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Frugal habits

No-shop days boost frugality

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Despite an extravagance (bought some dishes at Pier One), it looks like I’m going to end this month’s budget cycle in the black, for the first time since the memory of Person runneth not to the contrary. All I have to do is make it to Sunday without spending any more money.

This accomplishment came about simply by staying out of stores. Every day you can stay away from a store (or a gas station) is a dollar saved. With the week-to-week budget, I’ve found that if I can avoid laying out cash in, say, week 2, there’s enough in week 3 to cover the deferred spending. Or if I overspend in week 2, I can catch up by pinching pennies in week 3.

A day or two, or even three, is not an unreasonable length of time to hold off buying most necessities. I’m completely out of onions, for example, but so far the deprivation hasn’t killed me. I’ve evaded emptying the gas tank by telecommuting a day this week; I’d planned to telecommute again today, but in fact there’s enough gas in the tank to get me to campus and back, and so I’ll probably go out there this morning. If the gauge were closer to empty, though, I could make the round trip on two gallons. Six dollars would not push me into the red this week; though in past weeks it would have.

Before the run-up in gas prices, I had to make a conscious effort to stay out of the stores where I routinely buy supplies: I’d work “no-shop days” into my schedule. But thanks to the exuberant increase in the price of gasoline, no-shop days have become habitual. Not only that, but because I now shop exclusively in stores along my commute, I no longer shop at Home Depot.

And that, my friends, generates a surprising savings.

Last weekend I needed a few things I didn’t think I could find at the Ace Hardware, plus some potting soil, which is overpriced at Ace and at the nursery. So I made a special trip up to the Depot, several miles from my house.

One bag of potting soil, three timer gadgets for the garden hoses, three $1.37 bags of plastic plugs to cut off the irrigation lines, two cheesy plastic cord reels (last time I was in there, they hadn’t had the kind of reels I needed for months—grab it while you can get it), a bag of palm tree fertilizer, and a six-pack of tiny bedding plants came to $107.

I couldn’t believe it!

The largest single expense was the hose timers: about $20 apiece. Coincidentally, the style I wanted (a thing that resembles a kitchen timer) was the cheapest available. So that accounts for $60 + 8.3% tax: $65. With any luck, that cost eventually that will pay for itself in water savings—if the plastic junk doesn’t fall apart before the timers have recovered that much from the water bill. But forty-two bucksfor a bag of dirt, a bag of nitrogen, a few pieces of plastic, and some seedlings?

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s concluded that Home Depot cuts too much out of the budget. At 1:00 on Sunday afternoon, the parking lot was half empty. Without using my disabled sticker, I got a space right in front of the door. I’ve neverbeen able to park in front of the store; not ever. On weekends especially, the place was jammed.

No more.

The weird thing is, I’m not missing Home Depot. Its bazaar-like layout leads you to spend more than you have to on things you don’t really need. The flimsy cord reels, for example: I needed them last Christmas. Somehow I’ve struggled through nine months without them. Clearly I could have lived the rest of my life unburdened by cord reels. And had I been in Ace Hardware, I would have gone directly to the shelves that stocked what I needed and, not wandering through the electric department in search of irrigation plumbing, I probably wouldn’t have been reminded that I “needed” cord reels. Nor would I have purchased the plants, since Ace doesn’t carry them: that impulse buy would have been deferred until I could make a special trip to the nursery, at which time I’d have a list of the specific plants I needed and so would not have picked up just anything that struck my fancy.

After the $107 hit at Home Depot, I made a run on Costco for food and gas ($111), stopping by Fabric Depot along the way to pick up some yardage to make the coveted placemats ($32). This left $125 in the week’s budget—the final week in the August-September budget cycle. I did spend nine bucks on a miserable little lunch on the campus one day this week, only because I was so hungry I couldn’t go without some food, and another twenty on a few groceries. After subtracting last week’s $77 overrun, I’m still $17.51 in the black. And for the whole month: $151.99!

w00t!

Lemon and vinegar highlight your hair

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For blonde highlights:

Do this on a sunny day. If your hair is dishwater blonde or a lighter shade of brown, you can create blonde highlights by treating your hair with lemon juice. Either bottled juice or fresh will work. Wash your hair with your favorite shampoo. Then pour about 1/2 cup of bottled juice or the juice of one or two lemons over your hair. Comb it through to distribute well.

Apply sunblock generously to your skin and go outside. After an hour of sunbathing or puttering in the garden with your hair exposed to the sun, shampoo again and apply conditioner.

Lemon accelerates the effect of sunbleaching. While it doesn’t seem to cause damage, it brightens your hair and leaves you with subtle blond highlights.

For red highlights:

Mix cider vinegar or wine vinegar about 50-50 with water. After shampooing and rinsing well, pour the vinegar over your hair and massage it through the hair. Rinse well and follow with a good conditioner.

Vinegar effectively removes all detergent residue from clean hair. It also brings out the reddish highlights in auburn and brown hair.

Avoid getting either lemon juice or vinegar in your eyes! Lemon juice works best on hair that’s already on the light side; vinegar accentuates reddish highlights in darker hair.

Saved from my own fecklessness

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This weekend the fates conspired to keep me from spending money.

A week or two ago, while running around town with a friend who was looking for a particular combination of furniture, I came across some dining room chairs that exactly fit the description of the fantasy chairs I imagined would go with the table I bought four years ago. My mother’s kind of Shakery looking chairs work fine with this table, but I’ve always believed that a set of wheatback chairs with wicker seats would be just the ticket. When I got the table, I thought it would be fairly easy to find such a thing, but no! Months and years have gone by, and I’ve never spotted exactly what I wanted.

Until I came across these. They looked much like the one in the picture here, only in a nice medium walnut finish, not painted black; and the design is a little more polished. Perfect: $315 apiece, marked down for a moving sale.

Ohhkay….six of those would come to $1,890, plus 8.3% government gouge equals $2,046. A bit stiff, especially since I’d drained my diddle-it-away savings to buy the sideboard I’ve also been craving for the past several years. Four of them would cost $1,362. And there was some degree of hurry: the store is moving to a part of town that’s a long way from where I live, into an upscale area way too rich for my blood. I hardly ever go there; with the cost of gas where it is, I’m unlikely to venture out in that direction, even to get something I really want. Besides, the sales guy indicated the chairs weren’t about to sit around his floor for long.

So I dropped by on Friday and asked if I could buy just one on approval, to see how it would look with the set. No problem. Schlep this home, and…

Yeah, it looked really, really gorgeous with the table: like they were made to go together. But…

But the dining room is separated from the family room by a step up: the dining room is a slightly sunken room, so you make one step down from the dining area into it. Satan and Proserpine, the previous homeowners, took out the infelicitous wrought-iron railing that further delineated the spaces, creating a broad open area where nothing interferes with the sight line. The family room is the nicest and prettiest room in the house. When I sit at my accustomed spot at the table, I can look across the table into this lovely room with its big fireplace, skylights, Arcadia door, and handsome, simple furniture. I really like enjoying the view of the most pleasant room in my home.

Well, the chair backs are high enough that when you sit at the table, what you see is not the room but the back of the chair across the table! Nice chairs, but not what I want to gaze at while I’m dining alone. My mother’s chairs are low enough that they don’t intrude.

Saved from diddling away $2050 on unnecessary furniture! Back to the store the chair went.

Onward to more unnecessary objects: At Pier One, I recently bought some new dishes, my old set being scratched up and very tired. They’re mostly bright yellow, with blue trim here and there. To go with them, I wanted a set of cobalt blue placemats.

Think anyone, anywhere carries cobalt blue or navy blue placemats?

N-o-o-o. Not a chance!!!!!

After driving from pillar to post in search of a mat to go with the dishes, I finally found the perfect thing at Sur la Table. They had five. I needed eight. The saleslady called the catalog to order me three more: no way. She now suggests I drive halfway across the city to their other store to pick up the other three mats. I decide not.

While I’m walking around The Great Indoors, a repository of some of the most hideous products of the School of Ugly Design available anywhere, it occurs to me that one doesn’t really need table mats. Why use a placemat on a table whose surface is made of reclaimed European warehouse flooring, two-inch-thick slabs of polymerized pine with layer after layer after layer of dark wax rubbed into it? The thing is impermeable! A little water or wine spilled on it will wipe right up.I have a perfectly fine table cloth that can be used for guests.Why do I need placemats at all?

I don’t. Do you?

One less thing to spend money on. One less thing to have to wash and iron and put away.

We have a lot of STUFF in our lives that we think we need because we’ve always had them and our parents always had them and so that must just be the way things are done. Do you find that’s so? What’s in your home that you don’t really need?

Olive Oil: The ultimate hair conditioner

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Over at WiseBread, Nora has been holding forth on some unexpected ways to use powdered milk and toothpaste, ranging from softening your skin to filling holes in the wall. This entertaining discussion reminded me of something I learned from a dorm-mate in college. She had long, spectacular, radiantly shining black hair, the envy of every woman and the ruination of every man who saw her. One weekend she showed us how she used plain olive oil to condition her hair to a high pitch of beauty. Here’s her secret:

You need:

  • about a cup of olive oil (less, if your hair is short)
  • shampoo
  • plastic wrap
  • three old, clean bath towels
  • paper towels
  • a bonnet hair dryer, a gooseneck lamp or other incandescent lamp that you can move close to your head, or a warm, sunny day
  • a clean utility or kitchen sink in which to wash your hair

Prepare your tools: Pour about a cup of olive oil into a measuring cup, if your hair is shoulder length or longer; for shorter hair, you can use a half-cup or so. Place this, the paper towels, and the bath towels near at hand where you will wash your hair. Pull out a couple of lengths of plastic wrap, about two or three feet long, and lay them out neatly on the countertop.

Don’t use the shower for this process! Olive oil dripped on the floor of a shower is extremely slippery and dangerous. Bend over a large sink to wash your hair and apply the oil.

First, wash your hair and thoroughly rinse out all the shampoo. Don’t apply commercial conditioner. When your hair is clean and well rinsed, towel dry it until it’s just damp. Set the wet towel aside. Now, again bending over the sink, apply the olive oil to your hair. Gently rub it in well, so that all your hair and your scalp are bathed generously in olive oil.

Grab a few paper towels and wipe the oil off your hands. Now take the plastic wrap and wind it around your head, turban style, so your hair is firmly covered. Grab the dry bath towel and wrap it around your head over the plastic wrap. This towel should be an old one, not your favorite guest towel!

What you want to do now is keep your hair warm for at least a half-hour; better, for an hour or so. One strategy is simply to keep the towel wrapped tightly over the plastic wrap and let your body heat keep the hair warm.

Another is to drape the towel over your shoulders to absorb leaks and sit beneath a lamp with an incandescent bulb. A gooseneck lamp is good for this purpose; some floor lamps can be adapted to work, too. A third strategy is to sit outside in the sun for a while, allowing the sunlight to warm the wrapped hair.

But the best technique is to use an old-fashioned bonnet hair dryer. Wrap another couple layers of plastic wrap around your hair to try to minimize drips as much as possible. Slide the hair dryer over the plastic-wrap turban and turn the dryer to “high.” A half-hour or forty-five minutes of this treatment is extremely effective.

Whichever approach you choose, after your hair has marinated in olive oil for 30 minutes to an hour, it’s back to the sink, shampoo bottle in hand.

Shampoo your hair twice. If it’s very long, you may want to shampoo three times. If your hair still feels like it has any olive-oil residue, shampoo it again. Rinse well after each shampooing. Now towel-dry your hair with the third towel you set on the counter, and voilà! You’re ready to proceed with your regular styling and grooming routine.

If your hair looks at all limp or oily after you’ve styled it, you’ll need to shampoo again to remove the last residue of olive oil. One more shampooing should do the trick. To avoid this, be sure to shampoo and rinse thoroughly the first time around.

The effect of an olive-oil conditioning is amazing. It utterly does away with any dryness and frizzies, and it seems to last a long time—at least a month.

Clean-up

Olive oil, not surprisingly, is…well, oily. The towel used to wrap your plastic-wrap turban and keep drips off your shoulders will end up with a lot of olive oil on it. Wash thoroughly, preferably by itself in the washer. Sprinkle the absorbed oil liberally with Spray’N’Wash or a similar product and allow to stand for at least an hour. Then apply some liquid clothes detergent or a paste made of dry detergent and water to the areas that took up the oil. Finally, wash in warm water on a long cycle. It may take a couple of washings to completely remove the oil from the towel. This is why it’s best to use an old, tattered towel for the purpose! The other two towels, if you used them only to dry clean hair, should be fine—just don’t wash them in with the oily towel.

If you enjoyed this post…

Explore the way olive oil works as a facial cleanser and conditioner.
See an update on the olive-oil cleanser experiment.
Find out how lemon juice and vinegar can bring out your hair’s highlights.

A low-cost make-up kit for travel

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With airlines barring all sorts of toiletries and making it difficult or impossible to carry on more than a change of underwear, women who use expensive department-store cosmetics have a problem. Check your make-up through in a suitcase, and chances are it’ll be lost when you reach your destination. If that’s the case, you can be out several hundred dollars worth of fancy toiletries.

There’s a simple, low-cost solution. It involves taking advantage of a little secret the cosmetics industry doesn’t want you to know: pricey upscale face creams and make-up are, at base, identical to the stuff you buy at Walgreen’s.

Yes. I’m afraid it’s true. Lancôme, for example, is just L’Oréal dressed up in elegant jars and gold-plated price tags. Clinique is suspiciously reminiscent of Almay. This being so, you can safely do without your favorite products for a week or two of vacation time and still look just fine during your trip. The trick is to find something comparable to replace the liquid items you use in your daily toilette

Containers

Go to a drugstore, a camping store, or Target and get yourself a few three-ounce plastic bottles with screw-on caps. These are about the size of the free sample shampoo bottles you find in hotels and upscale motels. Plastic bottles are lighter to carry than glass jars and don’t break, and three ounces is as much as you’re allowed to carry on. Also, lay in some one-quart ziplock-style plastic bags. And a pen with indelible ink, such as a Sharpie, will come in handy.

Moisturizer

Amazingly enough, ordinary hand creams contain the same active ingredients as the most elegant, allegedly refined facial moisturizers. Look for one that has little or no perfume, so that it doesn’t clash with your favorite fragrance or annoy by filling your nostrils with some industrial chemist’s idea of what women want to rub on their hands. Keri and Cetaphil are excellent choices.

Pour a little of this into one of the plastic bottles and screw on the cap tightly. Use your sharpie to mark the contents. You can use this cream for your face as well as other parts of your body.

Worried about drying around the eyes? A light touch of Vaseline will prevent that, no matter how desiccating the motel’s air-conditioning or the sea breezes. Get the smallest container available, and apply a thin layer where you feel your skin is especially dry. Use with restraint, to avoid creating a shiny effect.

Sunblock

Neutrogena makes a very fine sunblocker, available in grocery stores and drugstores. It’s nongreasy, noncomedogenic, odorless, and effective. Transfer some of this into a small plastic bottle so you can easily pack a little in your carry-on. Pack Neutrogena’s big bottle in the check-through. That way you’ll at least have enough to last a day or so, while you wait for lost luggage to catch up with you or get around to buying more products.

Foundation

Drugstore makeup. If you’re not used to buying foundation in the drugstore, be aware that you usually can open the bottles in the store and test them on the back of your hand. Of course, your hand isn’t exactly the same color as your face, but it’s close enough. Better brands are L’Oréal, Revlon, and Almay. The coverage and effect is identical to those of the brands you buy at expensive venues. Some of these products contain sunblockers with significant SPF protection, so if you’re planning an outdoorsy vacation, check those out.

Not long ago, for example, I was at Saks Fifth Avenue, where I allowed a cosmetics saleswoman to give me one of those “makeovers” in which they demonstrate their products and try to persuade you to go into hock to buy every item in a line. The cosmetician remarked that the makeup I had on was exceptionally good. I said it was Almay. She looked blankly at me-never heard of the stuff.

Compared to the Yves Saint Laurent makeup she put on my face that day, I’d say it more than held its own.

Drugstore cosmetics — the same brands are often available at Target and WalMart — are often on sale and so cheap you can afford to buy more than one bottle if you’re not sure which color is right. I’ve found that Walgreen’s will let you return a color that doesn’t work. Walgreen’s also sometimes stations a salesclerk in the cosmetics department who has been trained to work with make-up. These women are very good at helping you identify the right foundation colors.

Powder

If you use powder in a compact, you should be able to carry this on a plane. Drop it in your handbag or carry-on. If you use loose powder, substitute compact-style powder purchased at the drugstore cosmetic counter. Another option is to purchase make-up billed as foundation and powder together. It comes in compacts and is easy to carry on a plane.

You may want to consider foregoing powder while on vacation. It really isn’t necessary. And if you’re of a certain age, powder doesn’t “set” your makeup: it settles it: into the lines of your wrinkles, making them stand out like the canyons on the face of Mars.

Coverup

An extra dab of foundation will cover most minor flaws. Otherwise, check the drugstore counters for inexpensive tubes of coverup. L’Oréal packages an especially effective one in a small, lightweight tube.

Blusher

Since pressed powders are unlikely to be mistaken for bombs, you probably can get away with tossing this in your handbag, carry-on, or backpack. If you use a liquid or cream blusher, buy an inexpensive powdered version and a fluffy brush at the drugstore cosmetics counter. You can apply it with a cotton ball, but a brush is much easier and nicer.

Blusher also often can be dispensed with. Experiment: you may find you don’t really need it, especially if you’ll be outside a lot.

Eye shadow

Here, too, if you use liquid or cream eye shadow, substitute an inexpensive powder shadow in a neutral color. A readily available combination is a light beige or pale tan with a midrange brown for the accent color. Sometimes you can find translucent golds, which look awesome on darker complexions…and on any face at the beach.

Eyeliner

Not a likely bomb. Bring your fave eyeliner along, stashed in your handbag or carryon. Or buy an inexpensive version at the drugstore, one that can get lost without any loss to the budget.

Mascara

Ditto.

Eyebrow pencil

If you color your eyebrows and your hair is brown, you can use your powder eyeshadow as eyebrow pencil, assuming you selected a tan/brown combination. Get a stiff, slanted eyebrow brush and use it to apply the shadow. If your hair is very dark, you’ll probably have to use actual eyebrow makeup.

Shampoo and Conditioner

Brace yourselves now. Shampoo is really nothing more than detergent. That’s right. It’s dish detergent. You actually can wash your hair with Dove or Ivory, whose scents are inoffensive. After a rinse with hair conditioner, you can’t tell the difference between the results from shampoo and the results from ordinary detergent.

If I’m carrying clothing that I will have to wash by hand, I bring along some Woolite. It works just fine to shampoo your hair, and you don’t have to carry two bottles of wash stuff. If your clothes will go to the cleaners or the laundromat, bring a little shampoo or detergent in one of your small plastic bottles.

You should bring conditioner, though, in case you stay in a hotel or other lodging that doesn’t supply it. Put detergent or shampoo and conditioner in small bottles for the carry-on kit. If you’re going to be gone more than a couple of days, pack the regular-sized bottles in your check-through suitcase.

If the detergent concept is too scary, check the sample-size bin at the drugstore or dollar store and pick up small containers of shampoo and conditioner that will fit in your carry-on.

Facial cleanser

Hang on to your hats, ladies. Soap will not hurt your face! Au contraire, it’s good for your face. When I was checking in to the Mayo Clinic for an appendectomy, I had to state my age. The nurse looked at me and said I couldn’t possibly be that old. “Of course I am,” said I. “Well,” she said, you sure don’t look your age.” This was after 25 sleepless hours of excruciating pain.

Fact is, I’ve been washing my face with soap and water since I was 12 years old. Apparently it hasn’t done any harm.

Plan to use the hotel’s soap. If you’re going camping, bring a bar with a moisturizer, such as Dove. Carry it in a small ziplock baggie.

Makeup Remover

Soap. Wet a bar of soap and dampen a washcloth. Wrap part of the damp washcloth around your index finger and rub some soap on the cloth. Use this to remove mascara that has run under your eyes. Wipe carefully, keeping your eyes closed, with the washcloth and warm water.

If this is too spooky, baby oil will do the trick. Stash some in another of the little bottles, and bring some cotton balls or pads.

Naturally, take your contact lenses out before applying either of these around your eyes.

Toner

A toner is nothing but a slightly acetic astringent with some perfume added. You can buy inexpensive toners at a drugstore, or you can dilute a little vinegar 50-50 with water for the purpose. Whichever you choose, store some of it in one of the small plastic bottles, and mark accordingly.

Packing It

Whether you’re trying to fit the loot in a carry-on or packing it in a check-through suitcase, remember to put all the bottles containing liquids inside a ziplock bag! Zip this tightly shut. You will have to present this at the security gage. For check-throughs, you may want to drop the first bag inside a second bag and zip that shut, too. This will prevent leakage inside your suitcase – assuming the TSA doesn’t pull the bags open and neglect to reclose them. Try using your Sharpie to label them with a polite request to reseal them.

This is where you can see the advantage of preferring powder and compact products to liquids. The more items come in plastic compacts, the more you can get into your purse or carry-on without being hassled. Transferring liquids into small bottles ups your chances of being able to fit the entire collection into a carry-on. But even if you have to check it through: if it gets lost, it’s no tragedy. You can replace the stuff inexpensively on the other end.

Tags: travel, baggage, packin

Declutter while you can

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Yesterday evening Cassie and I walked past a down-at-the-heels house in the neighborhood, its paint peeling, its roof tired, and its lawn going to weeds. At one time, the owners had a lovely, bountiful vegetable garden-someone who lived there loved to putter in the yard. Traces of their handiwork persist: the now feral vegetable patch overgrowing with weeds and bermudagrass, a trellis with a grapevine still producing lush bunches of deep purple grapes, big grapefruit trees strong and green from years of fertilizing and canny tending.

Rare among Southwesterners, these people never fenced their backyard, so you can see everything. The gardener’s old wheelbarrow lies on its side next to the house, its bottom rusted through. Mildewing frost cloths and decrepit shade curtains clutter the back porch.

At first I thought the house had been abandoned, its owners carted off to the nursing home or at least departed to cooler climes for the summer. But last night someone was home, the lights on so you could see inside the family room.

A Case Study in Clutter

What a mess in there! The place is stacked with junk: something that looked like an old exercise machine or an upended table and piles of clutter and trash that should have been thrown out years ago. Until the elderly occupant, unaware of our presence, closed the blinds on the kitchen door, you could see that room was chuckablock full of junk, too.

When we rounded the corner where the house stands, we found a car in the driveway and the garage door open. There was, after all, room for a single vehicle to fit in among the junk in the two-car garage, and so, since the driver hadn’t put the car inside, it’s possible the woman in the kitchen was a caretaker and not the homeowner. What a tangle in the garage! The place was stacked several feet out from the walls with tools, containers of household chemicals, and general junk. Someone had conceived the brilliant idea of using the pull rope for the retractable attic ladder as a device to hang bags full of old plastic grocery bags-and they must have stored a 30-year supply there! Great balloons of plastic bags stuffed with more plastic bags hung from the attic ladder rope, blocking the way to the kitchen door.

Amazing.

Don’t do this to your relatives.When you croak over — which could be any day now, no matter what your age — someone else will have to come into your house and clean out the mess. Have a little mercy. There’s no need to keep your megacollection of toy cars, hub caps, old clocks, plastic flowers, and multifarious sets of dishes with you at all times. Or every plastic bag you ever dragged home from the supermarket.

It is not frugal, not thrifty, to keep and stash every piece of junk you’ve ever managed to acquire, no matter how great a bargain it was when you got your hands on it. To the contrary: the constant acquisition of stuff drains your wealth. While you’re still healthy enough to take care of it, it burdens you with a clutter of junk to have to clean and store. When you’re too old to keep on dusting and scrubbing, it leaves you living in squalor amid stacks of mouldering debris.

The garage you paid for is meant to store your car, not trash. The space inside your house, for which you also paid dearly, is for you to live in, not to collect dust on trinkets and trash

If my neighbor had called an estate sale company and unloaded every piece of clutter that she wasn’t using, she could have had a nice chunk of cash to brighten her old age. At the very least, it would have paid for a weekend in Laughlin, Nevada

A true frugalist lives simply. And that simple lifestyle does the frugalist and her heirs a great favor: less junk to take care of means more time to enjoy healthier pursuits.

Principles of Decluttering

Here are the rules I try to live by:

  1. If I haven’t used it in a year, it goes to charity or gets sold.
  2. Nothing sits on a tabletop or counter unless it has a use.
  3. One use may be decorative, but this should be kept to a minimum: just enough to soften a stark look.
  4. I try to put things away when I’m done using them.
  5. Everything should have a place, and the “place” should be inside a drawer or a cabinet.
  6. The walls are festooned with as little stuff as possible, and what’s on the walls is the best quality artwork or crafts I can afford. Except in my office, I don’t clutter the walls with family photos.
  7. I discard empty containers, with few exceptions.
  8. It took some doing, but I finally trained myself to quit collecting old jars, boxes, cans, and fancy clothing-store bags simply because maybe someday they might come in handy. Nine and a half times out of ten, they don’t.
  9. If I find I’m not using a handy-dandy old bottle, out it goes.
  10. I do keep plastic bags, because I have two uses for them: wrapping garbage and picking up after the dog.
  11. But if I didn’t have these uses, I’d use canvas shopping bags or ask for paper bags at the store, to keep that filmy, infinitely lasting plastic out of the landfills.
  12. Instead of stuffing bags to be reused inside a plastic grocery bag hung on a nail, I use a couple of Kleenex-box-like bag holders, scored at Costco. Much neater.
  13. I have one set of dishware, not sets for everyday use and sets for entertaining and my grandmother’s Lenox from Tiffany’s. It’s a decent set of stoneware in a timeless style, which I eat from every day and which I feel comfortable using to serve guests. Ditto the glasses. Ditto the silverware.
  14. I own one set of sheets, one set of towels per bathroom, one set of kitchen towels. When they’re dirty, I wash them and put them back on the bed or into the bathroom.

Simplicity Makes Your Life Better — Long-term

It’s so much easier to clean house when you don’t have to pick up a lot of tchochkies, dust each of them, and dust around them! The less junk you acquire, the less work it is to care for your living environment.

From the vantage point of some maturity, it’s easy to see that developing habits of simplicity — decluttering your life early on and keeping it decluttered — will serve you well as you age. Not only will you save a great deal of cash over the years by not collecting junk that you rarely or never use, the easier it is to take care of your home, the longer you’re likely to be able to stay in your home. If cleaning around your stacks of junk is a major project, at some point along the line you will decide the heck with it. And it won’t be long afterwards that your kids will decide you can’t take care of yourself and move you to the old-folkerie…or worse, in with them!

1 Comment left on iWeb site

Anonymou

Hi, Vicky

At age 50, my spouse and I moved into a new home.I gave away 35 boxes of stuff to Goodwill.It felt so good that I’ve continued to go through the spaces of my new home with a critical eye.I frequently ask myself, have I used this in the last year?No.It’s gone.From experience, I know my daughter and son-in-law will appreciate this.

When my mother-in-law died three years ago, my husband and I cleared out her home in three days.We were able to do this because she had already disposed of all the unessential stuff from her life.

In fact, a couple years prior, my husband spent a few days with her (in another state) and helped her go through her house with the goal of eliminating stuff.They trashed stuff, they kept what Mom still needed, they gave stuff away, they boxed a few things for my husband to bring home, and they had a yard sale.

I believe they made a meaningful experience out of the process.Stuff helped them remember and relive the past.It also helped them consider the present and the future and what Mom was going to need in her last years.Certainly not the collection of mouse Christmas tree ornaments or the collection of 50’s era Hummel, which she worried would disappear with the inevitable strangers she would employ in her home.She wanted to be sure that we would keep the Hummel (with their historiical, sentimental, and real value) in the family.

And yes, Mom pocketed some cash.Further, she felt good about giving away things to people who would enjoy them.But most of all, she maintained control.She made the decisions about her own stuff and about how she would live out her future.

Mom left Hungary during WWII with one small suitcase.Perhaps it is with this perspective that at 80 she was able to make decisions about discarding stuff.I believe, though, that she relieved herself of the burdens associated with keeping stuff.

You offer helpful suggestions for people considering the usefulness of their stuff.Today we have various avenues for unloading stuff.We can give it to fmaily, friends, and/or charities.My friend puts it on the curb with a FREE sign on it.We can use Ebay to send stuff all over the world.My husband has amazingly good luck selling online.We have craigslist.

I personally don’t want to be burdened with all this stuff.I’m all for spreading mine around

Saturday, July 26, 2008 – 09:50 AM