Remodeling This Life

This is a guest post from Tales From The Road Less Traveled. She blogs about “Household finance for all family types”. Check her site out and if you like what you see, subscribe to her feed!

I may not be remodeling my life, but I am sure remodeling my husband! Four months ago, I started using The Grocery Game and religiously using coupons for all of our household cleaning and grocery shopping trips. My husband, Wes, started out as a skeptic. After all, coupons don’t really save that much and there was “no real way for us to cut our grocery costs any more than we already have.” Since my first few weeks of the game, Wes has been to the store with me a couple of times. The first time, he watched in awe as our total came down from $300 to $160, including beer and wine purchases that we had no coupons for.

Since then, he’s been going shopping with me just for the amusement factor and to see if I can keep up the savings over the long term. Now that he’s convinced, he tells his friends, my friends, and everyone who stops long enough to listen about his “wife who writes about personal finance and saves insane amounts of money by using coupons.”

Last night, Wes was replaced by alien coupon clippers. I sent him to the store for some wine, since we were having a dinner guest. When he came back, he was grinning from ear to ear and couldn’t wait to tell me the news. He picked up ice cream (impulse buy, but I’m totally not gonna argue over ice cream!) and two containers of topping… caramel and chocolate. Then, with a flourish that I’m sure he practiced on his way home, he informed me that he found a coupon for $1.50 off 2 ice cream toppings, and that with the coupon, buying two name brand toppings cost far less per ounce than buying one large jar of the store brand.

At this point, I didn’t know whether to laugh or applaud! My husband, the former spendthrift, not only used a coupon (that I didn’t give him), but he compared the unit price for the best deal too. I believe the world must surely be coming to an end. But, at least I have ice cream and caramel to celebrate.

Melissa over at The Inspired Room has asked people to share their creative concelments. Since I am not at home, but at the cottage where there aren’t nearly as many flaws to cover up, I wasn’t sure what to share. Then I realized that the play area for the kids under the stairs is a creative concelment.

I didn’t even bother to tidy up before taking photos. That’s the point of the concealing, right? We get to just shut the curtains on the mess.

When the cottage was renovated a few years ago, this hardwood staircase was built. Underneath was just an open space that we considered putting a desk and chair for computing and such, but then realized it was a great place for the kids play stuff.

With the help of a couple tension rods and some homemade curtains out of fabric from IKEA, we were able to make the play area whimsical and fun while being able to hide the mess when necessary. And my daughter and son can go in there and play quietly if they want to. Everybody wins!

My mom and I had a conversation a few days ago about contentment and how it affects her life.  She said to me, “being discontent has been quite expensive for me”. She meant that because she hasn’t had a great deal of confidence in her life, she has continually tried to find her identity in material things. She has never really found who she wants to portray herself as to the world everyday and just felt comfortable. When she sees friends, she sees all the things that they are that she is not and has a hard time with that instead of seeing herself for all the fabulous yet different things that she has to offer.

During that conversation she also said to me, “I want to learn how to be happy with what I am not”. Here she is, someone who has sought contentment and happiness in material things, and she’s not very happy. She’s not entirely unhappy but she is self aware enough to realize that there are things she wishes weren’t so in her life and she wants to make peace with who she is and stop feeling insecure and the need to be something she is not.  She and my father have done well for themselves financially and so she has been able to literally afford the insecurity and the expense of her discontent, but that doesn’t make it any better.  She has paid another price entirely that she can’t truly afford because being discontent means wasting precious time and energy in the short amount of time we’re given.

We talked in that conversation about my life when I was in my late teens and early twenties, up until just a couple of years ago, when I was in the same trap. I can look back with certainty and say that the unrest in my life then and the discontent I felt was because I was trying to keep up with and be accepted by people. I wanted people to like me and the way I tried to do that was to impress them with the way I looked and the things I had. I was defining myself in material goods. It was expensive and I was miserable.

As we spoke about that time of unhappiness in my life, she said that she can see over the past year or so that I have grown into what she wishes she had. She wants to be able to say “good enough” and live with it and stop striving for nicer clothes, a newer and different house, and all the things that she fell into the trap of during her life to try to impress others. Letting other people influence who we are, what we spend money on and how we define ourselves can lead to an endless path of spending if we’re not careful or aware enough to see it.

My mom also said to me in that conversation, “You aren’t just frugal, Em. You’re content. Frugal is just a result of your contentment. It would be really hard to be frugal and live simply the way you do if you weren’t confident and content enough to live it with a smile on your face.”  I think that may pretty much sum up how frugality has become such a big part of my life in the past year or so. It fell into place once I found myself content and happy with what is. I stopped seeking happiness in what others think of me. I stopped letting others influence my tastes and choices.  I started to see in others how they were living in that trap and instead of following them through the insecurity that leads to living a life that isn’t authentically mine, I chose to go a different way.  I chose to not let what other people think of a small and simple life influence me and instead embraced it for all the beauty it presented to my life. I realized that material things make life comfortable but instead of striving for things that are beyond my reach, I know now to be appreciative of what I have. I can constantly improve, change, and even spend money.  But, I have learned that doing so for anyone but myself is a sure way to live an expensive yet unhappy and unfulfilled life.

I don’t know quite when it started, but a family friend started saying “wabi-sabi” one summer here at the cottage.  It has become a mantra of sorts for this little cottage life.

What does it mean? Well, if you asked me, I would say it means beauty in imperfection and appreciation of nature.  You can read more about it here.

Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature….It’s simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all.

It has become a pretty popular term for us here, with family and friends. The cottage life seems to really revel in the imperfect and, of course, nature. We enjoy the great outdoors daily. There is a lot of imperfection, from sloping floors and crooked doorways to us totally and shockingly imperfect people who grace this summer home.

Wabi-sabi is all about embracing imperfection, enjoying nature, seeing the beauty in flaws. Whether it is serving dinner to guests on chipped plates or tripping over loose floor boards, that is life. Trying to be perfect and make the environment around you perfect is a losing battle. Enjoy the way a creaky door sounds, forgive mistakes and stop criticizing, take in the beauty of nature. Stand in the rain.

True beauty comes from small things, simple things, moments with family or friends where you love each other despite flaws, enjoy dinner on a time-worn table, and laugh that the door frames are crooked, all while rain is falling outside on a summer day. Those things are authentic. Beauty is all around if you open yourself up to seeing it.

Wabi-sabi.

I cannot believe that it’s already been two weeks of vacation. Time really does fly when you’re having fun. Such a good reminder to soak up every single wonderful moment of life as best I can because it all goes so fast.

I miraculously caught up on all 336 posts that were in my reader this week. Whew!

Here are a few favorites:

Running - Frugal or Not? While there are expenses to running, I have found it to be just about the cheapest form of exercise. And the benefits far outweigh any expenses!

10 Ways To Simplify Your Finances. Simplify? Finances? Love it.

Be Your Own Expert. I couldn’t agree more that knowing how to do things yourself is one of the more helpful things in living a frugal life. I am a huge proponent of DIY.

50 Ways To Celebrate Life Everyday. I love seeing others that are making the most of each day and sharing ways to treat each day as the gift it is.

Redefining Productivity. Alison shares great perspective here.

7 Life Tested Ways To Make Your Simple Life More Glamorous. I am a simple girl who tends to lean toward glamorous when the opportunity arises. Love this post.

Okay, that’s all folks. Back to soaking up the sun and splashing in the water for me!