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copyright ©1999-2004 |
A year after I graduated from college, I found myself sharing my very first real apartment with my boyfriend. We were living in a little city in edge-of-nowhere Australia -- about as far from our home state of Massachusetts as you could possibly get, and still be on the planet Earth that is. The rent was cheap, the location convenient to the school where we'd be studying during our one-year stint abroad; at least those were the rational reasons we gave ourselves for choosing our place. Mostly, though, I suspect we'd picked the bland two-bedroom townhouse because it featured a pool. What we failed to factor into the "good" rent price was that the apartment, like most, came completely unfurnished. We moved in with just two suitcases, a duffel bag and a hiking backpack, all crammed full of as much stuff as airline restrictions allowed, and found ourselves faced with a big, vaguely 80s-esque pastel box that featured a whole lot of empty space between its long bare walls. The few measly bits of furniture we'd acquired in our college dorm days remained back at home in our parents' basements. For the next twelve months, we had this place to call our own, and we were starting completing from scratch when it came to the furnishings department. With phone bills, electric bills, water bills, and the monthly rent suddenly plaguing us on a regular basis, plus food and car eating up another substantial chunk of our bank accounts, the frugal side of our Yankee roots soon reared its head when we realized we'd have to supply our apartment with at least the bare necessities. This, then, is the only reason I can give for how I came to spend five months of my life sleeping on two inflatable camping pads, fluffed up by a layer of sleeping bags, loosely bound together by a fitted sheet. What started off seeming (rather sensibly) like a home essential soon dropped rank in our priority list as we realized that a good new mattress would set us back a fair amount of cash, and that the idea of sleeping on one of those dingy used beds I'd seen at the thrift store placed just shy of wearing secondhand underwear on my personal gross scale. Many backaches and restless nights later, we finally sucked it up and bought ourselves a mattress. Only now, instead, of getting a whole year's worth of comfortable sleep out of our investment, we'd only be enjoying half that time before we'd have to sell it off and move on back to the States. That little experience taught me some important lessons. One: never underestimate the value of a good night's sleep. And two: there's a big difference between being sensibly frugal, and just plain being a cheapskate. When you're moving into your first real quasi-adult home and trying to deck it out on a less-than-lavish budget, it's just as easy to fall into the trap of being overly stingy with your spending as it is to launch on a shopping spree that'll leave you financially hurting for a long time after the adrenaline rush of consumerism wears off. As in most things in life, the ideal approach lies somewhere in the middle. ---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home.
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