so much for November

okay so clearly the one post a day in November thing was a complete and utter failure. Life happens, okay? sheesh.
Moving right along!

I have two deep, dark secrets to share with you today, dear readers. One is the dark, rotten, moldy kind, that should be kept out of sight....one is the kind that looks bright and shiny and clean but inside...well, it's more like the first one. Are you ready for this? These secrets are important, they are the secrets to our downsizing success.

1) The basement of our new house. This is truly one of the most horrific basements I have ever encountered. The walls are crumbling in various places, have been ripped out in others, and speckled with black mold in many others. I have a mold allergy and I can't spend more than 15 minutes down there without starting to wheeze. Evidence of the previous tenants abounds, from someone's sad attempt to texture paint one of the rooms (note: swamp green rag rolling does not improve a dark, dank room), to the *ahem* evidence left behind in another: tinfoil covered window, pile of soil in the corner and stack upon stack of shipping boxes. We hate our basement because it is moldy, lacks a proper door, and feels like the kind of place that makes a happy home for rodents or serial killers in movies starring Jodie Foster. But we also love our basement because it is holding ALL OUR CRAP. All the boxes, and boxes, and boxes of stuff that won't fit in our house and we might want and we don't know what to do with. And as a result we are saving thousands of dollars in storage fees while we figure out what we're doing. So we (or maybe Beth given my wheezing issues) are going to tackle the basement with mold spray, gloves and masks, and put all the stuff in boxes in shelves and in plastic to protect it from the damp we know, and the damp we know will come!
wish us luck.

2) My other dark, deep secret isn't really much of a secret. It's IKEA.

IKEA, shiny blue and yellow Swedish siren, luring me to your shoals of disposable consumerism. You with your crunchy, green, family friendly image, your shining clean ballroom, your cheap meatballs and fries. But really are you any better than Wal-mart or McDonald's ? Despite your shiny exterior, your insides are just as tainted by the pursuit filthy lucre.

I returned to the blue and yellow behemoth, Toronto version, for the first time this past Saturday. By some cosmic miracle both our children agreed to stay in the play place as my wife and I giddily skipped through the store. 3 groggy hours later and many, many dollars poorer, we staggered out into the bright daylight of a North York parking lot...wondering how yet again we had been lulled into consumer complacency and wasted almost a whole Saturday inside.

the secret here? I guess it's just that I keep on believing all my downsizing problems can be solved if I spend enough money on Expedit shelving.

unexpected gifts

our new, smaller home has brought with it a number of logistical challenges and minor and not so minor annoyances (freezing windows, quirky electrical, lack of fans in bathroom AND kitchen).

But it has also brought a number of little gifts. Gifts that at first masquerade as major annoyances.

Some of the unexpected gifts:

1. No dishwasher. For the first time in 8.5 years, we have no dishwasher. As we like to joke that our first dishwasher saved our marriage, this hardly seems like a gift. But it is...we are rediscovering the zen-like relaxation of doing the dishes by hand. And we are discovering that we have grown up a lot in the last 8.5 years--instead of arguing over who will do them and making large passive-aggressive piles of dirty dishes, we just get them done and move on.
   
2. No TV. We do have Netflix on our desktop so we are not completely screen free but the lack of tv means we have to be a lot more conscious about our viewing. No channel surfing, no turning on the tv just because. And as a result, more time spent reading, baking and doing all those wonderful TV free activities.
3. No need to drive the car everywhere. This is more obviously a gift, but we are all appreciating the ability to walk many more places we need to go and get lots more exercise along the way. We love not using our car every day!
4. One bedroom & two kids...we worried this would be a disaster, especially with our 5 yo who likes to have things exactly to her specifications and likes her space. But they seem to really enjoy sharing a room , lots of giggling, fort building and two sisters who are growing closer every day is the result!
   

What unexpected gifts have you received lately?

our new place

so a few people have been asking me about our new place.

Some great things about it:

-It is not as small as I feared
-our bedroom is huge, and our king size bed fits in easily
-the attic playroom is delightful and features a secret floorboard for hiding cool things (hopefully nothing valuable...)
-the kitchen is workable, especially with the generous loan of a lovely butcher block topped island from some great friends!
-there is LOTS of storage space in the basement.
-the bathroom is freshly redone.
-we back on to a pretty ravine with a train track running through it. The girls, especially our youngest, LOVE watching the trains go by. Which they do at roughly 10 min. intervals during rush hour.
-wonderful neighbourhood & dream location!

Some not so great things about the place:

-it is FREEZING...windows need replacing, some spots need caulking. Overall I feel like wrapping the whole place in shrink wrap for the winter. I shudder to think of our heating bill. Actually I just shudder.
-the kitchen counters were designed at a time when the height of the average Torontonian was about 5'
-the fridge light is broken & hence is always off.
-the window in the playroom is lexan, not glass, and half of it is an air conditioner. I'm sure that's great in the summer....
-we're right beside a train track, and the whole house rattles each time one goes by.
-it's an older home, hence it does not have enough plugs. And about half of these plugs don't work. And when my LW (*lovely wife) tried to change an ancient fuse, sparks flew. We are calling an electrician.
-the previous tenants had 3 large hairy dogs. The place was not properly cleaned after they left. The dogs scratched up the floors and either the dogs or the tenants punched a hole in the bedroom wall.
-someone painted the lovely exposed brick wall in the living room white. I mean really??!!

Overall, I'm feeling conflicted on the whole home ownership thing. After owning our own place for 7 years, it's kind of nice to look around and think that all the maintenance on this place is NOT my responsibility. But I also love this little place and kinda wish it was ours so we could take it in hand & whip it into shape...if we ever got around to it!

So far, I have been here for 8 days, and I have not, I repeat NOT gone to IKEA. Aren't you impressed?

taking the smaller the better to the extreme!

Not a real post, but a friend linked me to this incredible website of a house designer who designs truly tiny homes, anywhere from 89 to 800+ sq. ft.


Now there's some inspiration!

selling stuff sucks

Now I remember why we usually can't be bothered to do this, beyond a garage sale or two over the years.....

First you have to locate the item. Then you have to clean/repair the item (granted that my lovely wife usually takes care of these first two if I whine enough).

Then you have to decide how much to charge for the item....somewhere between 'I love this and others should appreciate it's unique beauty too' and 'hahaahahaha oh well at least it sold and we didn't just give it away.'

You know what else sucks about selling stuff ? Going back & forth, back & forth, back & forth with people over email and phone about how great said item is, how convenient it is for them to pick it up, how you have the perfect price, how big it is, how much it weighs, its shoe size, where you live....and then they never show up at the stated time and just disappear, entering the twilight zone of used item sales....never, ever to be seen or heard from again...

And yet when you are downsizing in the rather extreme way that we are at present, it's hard to get around selling stuff, sucky though it may be. I mean it makes a lot more sense to sell certain big ticket items than to try to store them in our limited basement space for an indefinite amount of time...and definitely makes a lot more sense than paying to store them somewhere else...

Some of the items we have managed to sell in the past few weeks:

• our rooftop car box thingy (we haven't used it since we got a bigger car 1.5 years ago).
• our espresso machine (we figure we don't have enough counter space and will be living closer to fancy coffee shops).
• Our lovely sit & stand stroller to some friends who just had a beautiful baby girl, baby #3, a few days ago. Time for Annie to walk more--at age 5.5, I think she's ready so long as we can handle the whining.
  
• Our big brown bunk beds...they will not likely fit in the girls new tiny (6' by 10') bedroom and will be replaced by, wait for it, something smaller from IKEA!
• This old, slightly odd looking wooden hutch from Beth's grandma's house. She was most decidedly NOT sentimentally attached to it (whew! I could learn from this example).
  

Some of the items we might, with any luck, be selling in the next couple of days:

• our leather couch. Lovely, but we also have a pull out couch and we need things with more than one purpose.
• Our Double Chariot Cougar Stroller. Weirdly we are having a lot of trouble offloading what is usually a hot item in Ottawa.
  

Some of the items we seem destined never to sell and might as well give up on at this point:

• our beautiful Radio Flyer Liberty Spring Horse. Perfection in plastic horse form. And yet nary a nibble...
• Our IKEA Robin bed. Maybe everyone else has read that they don't make it anymore due to pokey corners "(http://forum.canadianparents.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=198432) hmmm. maybe that's why we can't sell it.
• Our ibert front mount bike seat...perfect for carrying your toddler in front while your big kid rides on her trail-a-bike in back. If you're a toddler, imagine this: sun in your face, wind in your hair, waving and laughing at passersby, and for added enjoyment periodically leaning over to mess with your parent's gears/brakes/bell. hmmm.
  
• Our change table/dresser.
• A lovely Fisher Price pack n' play

(As you may sense from some of the above mentioned items, we have rather firmly decided that our family is complete, no more cute little Clarke-Ward babies will be coming our way. And yes, in our case, that is a rather definitive decision....for obvious reasons).

Some of the items we probably should sell but haven't brought ourselves to part with yet:

• The girls' massive 3 storey dollhouse
• Our Queen size bed & mattress.....mmmm such a nice mattress. And that nice basket-weaving IKEA bed. (IKEA should start sponsoring this blog).

***********************************************************************************
So now it's Sunday morning, and we have officially sold the couch, bringing to about $1000 the amount we have made selling stuff so far. Not too shabby and will definitely help pay for the move.

Except this time I think we may have gone too far. I am now experiencing a serious case of seller's remorse. What were we thinking!???!!!! That was our nice leather couch. The one that looked like it belonged in a grown-up's living room, not in a grad school apartment. The one that did not get dirty, no matter how many times it was peed on, spilled on etc. The one that never showed the cat hair from our WHITE cat. The one that was comfy and cozy. The one that I guess was really too big and anyway had a tear in it and really it is JUST a couch and we can always replace it some day and really it is just a thing, just an object, let it go, let it go, let it go....

Anxiety & insomnia can really be funny sometimes. No really. Not usually in the moment, but in the harsh light of reality that follows. As in, what the hell, I woke up early worrying because we sold a couch? Don't I have more important things to think about and worry about? Like hoping someone will buy our house?

There now, I feel better already. Maybe I'd better watch another therapeutic 15 minutes of hoarders. (and buy a new cover for our remaining IKEA couch?? That would probably help too, though it sort of goes against the whole point of this blog!)

Hmmm that gives me an idea for another post: how a green living, simple living, slightly broke Quaker girl like me still finds shopping strangely therapeutic at times. yikes!

Downsizing and downshifting

I am now officially downwardly mobile, and I couldn't be happier about it.

In the next six weeks, I will:

• drop my salary
  
• move from owning a home to renting (at least for now)
• move from a 2100 sq. foot, 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom suburban home to a tiny downtown row house with 2 functional bedrooms, 1 bathroom and a tiny sink with no dishwasher. (the horror!)

And yet, I couldn't be happier. According to my family, I've smiled more and laughed more in the past week than I have in at least 2-3 years. And yet, I know we have our work cut out for us, and I am definitely anxious...anxiety being something that runs in my family in a serious way. More on that later.

Follow me as I try to get rid of a whole lot of stuff, and try to make our current home and family fit into our new reality. Follow my kids, an anxious five-year-old who feels "ambivalent about moving" (direct quote), and our happy go lucky two-year-old who's biggest challenge is not breaking all our stuff before we pack it. And of course my lovely wife, who is working like crazy to make this all happen for us.