No New Furniture for the Foreseeable Future

(Warning: Whining Ahead)

So I’ve discovered that the place where we were going to buy carpeting is closed until further notice. And the furniture store where we were going to buy our sofa and chairs has put our favorite brand on sale…but only the floor models. What does this mean? Is the factory not running anymore? And if so, when will it be up and running again? Or won’t it?

These are small inconveniences compared to those who are fighting the virus. But they’re still real. We can make do with our old furniture, but it sure was fun thinking about the changes we were going to make.

It seems like this isolation is just taking the fun out of life. My grandkids are going to forget how to hug Grandpa and me; a couple of months is a long time for a little kid. Thank goodness we have Skype.

Now that it’s getting nicer out, it’s a good time to go through the house and declutter, finding everything we’re not using anymore and donating it or having a garage sale…except that that Goodwill is closed and people aren’t supposed to go to garage sales. I’ll just have to keep that excess in a corner of the basement until it has somewhere to go, I suppose.

(Whining Over, Hopefully)

Don’t Let Your Windfall Turn into Clutter

As a writer, I’m not paid weekly; I’m paid monthly. Every month, it’s a different amount, depending on my book sales. Once in a while, there’s a surge of sales, and I’m paid a lot more than usual.

That’s exciting, but it’s also dangerous, because it’s very tempting to take that money and buy new clothes, new bedding, new furniture….what I want to buy usually depends on the size of the windfall.

The true danger lies in the fact that I know how easily I fall into the trap of wanting more things, which is how I got into the overcluttered life in the first place. Not only was I good at accumulating stuff, but when I got new stuff, I often kept the old stuff because “We paid a lot for this,” or “Someone might need this.” That kind of thinking is one reason that I ended up with a big house full of stuff plus two full storage units. If you tend to let cash burn a hole in your pocket, you may be prone to accumulating stuff, too.

Even if you’re paid weekly, you can still end up with a windfall in the form of an annual bonus or a much-larger-than-expected tax refund. Then there are the larger sums: your Uncle Ernie leaves you $5,000 after he dies, or you finally win the state lottery’s $25,000 prize.

I immediately put extra cash into a savings account so I don’t spend it impulsively. But that doesn’t mean my brain has stopped thinking of ways to spend it. However, my family and I worked very, very hard to get rid of all our excess possessions, and we enjoy living in our small, clean, uncluttered house now. We do not want to go back to living with too much stuff. Sometimes it occurs to me that we could buy a house that’s a little bigger than what we have now, to accommodate our growing family of grandchildren when they visit. But I fear that a bigger house would just mean more places to accumulate things.

So what to do with the windfall? How can it benefit us without overloading us with the wonderful things it might buy? I’ll share some ideas next time.