Does This House Make Me Look Fat?

Although I probably should be on a diet, I'm not talking about my body weight; what I'm referring to is shedding the weight of the things I own.  I recalled watching a talk show years ago where there was a guest speaker who was preaching about the negative effects of "living fat".  I wasn't paying very close attention, but the words "living fat" apparently settled somewhere deep in the wrinkles of my brain and slowly started chanting louder and louder over the last year or so until it was screaming at me to pay attention and make some changes.  Even after I had thought long and hard about downsizing my house and the stuff inside of it, I didn't bring it up to my husband for a long time.  How do you tell your spouse that the house they have been working so hard to pay for over the years was now something you find excessive and pointless to maintain?  How do you ask your thirteen-year-old to up and move to a smaller place when all she's known is the house she's been in from the age of two and is inside the neighborhood that contains at least three of her very best friends?  This was not an easy decision and one that I wouldn't have ever entertained had I not had the supportive husband and agreeable child that I am blessed to have.  Still, as lucky as I am to have such a good family, I knew that I was going to have to have some pretty darn good reasons to broach the subject to my better-half and my awesome kid.

After I stopped working last year I took some time to reevaluate what I wanted to do career wise.  Well, I guess "reevaluate" isn't the correct term because in reality I've known for many, many years that I wanted to write.  Sadly, writing a blog and working on my novel hasn't paid any bills and we are a family used to having two incomes.  There's something very addicting to bringing in two paychecks and it's hard to change the way you live when it's cut down to just one.  Can it be done?  Of course!  People lose jobs all the time and have to adjust their lives accordingly.  What's different for us is that this time it's being done by choice and I had to make certain changes that were slightly saddening to me because I'm self-admittedly spoiled.  I knew that when I was ready to present this idea to my husband that I was going to have to make some promises of change in my spending habits that would cause me to wince in mental-pain when making that verbal contract that would outline what I would give up to stay at home and write...paid or not.  Luckily for me my husband thinks I'm at least slightly talented in my writing, "so I have that going for me...which is nice." (that's a little quote from a movie that we like to use...all the time...probably way too much.)

So, living fat - what exactly is that?  According to Dr. What's-His-Name, it's when humans fill their homes with tons of stuff that they don't need and most of the time don't even remember having.  Knick-knacks start piling up because we don't take the time to weed through the un-needed every once in a while.  Furthermore, and this is just my opinion, people tend to fill their houses no matter what the size.  What I mean is that we grow our stuff to fit the house instead of buying the house to fit what you already have.  It's normal I think; my husband and I bought this house with a certain future we had pictured for ourselves and I think that's what most people do.  We thought we'd have more than one kid so we bought a house that would be suitable for two or three children.  Well, flash forward eleven years and we still have only one child with no intention of having any more.  It's just the way it worked out and we are more than satisfied with our personal status-quot.  Anyway, we didn't just leave the extra two bedrooms empty in hopes that they would be filled with baby equipment at some point; we put a bedroom suit in each of the extra rooms for guests.  Basically the furniture just acted as dust collectors, picture holders, a graveyard for old flower arrangements that I didn't want anymore but felt badly about throwing away, etc when not in use for visits from family.  To be honest, all that furniture didn't bother me either until we needed to let our cleaning people go and I realized how much work it takes to clean something we didn't even use!  That led me to think about how much extra house we were keeping cool or heated depending on the season.  Now I was thinking like my husband and I could actually talk to him in a way that he would appreciate.  Go me!  We were now on our way to making a plan to shed some of the unneeded expenses or "weight" that go hand-in-hand with over-buying.  It felt good just to get the wheels in motion, knowing that we were working together with the same goals in mind.

Telling my daughter wasn't quite as easy because she couldn't give a rats patooty what we pay in electricity each month.  Also, I couldn't just pat the seat next to me (the universal sign for "let's talk for a minute") and say "Hey, Sweetpea...our house is fat so we're peace out.  Cool?"  I mean, hellooooo, she has friends right across the street for goodness sake and that's the most important thing to her right now.  Luckily for us we had been making her cut the grass and help clean bathrooms for a few months so other than her concern over how often she would be able to hangout with her besties she was all kinds of in on the plan.  So, needless to say I had to agree to letting her peeps come over a couple times a week and my only caveat was that if I had to cart them home it had better be before wine time!

I believe that this decision was meant to be because the one place we could all agree on had one more home available in our size range and price range along with the must-have features we all put on the table. I won't bore you with the details of the selling and purchasing process, but I will give a mental fist-pump at selling our house in one day.  One day!  I also want to tell you about how good it felt to start unloading extra furniture via the very convenient Craig's List.  When the first piece of furniture sold my tummy did that weird roller coaster flippy-flop thing that represented my feeling of excitement and nervousness; we were on our way to trimming the wasteline of our lives (see what I did there?  Wasteline instead of waistline...waste... unneeded stuff...eh? ehhhh? Well, I thought it was clever!).  After selling a few of the larger items filling rooms we didn't use I felt so good that I had to stop myself from posting everything we had planned to get rid of before we even had a place to move into.  Well, when I say I had to stop myself it was more like my husband said to slow down because apparently he hates sitting on the floor while trying to enjoy his steak dinner.  Whatever Mr. Party-pooper.  Oh, and one of the negatives of selling on Craig's List is that for every decent person that comes to your house there's an Uncle Creepy that wants to tour your house and ultimately tries to buy the items that you have no intention of selling.  I'm pretty sure that my daughter was getting tired of faking injuries and taking imaginary phone calls that couldn't wait so I could take the wimpy way out of asking someone to get the hell out of my house!  On a positive note I got very proficient at texting Skye on the down-low giving her the cue to come limping in holding the body part of her choosing or sneaking out to call me from out of ear-shot of said weirdo.  She got really good at it too and at some point I had to tell her that no, we really didn't need to go to the costume store and buy a couple tubes of fake blood.  Amateur!  If we over-played our hand we might have had to accept a ride to the nearest emergency room!!  She'll learn.

Since starting this post we have settled into our new casa and we love it.  We dropped a few hundred pounds and are adjusting to our thinner lifestyle.  If it had any effect on my personal weight I haven't noticed (I did notice how out of shape I am when moving out and then into this new place so hopefully that will kick-start some type of exercise regiment. I love that word "hopefully", it gives me options).  Downsizing isn't for everyone but if you're batting around the idea just know that this girl gives it a two thumbs up!

I'll close with this question:  Why haven't they done a show called The Biggest Loser Home Edition?