Tales of Thrift: Thrift Your Life (pt. 1)

Editor’s note: hi, it’s me, I’m the editor. The content of this series is adapted from the Memoir That Never Was, which I wrote last year. The themes centered on identity-making and my relationship with secondhand stuff), but in writing it, I ended up synthesizing ideas that have been pivotal to my growth as a person since turning 40. Although I decided to shelve my Memoir That Never Was indefinitely, I decided that there are parts of it I would like to share here on the blog. It will get pretty personal/vulnerable at times, but I think the community we’ve created here is a wonderful (and safe) space, and I hope that these posts will inspire reflection and conversation. Cheers!

I like to joke there are two reasons why my husband and I are still married: we have the same outlook on money and the same taste in interior design. Except I’m not really joking. Statistics are easy to make up on the internet, but one poll conducted by a Canadian bank in 2014 found that nearly 70% of respondents reported disagreements over money as the top reason for divorce, ahead of infidelity. A British poll in 2018 found the same thing, while other polls reverse that order, but however you slice it, money issues can throw up some of the biggest obstacles in relationships. It’s a hackneyed cliche when personal finance gurus say that one of the smartest things you can do, money-wise, is choosing the right partner, but it’s also not not true. A partner who supports you in pursuing your financial goals (or who at least doesn’t hinder the pursuit) can make a huge difference to your success – and that’s before you even consider how expensive divorce is, and how much it can set people back in terms of financial security. Of course, money isn’t everything – not in life, and not when it comes to partners – but it’s one of the most important tools any of us has to create our best life. Having a partner who’s on the same page when it comes money (and how to use it) is priceless.

“Fine,” you say, “money, I’ll grant you. But what’s this bit about interior design?” To explain that, I’ll have to tell you my whole philosophy on marriage. Ok, maybe not ALL of it — and don’t worry, it won’t take very long. What I knew about marriage on my wedding day, I could fit on the back of a postage stamp. I didn’t realize that at the time, because at the age of 30, I was still convinced I knew pretty much everything. What I know about marriage now, 15 years later, can fit on the back of a slightly larger postage stamp; the main difference being that, at 45, I am constantly discovering how much I don’t know about everything. It makes life kind of amazing, to be honest. It makes marriage amazing too, though in a different, more perilous, way than I expected when I got married. Life is a process of constant discovery, and marriage is a process of constant discovery too … except that it involves not just one but two points of view, which have to constantly negotiate a (third) point of balance amidst the chaos. The person I am today is not the person I was 15 years ago; neither is my husband today the man he was 15 years ago. I mean, we look more or less the same (or so I like to think) and we talk and behave in ways that will seem familiar to people who’ve known us for years, but it’s all a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation when you get down into it.

The ship metaphor is apt here. We have sailed many seas together – some placid, some stormy – and managed not to get shipwrecked or drift too far apart, all the while each of us was slowly being transformed. When you think about it like that, it’s kind of a miracle we’re still together, isn’t it? You have to decide, time after time – all the time – that the journey is better together even though you know the journey isn’t even exactly the same for the both of you. I mean, ask two people to describe a trip they went on together (even something as mundane as a visit to Costco), and you will see what I mean when I say the journey is never exactly the same. You have to let your partner have their journey – their own point of view, their own ship. It might seem chancy and downright haphazard and, honestly, sometimes it is. Sometimes you’re trying to patch ships and find your compass while a storm is raging, and you end up soaking wet clinging to a jagged rock miles apart from the other. That’s a pretty good description of my mid-30s, actually. Sometimes it’s a great big bloody effort to swim back together and wait for the storm to pass so you can sail another day. Each of us has had to decide if it’s worth it, or even possible, over and over again.

What helps a lot is navigating with the same map. I’m not of those people who believe spouses need to be best friends or share all the same interests and hobbies. My husband is a friend but, more importantly, he’s my partner in life. Our personalities are very different and as far as hobbies go, we’re all over the place. But it helps to be on the same page about some things. The important ones. (The more of them, the better.) What are the important ones? Well, money outlook is a pretty universal Important Thing, as we’ve seen. As for what the other Important Things in your life might be … well, I wouldn’t want to try to guess. But whatever they are, it’s a lot easier to navigate life when your partner understands and values those Important Things in a similar way as you. It keeps you both going in vaguely the same direction, never so far apart that you’ll be lost to each other. And if there are times when you do lose sight of your partner for a while – when they run ahead of you, or to the side – you gotta trust that your paths will come together again because you’re both using the same map of Important Things.

Ok, but interior design? WHAT DOES INTERIOR DESIGN HAVE TO DO WITH IT?

My husband and I are both homebodies. Does homebodyness (not a word, roll with it) merit mentioning in the same breath as, say, other potentially important things like Trust or Honesty or Being Able to Put Up with Each Other’s Bathroom Habits? [I’m kidding about that last one, or am I?] I don’t know about you, but it very much does for us. You know how the world is divided into introverts and extroverts? I feel there should be another category: homebodies. As a homebody, I prefer being at home over pretty much anywhere else. It’s not that I don’t like people or activities; I just prefer to be at home or, failing that, as close to home as possible when I see people or do fun things. This means that, as I’ve gotten older, my interest in travel has decreased significantly. It’s not that I am any less interested in or curious about the world, I just dislike being away from home for extended periods of time. If there was a way to travel with my home – and I don’t mean an RV, I mean my actual house, thankyouverymuch – I would be all over it. Alas, as I am a human and not a snail, that is impossible.

My attitude would probably make life difficult for my husband if he didn’t share it, so it’s lucky for both of us that he does. He’s a chatty extrovert, I’m a bookish introvert, but we are both growing into committed homebodies as we age. Our original plan to celebrate our 40^th birthdays was to take a long-dreamed-off, kids-free trip to Japan … in September 2020. Well, as you can imagine, that didn’t happen. And now the chances of it happening are, between you and me, getting slimmer by the day. It’s not that we can’t make it happen. It’s not that we don’t like the idea of it. But the people we are today prefer the option where we stay home and use the money for home renovations. And I love that so much for us. [Let me pause here and write a note to the person who will inevitably feel moved to send me a DM to tell me how awesome Japan is and how easy and cheap and fun it is to travel there. I’m going to say this as gently as I can: I know, and I don’t care.] Which brings me to interior design. You can appreciate, I hope, that married life could get quite fraught if two homebodies who love putting a lot of time and money into their house could not agree on something like interior design.

But we do.

We don’t see entirely eye-to-eye – that would be practically impossible for two people with strong opinions about aesthetic matters – but we agree enough to make it work. In fact, our aesthetic tastes have started to overlap more and more with time; a sign, I guess, that we’re rubbing off on each other. This gradual alignment has been timely, as we have been slowly transforming our house over the course of our marriage. With each project, our creative vision has crystallized a little bit more, and thankfully, it’s crystallizing into lovely, cohesive picture and not some Frankenstein monstrosity. I can’t tell you how much that matters to people who love to be surrounded by beautiful things and view their home environment as an extension of themselves, as both my husband and I do. It would hurt my soul if he was the kind of person who liked to buy the biggest leather sofa he could find at Restoration Hardware, because I would have to look at that sofa every day of my life and be reminded of how much I hated it; and vice versa. [Let me pause here and write a note to the person who will inevitably feel moved to send me a DM to tell me how they love their big leather sofa and how I’m an asshole for suggesting they’re not the best thing since sliced bread. I’m going to say this as gently as I can: I didn’t say that, and this isn’t about you.]  I probably love knick-knacks more than my husband does, and he loves wainscotting more than I do, but those are relatively minor parts of the big picture – a big picture that started coming together more than a decade ago when we bought our house.

How and why we bought this house and not some other house will tell you a lot of what you need to know to understand us, individually and as a couple. Edmonton real estate marches to the beat of its own drum, so late 2009 was a seller’s market here. After seeing some real horror shows –including a house we dubbed “the murder dungeon” – we reluctantly agreed to up our budget and expand our search geography; a tale as old as time for young homebuyers. We wanted space and didn’t want to take on a major fixer-upper, which pushed us into the depths of suburbia. It wasn’t the end of the world, as this meant we wound up living very close to both sets of parents, but it did mean sacrificing architectural character and proximity to city attractions like the river valley, arts district, and downtown. Having previously sold my condo, we were somewhat under the gun to find a house to move into, which is how I ended up, on a cold winter’s evening, doing a bunch of viewings in an unfamiliar neighborhood with only my mom for company since my husband was working late. I knew our house would be “the one” almost as soon as I walked in. The windows did it. The living room has 3 identical windows along its frontage, a pattern that is repeated in the dining area off the kitchen. It’s a neoclassical pattern that has appealed to me long before I knew what “neoclassical” meant. Those windows, by the way – along with a few arched entryways – represented the sum total of the house’s character; it was all builder basic, all the way, beige walls and everything. Still, compared to the murder dungeons and tiny 70s split-levels we had seen up to that point, it was a veritable pearl of a house. The real estate agent had bad news for me, though; there was already an offer on it. So, I did the only thing that seemed reasonable at the time. I called my husband and told him we had to make an offer, then and there – and, in his case, sight unseen. Before you ask, no, I didn’t have a smartphone; forget Facetiming, I couldn’t even send him a single photo. And my husband did what may or may not seem reasonable, depending on your own home-buying experiences: he said OK. And, readers, we bought a house.

Now, when I say that we prioritized space, don’t imagine that we ended up in a mansion. Our house is a hair under 1,700 square feet, excluding the basement which was unfinished when we bought it. There are 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms plus a powder room, and a dining area that is smaller than it should have been according to the construction drawings. Its main attraction is a generous “bonus room” above the attached garage, which we originally slated to serve as a playroom for the kids we were planning to have. For our income bracket, it was a relatively modest house, one that many of our peers would have considered a “starter home”. Us, not so much; having assumed a mortgage that seemed enormous at the time, and then gone through the hassle of moving our college-era furniture and my already extensive collection of books across town, we decided we were DONE. This house would be the house, one and only, forevermore, amen. We were probably not the only people who made that vow in the heat of the moment – or rather the lack of it, as we had to move in the middle of winter – but we might be in a minority for sticking with it.

As our incomes grew, so did our family and the list of things about the house that bugged us — some small, some not-so-small. This is not unusual; you have to live in a place for a while for its quirks and shortcomings to become fully apparent. But instead of looking at all those things as reasons to up(size) and move, we decided we would stay put and create our dream home from the material we had at hand. This, on the whole, was a very smart decision, not least because it played a significant role in our journey towards financial independence; locking in our living expenses early, and avoiding the lifestyle creep that often goes hand-in-hand with moving “up” the property scale (and into more affluent neighborhoods), meant that we had a healthy portion of our income available for investment during one of the longest market bull runs of recent history. What a wild, and possibly never-to-be-replicated time in history that was! I feel bad for the generations who may only experience the effects of compounding interest in the opposite direction, via inflation and an ever-increasing cost of living. Listen, timing can be a form of privilege too. But this isn’t a personal finance story, and financial considerations weren’t the only upside of our decision to live small.

Sticking with our “starter house” forced us to be creative in ways that we might not otherwise have been and, in doing so, to form a different relationship with our living space than we might have had under different circumstances. We put a lot of sweat, some blood, and many tears into this house, and much of our attachment to our house is rooted in those, umm, bodily fluids. Sorry for that mental image. The house has grown with us – only figuratively, sadly – into the dream home we didn’t know we wanted when we bought it. We’ve had to learn to live with some things we didn’t love (hello, too-small dining area and non-existent mud room!), but we also discovered way more potential than we expected, which, thanks to my husband’s seriously impressive skills, we tapped to the fullest. It goes without saying: making the most of a small space is easiest when you have a multi-talented craftsperson on your team. Other than major electrical stuff, my husband can pretty much build a house from the studs up. And my role, you ask? I provide the vision. I am the “what about this” person, and my husband is the “making this happen” person. It’s important to have well-delineated roles in any successful enterprise.

Now, we didn’t walk into the house on our first day with list of things we wanted to change and a crystal-clear picture of how we wanted everything to look at the end. Far from it; we had some very general ideas, on which we made very little progress before our first child was born. At which point – and this will come as no surprise whatsoever to any parent in history – everything was put on hold. Life with babies is chaotic, and adding home DIY into the mix requires a measure of internal fortitude neither my husband nor I possess. We began to pick off small projects, here and there, once our oldest was in kindergarten; each one of those projects took about three times longer to complete than we thought it would. It’s funny, though, how small bits of progress over a long period of time can add up. A decade on, our house looks unrecognizable – no, but, like, in the best way possible. Because small projects have a habit of bleeding into other small projects, big “reveal” moments have been few and far between, but there are upsides to the fact that real life doesn’t unfold like an HGTV home makeover show.

For one thing, a gradual transformation means that you’re never taking an all-in gamble on a design aesthetic which, years down the line, might end up making your eyes bleed. It’s much easier to reverse a design direction you’ve explored via a small project, than to redo a whole house from top to bottom. And, much like personal style, interior design taste is always a work in progress. Ours evolved organically over the years, informed by the things we tried and hated to no lesser degree than by the things we tried and loved. The house rolled with the punches and evolved alongside with us. Over time, it became an extension of ourselves, a memory palace as much as a living space. The pandemic made that clear.  With two adults working from home and two kids in online elementary school, the house was certainly stretched to capacity, but it never felt too small. I never felt like we were battling a lack of space or privacy which, honestly, feels like some kind of black magic. Like, is there a secret trap door in the space-time continuum somewhere in my house? I don’t know, but maybe someone should look into that.

Our shared loved of interior design was also how I got my husband into thrifting. He grew up in a family who did not shop secondhand, even as a matter of necessity, and consequently wasn’t so hot on the idea himself. I find that a heads-on approach doesn’t typically work in these situations; you have to slowly introduce people like my husband to the idea and give them to acclimatize to it. Books were my husband’s entry point. My husband has a background in industrial design and architecture, so any sort of design book is like catnip to him. And those things are EXPENSIVE. If I’m bringing home a $100+ book that cost me less than a cup of Tim Horton’s coffee, well, he’s going to sit up and take notice. Leave a few of them laying around the house, and he’s going to start looking at them, and pretty soon, you’ve got your prey hooked.

But don’t rush things! Play it cool. Knick-knacks came into the picture next – pottery, some vintage globes, that sort of thing. My husband is indifferent to most objets decoratifs but he would, from time to time, deign to agree that something was, in fact, “kinda cool”. I took the little wins where I could get them and kept playing the long game. Art was next, and it was a big step forward. My husband is a stickler for original art and, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, that is VERY EXPENSIVE. But guess what? Not at the thrift store! Sure, you’ll need to dig through dozens of mass-produced canvases of the Live, Laugh, Love variety, an equal amount of abandoned hobby experiments, and more than a few scary clown pictures, but you’ll eventually find some gems. After I brought a few of them home, my husband was fully primed for the killer blow (metaphorically speaking) which was delivered via thrifted woodworking tools. The first time I found him a vintage Stanley No. 5 plane at the thrift store, I think a little piece of him died and ascended to heaven.  

You might have noticed that clothing wasn’t my first, second or even third thrift ‘lure’ for my husband. You have to know your audience. My husband likes fashion but, for a long time, he found the idea of secondhand clothing icky. Seeing my cool finds over the years – and seeing me wear them without any ill effects – verrrrry slowly changed his perspective. I didn’t push him on it. As he became more comfortable with the idea of secondhand in general, I started to buy him a few items of clothing now and then, starting with accessories. A Lanvin tie here, an Yves Saint Laurent tie there, a Perry Ellis leather belt. Later came shirts, and sweaters, and coats. My husband will never be the prolific clothes thrifter that I am, but in fairness, he doesn’t enjoy clothes shopping in general. Just remember, progress is better than perfection. All in all, it took nearly a decade, but I finally got my husband there … into thrift stores on the weekend, that is.

Over the years, there have been other people I’ve helped along a similar journey, and what I’ve learned in the process is that you have to meet each person where they are. Understanding the things holding them back, as well as the things that might push them forward, is key. Some people are ready to jump in with both feet, but most will need to ease themselves into thrifting. I love thrifting and I love telling anyone who will listen about how much I love it, but I’m not evangelical about it. I don’t think pulpit-preaching works. People do respond to enthusiasm as long as it’s not paired with the expectation that they need to immediately act upon it. I’ve received so many messages on Instagram over the years from people who wanted to tell me that I changed their perspective on thrifting simply by sharing my passion for it. Messages like that make me incredibly happy. Thrifting is fun and everyone should try it (at least once)! But there is more! I think thrifting can also be a transformative practice.

to be continued …