contemplating a radical downsizing
Aug. 8th, 2008 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aslantkirk and i have been talking a lot about buying a house. or, scratch that, buying land, and what we might do with it. last night i showed him the tumbleweed houses, which he hadn't seen before. he was enchanted, as i was. but then we had a discussion about what it might actually look like to get rid of all of our stuff, and we started to run into problems and tricky questions.
what do we do with our treasured book collection? where does a sewing machine fit? would we sell the letterpress? (been thinking about that for a while, since we haven't touched it in a year.) store our video game systems at my parents' house? a tiny house is cute and all that, but it's essentially like moving into an RV. we'd bring the bare essentials: some clothes, reference books, table games, some cookware. there's not even an oven. and there is no space to store endless sentimental things. or even bulk things, like cases of glass jars for canning. or six amethyst cut-glass iced tea glasses from texas. or my old journals. we have boxes and boxes of this stuff, either in our cupboards or in the attic.
kirk says we could just rent storage space and keep things there that we absolutely can't bear to part with. but i can't help but think we would be storing away the things for our 'real' life. the life with a legitimate kitchen, an expansive bookshelf. the fact that we started to get kind of anxious or weirded out by this idea is a sign to me that maybe we're not ready. or it's just not the right step.
maybe homesteading is my calling, but it doesn't have to be combined with living in a minuscule house, or at least not yet. and we could still pare down a lot of our belongings in order to have less of this accumulated sentimental effluvia.
ETA: But also, what is the point of our treasured book collection? Isn't it essentially scenery, props, unless we re-read? I can think of a few to keep that I do constantly reread. The River Why. Wise Children. Good Omens. The Secret History. Middlesex. Almost everything else (save ref books on gardening, cooking) I think I could let go of.
what do we do with our treasured book collection? where does a sewing machine fit? would we sell the letterpress? (been thinking about that for a while, since we haven't touched it in a year.) store our video game systems at my parents' house? a tiny house is cute and all that, but it's essentially like moving into an RV. we'd bring the bare essentials: some clothes, reference books, table games, some cookware. there's not even an oven. and there is no space to store endless sentimental things. or even bulk things, like cases of glass jars for canning. or six amethyst cut-glass iced tea glasses from texas. or my old journals. we have boxes and boxes of this stuff, either in our cupboards or in the attic.
kirk says we could just rent storage space and keep things there that we absolutely can't bear to part with. but i can't help but think we would be storing away the things for our 'real' life. the life with a legitimate kitchen, an expansive bookshelf. the fact that we started to get kind of anxious or weirded out by this idea is a sign to me that maybe we're not ready. or it's just not the right step.
maybe homesteading is my calling, but it doesn't have to be combined with living in a minuscule house, or at least not yet. and we could still pare down a lot of our belongings in order to have less of this accumulated sentimental effluvia.
ETA: But also, what is the point of our treasured book collection? Isn't it essentially scenery, props, unless we re-read? I can think of a few to keep that I do constantly reread. The River Why. Wise Children. Good Omens. The Secret History. Middlesex. Almost everything else (save ref books on gardening, cooking) I think I could let go of.
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Date: 2008-08-08 09:11 pm (UTC)retirement savings can be used as a down payment, if you've saved anything there.
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Date: 2008-08-08 09:36 pm (UTC)i have a retirement account, but not enough. i think you can take out max $10k without penalties for a home -- i have around $7k but that won't get us anywhere near a 10% down payment for a house in town. if we go further out we might find something, but we'd be trading off commute time and gas money, etc.