Radical Living

It all started with a late night conversation about kitchen cabinets.  Dh and I have talked unceasingly about The Day.  That would be The Day when we remodel our 1980 horror of a kitchen.  We have done zero, zip, zilch, nada in that room since the day we moved in, because… after all.. we’d be changing everything on The Day.

Except, a funny thing has happened over the course of the past two years.  We’ve slowly gone green.  Probably not enough for those not close to us to notice, but enough that we make decisions much differently than we did in 2005.  Mostly, our desire is to be good stewards of the earth… to do the things that OUR FAMILY is able to do to make just a little less of an impact on the ecology of our planet.  Before that fateful conversation, the most difficult change we’d made was using canvas bags for our shopping.

Almost on cue, we both came up with the idea that we should not rip out our perfectly functioning (albeit horridly ugly) kitchen cabinets.  Because of the way they are built, once they come down they will be useless.  Nothing but scrap wood.  And they are REAL wood.  So, on that fateful night, we committed to repairing and repainting our kitchen cabinets rather than completely replacing them.  How liberating!

From there, we started talking about the idea of not buying ANYTHING new this year.  We have a wonderful Habitat Re-store, so we may even be able to do much of our remodeling with broken-in items.  We talked about what would be difficult for our family… things like tall jeans for Princess and shoes for Flower Child.  (At which point we were like… umm… she rarely wears shoes in the first place, why are we obsessing about this?)

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been pondering the whole idea.  Turning it around in my head and trying to read all the angles.  Never quite ready to put in print, for all the world (my world, anyway) to see.  Never really quite sure that we could live up to such a lofty aspiration.

Today, I realized that we’ll never know unless we try.  And it’s time to get this blog post off my chest so I can write about other witty and entertaining topics.

Our initial plan is to not buy anything new for three months, and hopefully renewing that pledge with additional tweakings for the remainder of the year.

Yes, there are exceptions.  Things like food and consumables (art supplies, paint, cleaning stuff).  School books that can’t be bought used.    Things that would be just too gross to buy used.  I’m still thinking through exactly what our exceptions need to be.