our disposable income for the past few years. 

We don't intend to leave any time soon - we don't anticipate feeling the need for a McMansion in a suburb 70 miles away the moment we have kids, but things happen.  Is it really responsible to pour so much money into one aspect of a house many would consider a "starter home?"  What if the real estate market tanks and we can't get any of our money back out of the house if we have to move?  What if the neighborhood goes to seed?

Unless we win the lottery any time soon, we'll be exploring lower-cost options to make our backyard a place we'd like to hang out, as well as to help those Big Homeowner Questions rest a little lighter on my shoulders.  Any input from experienced budget landscapers (or anyone, really) is much appreciated.

In the meantime, I'm just dreaming of a green space, as it keeps snowing at a rate that makes shoveling seem futile.

Not Buying It

I'm pretty well-acquainted with the non-fiction genre dedicated to frugality, money, and consumption.  I own a well-thumbed copy of The Complete Tightwad Gazette, I've checked Your Money or Your Life out of the library at least five times in two different states, and I can tell you the difference between Jonni McCoy and Mary Hunt off the top of my head.  I strive to be careful with our money and not blow it on junk, and as a inveterate worrier, I'm in constant need of reassurance.

I really expected to like Judith Levine's Not Buying It.  The premise is intriguing - a freelance writer resolves to buy nothing for a year, excluding groceries and other essentials.  For the most part, she succeeds.  Unfortunately, it doesn't translate into a successful book.

The major flaw, I think, is that Levine doesn't ground her experiment in any sort of historical or psychological context.  She simply decides after Christmas 2003 to embark on a year of not-buying, and appears to be more concerned with The Rules of her own personal experiment than what the concepts she's addressing might mean for other people.  The (mildly interesting) accounts of her struggles with irrational longings for stuff, dilemmas about whether Q-tips qualify as necessary, and so on are accompanied by a good deal of political commentary and forays into various simplicity movements, but there's no attempt to explore WHY Americans buy so much stuff.  Consumerism has been around since the dawn of time, but from reading Not Buying It, you'd be forgiven for thinking that George W. Bush mandated it on his first day in office.

Levine's politics are what really stuck in my craw, though.  She and I are likely going to be voting the same way in any national election, but she presents herself as a caricature of the Snotty Liberal.  When she goes to movies, she sees French cinema in art-house theaters, and $4 milk in glass bottles is a justifiable expense.  She goes from looking at paint chips to grousing about presidential politics in two sentences.  ("I have better choices in paint than I do in presidents.")  The book is filled with two long examinations of a proposed cell-phone tower in her adopted Vermont hometown and the 2004 elections. 

Snotty, latte-sipping liberalism aside, what really gets me is the speed at which Levine moves from zero to political hysteria.  She downplays the economic and spiritual aspects of consuming less, concentrating instead on the political, declaring that "I don't want my country and everything in it to be sold to the highest bidder.  I don't want my government to be a plutocracy, or my presidency to be a consumer product."  That's a legitimate sentiment, but so is the belief that the meek shall inherit the earth and that people need to examine their desires, as espoused by a few of the book's much-maligned Voluntary Simplicity support group members.  There are a million different reasons to buy less, and she ignored all but one.  After all, plenty of individuals are rejecting mass consumer culture (at one level or another) for their own reasons, without an iota of desire for the kind of grand political gesture that Levine loves. 

Maybe the experience of voting for the first time in the 2000 elections has endowed me with the cynicism of a career politician, but I can't get comfortable with the idea that political activism is the only worthy application of anti-consumerism or any other concept.  Perhaps my reluctance to run up credit card debt, shop for the sake of shopping, or keep up with trends doesn't have any lasting political value, but it has significance to me, my values, and my checkbook.  And that's enough for me.

***

I searched around a bit for more commentary on this book, and found an interesting blog entry from someone who seems to feel the same way about it as I did: The Rage Diaries.  It's worth reading, if you'd like more of a (better-written) window into my mind.