El trato

I’ve been sleeping downstairs for about a week now. I like it. I certainly don’t miss making up the couch bed every night and putting it away every morning. And somehow, my son stopped waking up in the night right when I went down there. Interesting…

We moved the dresser downstairs a week ago to. This past weekend we moved our clothes out of the armoire and into the downstairs closet (my first real closet since I left my parents’ house at 22! Why do I always end up sleeping in what is supposed to be the living room? SF living I guess…)

{We’re taking it slow because the threat of bedbugs is one you don’t let go of easily. Someone has been sleeping down there for over a month with no sign of them and I still worry they will suddenly come back with a vengeance. Evidently after 6-8 weeks we can feel very certain they are gone. Right now, at 4 weeks, we can feel fairly certain.}

We’ve made a couple of big purchases related to the move downstairs. We got the Couchbed that I slept on for three weeks, and that will remain upstairs for when we rent out one of our spaces, or have guests stay (obviously neither will happen for a long time). We bought an electric standing desk for the downstairs. I had been using a standing table at work for years and loved it, so I started looking at them when we had to shelter-in-place. We’re both working from home for the foreseeable future and we needed a desk anyway, so we went big with a 30×60 standing desk. My husband thought it was kind of ridiculous but now he loves it, which is good because he ends up using it more anyway.

I also got a new Dyson cordless because our old one was VERY old and since those don’t have bags, we risked bringing bed bugs upstairs if we used the same vacuum in both units. So now, after a Costco sale last month, the old one lives downstairs and the new one lives upstairs. Our old one was probably first generation and the new one is an X and it’s SO MUCH NICER than the old one. I heart it very much.

So there have already been some big purchases around here. But with a whole new space to move into I have more stuff on my list. I’ve spent weeks looking at different possibilities and have compiled a sheet with the links and prices. We have plenty of time to furnish the downstairs and transform the upstairs, so there is no hurry. Well, there is no hurry, except my own desire to buy stuff.

Luckily I’ve spent enough years learning about my spending habits to recognize what is going right now. First and foremost, “window shopping” online is a fun way to pass the time. It gives me something to look forward to when all the other happy things I was anticipated have been cancelled. Second, I recognize that I want these things because I want to love my house more, but the main reason I don’t love my house already is because it’s messy and stressing me out. Getting something new is not going to solve the issue of clutter overtaking our house. If anything, it will make things worse because there will be less space to put our stuff.

So I’ve made an agreement with myself – un trato if you will (It’s funny how there are some words I just prefer in Spanish, usually because they have a slightly different meaning and the Spanish meaning fits my idea better than its English counterpart). I can’t get anything new until I’ve dealt with my current pain points in the house. I haven’t decided exactly what needs to happen before I can buy certain things, but I have some preliminary ideas. We have a GIANT cupboard in the downstairs bathroom, and since the upstairs bathroom has NO storage (except a paltry space under the sink) collecting all the toiletries from around the house (there is even a box in the garage that was taken out to the shed when the house was heated for the first bed bug treatment), purging the old and organizing what we’ll keep in bathroom cupboard would be worthwhile task. The garage also needs a massive purge and would make me feel better about things in general.

I am reticent to start purging though, because I am finding it harder to get rid of things these days, and not just because there isn’t anywhere that’s accepting items (that I know of – maybe I’m wrong about this?), but also because having been thrust into this, I’ve definitely found that I’m using things I might have gotten rid of otherwise. I definitely hoard resources (books, games, etc) more than most things and it’s harder to throw things out now that I know life might be turned upside down. Having said that, I recognize that if I’m not planning on using some of those resources right now, I probably will never use them. So I guess it helps and it hurts.

We need a new vertical chest of drawers (maybe two narrow chests) downstairs because our bed has to be in the corner with our wider dresser and we don’t like the bed in the corner. So that is the first things to get. We also need nightstands as we were using the mantel above our bed (remember, we slept in the living room, with our bed pushed up against the fireplace) as our nightstands before. I think if I get the bathroom stuff done, we’ll get the bedroom furniture and then hold out for a while on the other stuff (a convertible sofa and coffee table for downstairs and eventually a California King bed! EEK! MY DREAM!)

I guess the good news is we won’t be spending anything on summer travel or camps so we’ll have the money for this stuff. We also have some stimulus money to spend (though most of it will be donated because we don’t think we should have gotten any if the first place). One step at a time…