The kitchen work continues + before and after photos

The kitchen for us was one of the few places in our lives where we felt it actually made sense to try to get more space instead of cutting back on the number of items we owned. The food allergies we have mean that it's not necessarily safe to prepare items on the same surface or using the same spoon/fork/bowl, which means we own two versions of everything. Two sets of plates, two sets of mixing spoons, two sets of pots and pans...you get the picture. In spite of some serious decluttering we still own a lot of stuff.

To get more space, we knocked down the kitchen wall and replaced the wall with a peninsula with cabinets. Here's what the kitchen looked like in October after the wall came down and peninsula went up:

And now. Please ignore the mess!

The kitchen looks awesome and it is so much easier and safer for the two of us to work in together. The backsplash goes in next month and then we'll be finished.

We did a little extra decluttering when we put everything back in the cabinets. The number of kitchen items we own became a small problem when our new stove arrived. Our new stove has a warmer drawer instead of a drawer to keep baking sheets and the like. We decluttered a few things from our baking sheet cabinet so that we can consolidate the two sets of baking sheets into one (separated) cabinet. The five things that went out were a cutting board ($5), two purple cafeteria trays ($8) a broiler pan (free -- it came with our condo), and a small jar that we used as a bud vase. I'm very excited to be so close to done with the whole process.

Have you renovated your kitchen? What was the experience like?

Traveling a little too lightly

I love traveling and was super lucky to spend this past weekend in Austin, Texas. Not only did we get to enjoy celebrating two friends' wedding but I also got to meet Austin Eco Mama Megyn! She's an awesome lady and I was thrilled that we got to enjoy being outdoors and having a tasty lunch together. 

While the weekend was awesome, it had a few funny mishaps. I definitely learned that a little minimalism is good but sometimes it helps not to be trying to pack as little as humanly possible. Neither one of us had traveled by plane in over a year and we'd forgotten a few things.

If you're going to be stuck on a plane for hours, don't forget your entertainment at home!  I hate traveling without anything to do and yet managed to bring an audio book but no headphones. I spent $10 on new headphones. That's okay, I now have a spare for the office. 

If you do bring entertainment, don't leave it in the seat pocket! The Chief Engineer is mildly addicted to his kindle. Unfortunately the addiction wasn't strong enough to keep his kindle from finding a permanent home in the seatback pocket of a Boeing jet. I don't use mine much so I suppose he'll be getting that one instead of us purchasing a new one. 

A spare copy of your itinerary will keep you from accidentally leaving your car at the wrong airport. D.C. has a lot of airports and it's not uncommon to purchase airplane tickets that have you leaving from one airport but coming home to another. We neglected to print out copies of our itinerary and just went on our memories. Unfortunately this meant that we left our car at the Baltimore airport but found out on our way back that our return flight would take us into the Reagan airport in DC, a good hour away from where our car was parked! The Chief Engineer heroically metro'ed it up to Baltimore, got our car, and drove home after I took the train home from Reagan. 

Girl Scout cookies shouldn't be dinner! Food in airports and on airplanes is expensive. In fact, sometimes it's downright non-existent when you only have 1/2 hour between flights, like we did on our way home. I had potato chips and girl scout cookies for dinner on the way back because we forgot to pack a meal. 

In the end all was good and we had a very enjoyable trip. But next time I'm definitely going to write down what I need in advance and I'll follow that list. A few extra items would've saved us a bit of money and aggravation. But still, it was an awesome trip. Thanks again to Megyn for the wonderful afternoon out!

When is a hoard not a hoard?

Hoarders often make a lot of excuses about how their hoard isn't a hoard. Some of my favorites?

"I'm just a clutterbug." As if saying that makes the piles of junk okay. 

"If I had time, I could clean this up." Never cleans it up even though the hoarder actually has plenty of time.

"I'll get around to it." Never does. Never will. 

"There's nothing wrong with this. It's not that messy." Completely ignores the fact that rooms are unusable for intended purposes. 

"This mess isn't my fault, it's yours." And the personal responsibility goes right out the window. 

All of these responses beg the question, when is huge, life-disrupting pile of clutter not a hoard? Let me give you an example of something that looks like a hoard but isn't. You saw the matrix room a couple weeks back. That was before we started having our kitchen renovated. Now 3/4 of our kitchen drawers are in the matrix room. And because clutter begets more clutter, the room has also been made home to our pile of stuff to donate, the things I require for telework, and my bike. 

The room is barely usable for its intended purpose. There's clutter everywhere. I've even got a collection of used glasses sitting on the pile of baking sheets. If you stepped in the wrong place you could get hurt, and hurt some valuable stuff too. So why isn't this room hoarded? 

This isn't hoarding because it's legitimately temporary. We know the kitchen will be finished next week. By next Friday this room will look the way it did before and it will stay that way. The "magnetic clutter" that found its way there mostly did so because we've had to move the contents of other rooms around to accommodate completely giving up our dining room and living room to our contractors for a while. But we have a plan for cleanup and we know when we will act on it. The stuff is not there for emotional reasons, it's there because our contractors needed us to remove the drawers to fix the cabinets. 

Thank heavens this isn't permanent. It's driving me insane in the mean time. And for fun, here's what the kitchen looks like right now.

There goes the dining room

And don't forget the stove in the living room.  

But at least this horrible, disgusting sink is gone. It was this 'clean' when we moved in two years ago. I am so lucky that we can have our kitchen renovated.

Less stuff, fewer loans challenge 1.5 months in

Back in January I decided that all of the "surprise" money that showed up should (if possible), go towards paying off our remaining loans and then building our emergency fund. Here's how we've done so far.

Emergency fund goal: end of year	Kitchen Loan (1.99%) due in Oct 2014	Student Loan (2.65%) goal: July 2015
Starting balance: $0 Goal: $20,000 As of 2/19/14: $0 $0 saved so far 0% filled $0 $20,000	Starting balance 1/1: $10,000.00 Balance on 2/20/14: $5,376.99 $4623.01 paid so far 46.2% paid off $0 $10,000	Starting balance 1/1: $8,127.00 Balance on 1/14/14: $7862.99 $624.01 paid so far 3.2% paid off $0 $8,127 Get a progress bar at DollarTimes.com

I only started keeping track of payments on Jan 10th. But since January 10th we've paid off $3842.73 worth of our loans! My goal was to put $3,000 a month to this task. Only 1 month and 10 days have passed and we've well passed the $3,000 mark. We're doing well. Our Kitchen Loan has $5,376.99 left. At our current rate we should have this paid off in two months. 

Unfortunately something that may put a snag in our ability to pay this debt off in two months is the fact that said kitchen is getting finished next week. We're temporarily holding on to extra money so that we're sure we have enough to finish the job. But after that I also should be getting a promotion at work and that should make up for any extra money that has to go to the kitchen. 

Afterwards we'll be focusing on the emergency fund. We'll do this by putting $1000 from my biweekly paycheck directly into that account. We'll start this on May 9th. That way there are 20 pay periods left in the year. Then we can apply all of our 'surprise' money to my student loan, and whatever is left of the kitchen loan if anything. 

My student loan has become less of a priority. The stock market is likely to do well in the next year and I would still prefer to invest some of my money. I may extend my goal of paying off the student loan until July 2015 and make a separate stock trading account where I put any of my personal 'surprise' money and then invest it. That will keep me from spending it.  I've gotten very good at investing and have figured out how to prevent most losses. I'm pretty sure that I can manage a return decently above the 2.65% in interest that my loan charges me.

That's the plan! What are your thoughts? 

Why working out at a military gym has been key to my eating disorder recovery

In recent years I felt that going to the gym was a chore. I felt like I never had time for it.  I always had too much to pick up at home, too many errand to runs. Now that I've accomplished most of the decluttering, organizing, and found some balance in my life I feel like I have the time to go to the gym. It's been an unusual experience.

I used to hate my time at the gym because I would push myself incredibly hard, particularly when I was at the depths of my time as an exercise bulimic. I hated feeling like my body was on display. I hated the fact that the women competed with the women, the men competed with the men, and the men hit on the women. When I went to a women's gym it was even worse, because suddenly all I was doing was comparing my own body to others' (possibly also eating-disordered) bodies. Generally making myself miserable.

But this time I've been fortunate to have one huge change in my workout routine that's made the experience much easier on my eating disorder: I go to a military gym. I've never been a member of the armed services but my company works closely with them so we are allowed to use the local military base's facilities. Typically I'm the only woman in the room. But this doesn't bother me. Here's why.

• None of the men oogle. Ever. Why? Because they have no idea whether or not I could be their commanding officer. 
• The women don't try to prove that they have better bodies than you. When I see women they're often in fantastic shape but they're never condescending about it. Why? Because they also don't know if I outrank them. Fat shaming someone at this gym literally could cost someone their commission if they did it to the wrong person. So no one does.
• The guy on the upright bike next to me had his legs blown off by an IED in Afghanistan. It's impossible to go to this gym and not work out around Wounded Warriors who probably have some serious body image issues themselves. They're still there, giving it their best, staying healthy but not using exercise to punish themselves for what went wrong in their lives. I have no reason to complain about my body. Mine may not be perfect but fortunately it still has all its parts and I am damned lucky for that.
• Fitness is many of these people's job but it's not mine. Depending what you do in the military part of your job description may be to stay in fantastic shape. Those people are duty-bound to spend hours each day working to ensure that their bodies are in particular condition. I'm not training for combat. My physical fitness doesn't have to save my life. If I can't bench press my body weight (when I was in high school, I could, believe it or not), or be toned and muscular all over, it's nothing I need to be ashamed of.
• They have a dress code and they take it seriously. No bare midriffs. No cleavage. Keep your shirt on. Cover up your tush. If you want to show it off, go do it somewhere else. What you can do is what matters here, not how you look. Not to mention that a sexual harassment court martial is no one's idea of fun.
• Respect, respect, respect. Just because I can barely do hamstring curls with a five pound weight doesn't mean I'm looked at like I'm weak. Everyone is willing to help out when I have questions about the weight machines. Everyone seems to consider people where they are because you never do know where someone came from. Maybe the guy who can only bench press an empty bar does that because he got badly hurt in Afghanistan. It's not his fault. The point is that we're all there trying to improve ourselves in a healthy way.
  

This gym's environment is a HUGE help to my self-esteem. Moderate exercise for 30 minutes, 3-5 times a week is no longer an exercise in emotional self-harm. I couldn't be more grateful to our armed services for allowing me to use their facilities and return to a normal life.

Well, that explains things

The condo may be decluttered, but my psychiatric life is still very, very messy. Back in November I quit Cymbalta after gaining 20 pounds on the med in four months. My psychiatrist didn't seem to care, so I fired my psychiatrist and got a new one, who I saw for the second time today. I have a new diagnosis. Apparently I'm bipolar.

Specifically, I'm bipolar type II.  Unlike what you commonly know of as bipolar disorder (aka bipolar type I), bipolar II doesn't have the full-blown manic episodes. I instead have what's called "hypomania," where I'll have a day or two where I'll be extremely happy, impulsive, chatty, be super social, and go on spending sprees. For days, weeks, or months between these hypomanic episodes, I'm either 'normal' or down in the dumps.

Tuesday the 4th was my hypomanic day. I got of work early to run some errands downtown so I was super excited. I celebrated this 'freedom' by going shopping at Macy's and dropping $250 on stuff I never planned to buy -- a new pair of boots, eyeliner, and running pants. I went to my doctor's appointment afterwards and just couldn't shut up when I was talking to the tech. I mean, sure, talking about medical stuff is exciting to me as a medical librarian, but I didn't give this guy room to breathe. I came home and just kept talking about what an exciting, wonderful day I had, and literally could not stop talking. I didn't want to go to sleep at my usual time that night, I wanted to stay up. And the next day, I crashed hard. I was depressed, couldn't concentrate, and I binged for the first time in a month.

It all makes sense now.  It also explains why the antidepressants never really seemed to do a good job. Apparently ADs don't really work for people with bipolar disorders.

The next step in the process is to start on a mood-stabilizing, rapid-acting "anti-psychotic" medication: Abilify. If this works we'll gradually taper me on to something that has less chance of weight gain, possibly Latuda. The 20 pounds I gained on Cymbalta that still haven't come off are not helping my body image in recovery. This doc is willing to listen and wants to make sure that I don't put on any extra weight from the meds.  As soon as anything seems fishy, she wants me to call her and we'll find another med. Phew.

I think for some people a bipolar diagnosis can be a traumatic experience. But I'm glad now because I know what's going on with me. We can now treat it with appropriate medications. Hopefully this will also help calm the shopping sprees. I look back now and realize that I don't buy stuff when I'm depressed, I buy stuff when I'm really happy. Now that I know that the "really really happy" is a hypomanic episode I can see it for what it is and understand why it's important not to act on those desires. The food binges that happen when I'm severely depressed will hopefully also become less problematic.

I'm not expecting meds to fix everything, but I'm looking forward to a more mellow life experience, and getting back to being me.

I fulfilled my dream. Now what?

 

What were your goals in life as a young adult? Mine were pretty much focused on escaping the life I grew up living. I wanted to

 

1. Have a neat and organized house without a lot of stuff

2. Have a happy, respectful marriage where I felt safe

3. Work at a certain Really Big Library doing things I enjoyed

4. Have enough money to do most of the things I wanted without feeling too restrictive

5. Stop caring so mcuh about my weight

6. Have some respect for myself.

 

And in many ways, all of those goals (except #2 and 3) were things I set out to do when I started this blog a few years back. And as my posts got fewer and farther between, I started to ask why. Well, it's because I've actually achieved those goals. My home is tidier than ever. I feel very settled in my marriage and I'm keeping my parents' very destructive marriage as far away from me as possible. I got a great job at said Really Big Library (quite literally, my dream job). Even though I'm still paying off a few very inexpensive loans, we'll easily be out from under them in 6-8 months and I'm expecting a promotion at work in the next two months. I can look in the mirror now without hating myself. I know I'm capable enough.

 

Great! Go me!

 

 

 

Sure, there's some room for improvment in all of the areas I mentioned. But I no longer feel pressure to be perfect. I'm okay with the fact that the condo won't be perfectly neat all the time. I don't think I will ever re-train myself to put my clothes in the hamper at night. They're always going to be on the floor of the bathroom in the morning and will find their way into the hamper before I'm off to work. Every single day.  But there's no longer so much stuff lying around that I'm afraid of breaking my ankle trying to walk across my room. I'll never like what I see in the mirror, but it doesn't make me feel miserable any more. I know I'm capable, even if I'm not perfect. Even Jillian Michaels says that perfect is boring, and I believe that. I'm happy where I am. Yikes!

 

I suppose I'm having my mid-life crisis. I have a lot of free time now and a lot more psychological time than I've ever had before. It's a completely new thing for me not to have a goal to work towards. I don't feel like I'm perpetually reaching for a goal that's out of my reach anymore.

 

Now what do I do? Now what do I blog about?

Our spare bedroom: before and after

Part of growing up as the child of a hoarder is that often you're not allowed to decorate your own space -- assuming you're allowed to have your own space at all. My mother wasn't completely controlling and I did have my own space. But she controlled the curtains, the color of the walls (white), the closet doors (white), the trim (white) and the flooring (white linoleum). When I went to college she told me that my matrix poster was too frightening and I needed something cheerful. Down came the matrix poster, up went the white Winnie-the-Pooh poster.

Because we own our place we're allowed to paint. I finally have the chance to really redecorate a room! Our spare bedroom has long been a thorn in our side and a room for junk, as you can see here.

 

Then I read Brian Grey's post about his new minimal bedroom. Brian's blog is called "Free Your Mind Today," which always reminds me of the matrix.

"You have to let it all go. Fear, doubt, disbelief. I'm trying to free your mind, Neo."  What am I afraid of? White walls? Clutter? Yes. It was time for EVERYTHING to go.

As Agent Smith says, "it is purpose that drives us." Our room suddenly had a purpose. We wanted a minimalist bedroom that we just use for relaxing, watching movies and occasionally working on a small project. I also wanted a place to display our collection of artwork from the Matrix movies. Having a purpose made it so much easier to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. Behold, our decluttered, redecorated Matrix-themed room.

The Chief Engineer really wanted to keep the spare bed.

We bought a $25 backrest pillow to turn the bed into a couch for movie-watching without having to give up the guest bed. 

Our Neo and Trinity posters were prints from England where I saw Reloaded for the first time. This next print was commissioned for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, our favorite arthouse/restaurant movie theater where we used to live. 

The fold-up table is still big enough for my sewing machine or the Chief Engineer's origami. 

We moved our only TV from the living room into this room. 

The subway poster was rescued from the trash on the Chicago EL after the movie closed.

You don't get much further from a white bedroom with white linoleum floors than a room with black walls!  Yes, I had my teenage rebellion at 30.

Most of the clutter has either been donated, trashed, sold, returned to the place where it belongs, or unfortunately stuffed into that very large closet. We minimized the number of surfaces to keep clutter from building up. Decluttering the closet is next. But for now it's time to enjoy the new room by watching the Chief Engineer's 31st birthday present:

On the second day of ebaying, my clutter gave to me...

a way to grow pot at home without getting caught. Just kidding. But not quite.

I love to garden and last year I bought an aerogarden for my office. This gimmicky contraption looks like this:

I kept it at my office and loved it for a while. I bought large quantities of aerogarden-related equipment thinking that I could continue to grow lots and lots of plants! This was how I figured out that apparently the aerogarden is how a number of people grow marijuana at home. The number of websites to buy this stuff that also give advice on growing pot....definitely not good to look at while at the office! Anyways, I loved it, until I discovered that the thing is practically impossible to clean. I also hate having a light on all the time and a pump running, and the electric waste is just sad. 

Anywho, the aerogarden itself had to get trashed, but the liquid food I put and sold on ebay. I bought it for $25 and sold it for $23, after shipping I took home $17 -- a loss of $7. $23 more towards the student loans though. 

The aerogarden itself was $55. Fun while it lasted though. Items 205 and 206 are gone, and $62 is down the drain. $2512 wasted on stuff I never should've bought.

What gimmicky products have you fallen for?

On the first day of ebaying, my clutter gave to me...

In an attempt to generate some money to pay off our loans I'm taking the agonizing step of selling more stuff on ebay. I wonder if I have enough stuff for 12 days of ebaying? Hm.

Anywho, on the first day of ebaying my clutter gave to me...

A very expensive Kate Spade planner. Cost $100 when I bought it well over a year ago. I now use a spreadsheet to stay organized at work and that suits me much better. This item sold already and with shipping nets me $35. So I lost $65 on this item. Decluttered item 204, my old Kate Spade planner. 

Total money wasted on stuff I never should've bought: $2449