There is something about January that drives people round the bend....seriously, think about it. Maybe its the pressure of overly ambitious New Years Resolutions, the guaranteed horrible Canadian Winter setting in, the constant darkness, the twinkle lights coming down or the big December hangover when the credit card bills roll in that make us crazy but it all adds up.
For most people....January is a month that starts on a high and ends with a crash and burn. We are on week three now, and for most people that means that you've already blown the diet, the exercise regime, the abstaining from smoking, drinking and other bad habits. Don't worry you are not alone.....
We did our best to stick to a budget in December and achieved a far better end result than any Decembers in our history together, but running over the bills at the end of it all, we still blew the grocery budget and the miscellaneous budget mostly due to eating and drinking indulgences for ourselves and a few friendly visits from loved ones.
Renewing our vows to stick to the Austerity Measures budget, we toasted in the New Year with a cheap bottle of Nasty Asti to celebrate our commitment to pay down the debt in 2013. It was a great feeling to know that out of the four months since we started sticking to one we met the budget for three of those.....
Flash forward to two weeks later and as I am sitting at my desk inputting the latest expenditures into our spreadsheet, I feel a sudden case of the Frowny Downy's coming on. Staring at the computer screen, I feel a sense of frustration at the numbers, as if I could just will away the money we have left owing on our roofing job and flood disaster.
With a click of the mouse I could make it all disappear and believe me, I want it to. For example, we have 28 months left of living off of a budget that only allows for $500 in groceries for a family of 5 per month, and $200 for extras like Tim Horton's, trips to the Spa to remove my mustache, fun family outings with our kids and other money things that suck that we need to pay that we haven't budgeted for.
It's like starting a diet and all of a sudden all you can think about is chocolate cake. It is exactly what happened to me last weekend, when I woke up and went off the deep end. We have what I refer to as my broken dream home....it is an amazing house that we bought as an investment of love that keeps us way busier than ever anticipated. If you have never seen the Money Pit with Shelley Long and Tom Hanks, and you have a broken dream home of your own, you need to watch it. It will keep you from jumping out the basement window on the days when you just can't take it anymore.
I woke up and wandered into the same horrible looking bathroom that I have wandered into for the last four years and maybe it was the January miseries that pushed me over the edge, but I just couldn't take one more day of the ugly puke beige colour and the 1980's sailboat border.
Nor could I stare at the mirror that the previous owner put on the wall probably found at the local dump, with the trim that he used and nailed directly to the wall around it in a lame attempt to pretend like it was an actual framed mirror.
No more could I tolerate the rusted knobs on the home crafters DIY bathroom cabinetry that require me to get a tetnus shot in order to retrieve my lip gloss. Added to my moment of inner furor is the realization that we have zero budget for any repairs for the next three years!!!! That means 36 more months of sailboat salutations that make me want to scream!!!
Like an out of body experience, out to the garage I went in a frenzy to find anything and everything I could use to do something before 2016. Dragging paint cans left over from previous reno's off the shelf, I determined I might have enough paint to do the job including the trim. Found extra paint rollers, clean brushes, wall paper remover, and window trim since the 1970's trim full of screw holes was NOT going back up. Grabbed my crowbar and hammer, screwdrivers and paint cans and stormed back into the house to confront my ugly bathroom with an attitude of Momma's gonna knock you out!
The first thing on my agenda was the ceramic wall mounted toilet paper holder and towel bar, long since painted over several times and the wooden bar in our towel holder replaced years ago by a stick probably found in our back woods, again by Mr. Cheap, the previous owner of our home and the reason why our home is in such a sorry state. Whoever came up with these ceramic wall mounted wonders, most likely a man, should be kicked in the nuts. (I can just picture the guy too, putting them in, saying..."Look honey, we will never need to replace the toilet paper holder and towel bar ever again. Its in there good and tight.")
As I smack away at the crowbar with my trusty hammer, in the background I hear my kids yelling at my husband as they run towards the bathroom in excitement, " Hurry Dad!!! Mom's smashing stuff......". Yes, indeed, Mom's smashing stuff, which means Dad definitely doesn't want to know what's going on....too many years with me and he knows its best to leave me in my madness.
My youngest two spot the tools and want to get in on the action. "Can we smash something Mom?" Boy, this could get really nuts with the three of us on board so I relegate them to using the screw drivers to remove the doors off the crappy cabinet and to pull out all the extra nails we seem to have in the walls for no apparent reason. Tens minutes into demolition, Lucy lets me know that this is the best day ever! I agree it is as we remove the last sailboat and take out the plastic vertical blinds caked with dust and yellowed with age...it is indeed a better day.
I get Lucy to work on painting the cabinets a fresh white trim colour....this being the easiest reno job ever since there was no agonizing over whether we should use maple syrup from Benjamin Moore paint or maple spice....we chose colours based on how much was left in the cans in our garage. I get her to paint the trim too and somehow she manages to get more on herself than the trim but she does it with a smile so who really cares?
In a day we manage to get the new chocolate sundae paint on the walls, redo the cabinet in white, paint a bookcase that was hanging around to use as storage for our toiletries and cut the trim for the window. The following day, I head out to Home Depot to pick up new knobs for the cabinet, a mirror found in the 70% off pile that needed a little touch up, patches for holes left by my demolition and some new holders of paper products. Total cost of renovation....$100, out of our miscellaneous budget for the month. Cost of returning my mindset to sane again.....priceless.
It can seem at moments that living on a tight budget is tough. There is no doubt that it has forced us to be a lot more creative with money than we have ever been. Waking up into a new bathroom the following morning....I realized that being on a tight budget is not as bad as it seems with the right attitude. Its okay to fall off the wagon every once in a while too, so long as we apply the 80/20 rule that says we get it right more often than we get it wrong.
I am currently reading, "Mindfullness and Money: The Buddhist Path to Abundance", in which the author describes five precepts to the path of abundance. The third precept deals with Cultivating Contentment which teaches us how to deal with our passions, our desire for stimulation, intensity and excitement. You may think I am talking about 40 shades instead of my impromptu bathroom renovation but it is much of the same thing and it manifests in our lives daily.
"Our desires go to the very heart of who we are. They shape and define us. What we take, what we push out, under the sway of craving and aversion make us who we are now. There are two kinds of desire: skillful and unskillful; reactive or creative."
The book goes on to describe how we can train ourselves to check in with our desires to convert our unskillful, reactive desires in order to make space for more skillful, creative desires to flourish.
"The root of all reactive desires is the deep, but often barely conscious sense we have that somewhere, somehow, we are currently incomplete. There is a hole deep in the center of each one of us, that we try to fill with sensory experience. Whether it is a chocolate bar, a cigarette, a new car, more money, the perfect vacation or a complete bathroom renovation, there's always something out there that we think will make us complete."
Certainly I woke up with an powerful itch that needed to be scratched last weekend, and while the relief was instant from the moment of the first crack of the hammer, I am so glad that I chose to work with what I had on hand instead of allowing the real urge of wanting to take the entire room out from the faux marble retro sink to the seniors geriatric toilet to the converted shower in a closet.
According to the author, Dominic Houlder,"No other modern people have consumed as much as we do today, and none have been so discontented. There are many apparent causes for our discontent such as social fragmentation, the pace of change, and the constant subjection to brand advertising." (I blame the Property Brothers for my bathroom reno...they made me do it!)
"The real issue is that deep down, at a part of our being we're barely conscious of, lies a sense of our own incompleteness." Perhaps this is true, I know that I felt a sense of being torn from the New Millennium with the horrible state of my bathroom since it is the first room that I start my day off in everyday....
Is the point of the third precept that we all have to give up our candy bars, our massages from the local spa, our fuzzy slippers, mochachino lattes and household comforts? Not really....it is all about having some conscious awareness when it comes to consumption and bringing the balance of material acquisition back into proportion, while learning to maintain our humanity and creativity in the context of a consumerist society.
Dominic offers five antidotes to compulsive spending urges Buddha-style. They are:
1) Cultivate the Opposite: Instead of focusing on the dream bathroom renovation with the rain shower fit for two and being bothered by our toilet that is so close to the sink that I can wash my hands while still pooping.....I could focus on applying my mental energy to enjoying what we already have or by experiencing beauty without craving by visiting an art gallery, walking in the park with my kids or catching up with a girlfriend on the phone.
2) Play out the Consequences: Thinking about where we would be financially next month if I had of allowed my desires to go unchecked would affect the things that really matter to me. The stress and worry of financial burdens quickly crowds out the good stuff in our daily lives. Most stuff is simply not worth it.
3) Cultivate a sky-like mind: My mind is far from sky like, unless you are referring to Atlantic skies which can change at a moments notice, but understanding that I don't need to act on everything that floats through my brain is important. Allowing thoughts to pass through like clouds, allows us to simply attend to the feeling, see where it is coming from, and reflect on it as opposed to acting on it.
4) Suppression: Not to be confused with repression, sometimes you just gotta say no. We don't deserve everything....that's just crazy talk. Yes, you have been a good girl or boy, that doesn't mean we get whatever we want. Tell yourself no.....even if it means saying no to something you really want like a double sink to share with your husband.
5) Make a Commitment: "We don't work to overcome our reactive desires because they are bad in themselves. Rather, we do so because we want to make room for our more creative desires to flourish, and our creative desires are often tied, not to material possessions, but to somewhat more intangible matters- to our relationships with friends or family, to our personal development and to causes we really believe in."
This is the old concept that when you say no to one thing, you are really saying yes to something else and vise versa....there is always a yin/yang experience when you make decisions. Figuring out what opens up when you say yes or no makes the difference in our ability to maintain commitment.
We have much hidden wealth and it truly is the key to our capacity for happiness. They key to my completeness in my bathroom renovation was not so much the renovation itself or the satisfaction of walking in the following morning, but the joy I got from seeing my son totally engaged in using screwdrivers removing hardware from cupboard doors and from Lucy's exclamation of, "This is the best day ever!" as she slapped paint on cabinetry.
We are your average Canadian Family and we smash stuff at a bargain price.....