• getting the house straight

    Getting the House Straight– So….I am in the process of cleaning up our messy (and dirty) house for the first time in a good while. I started in earnest last night.

    I need motivation and accountability in this process. When I get depressed, all housework goes by the wayside. We slip into survival mode.

    I first found A Slob Comes Clean in 2018. Listening to Dana K. White’s journey to a clean house system and organization inspired me so much that it worked well at the Holmes Drive house.

    I am determined to get our current house in order.

    First up is the kitchen. The microwave on our microwave/oven combination unit is broken. So we have a second microwave in the kitchen currently, sitting on the counter.

    I don’t use the desk in the kitchen for anything other than sorting mail. So I am going to move the coffeemaker and the microwave over to that area. That area will house our printer, the coffeemaker, and the microwave. Our mail and to-do stack of papers will also live there.

    I thought about picking up a mail sorter or something else to mount to the wall for storing to-do papers. But we have a drawer in that desk unit that doesn’t have a lot of contents. So I think I will start having the boys (they get the mail every day) put the mail in that drawer from now on. Then it’s not just sitting out until I can deal with it.

    Getting the House Straight

    Next up will be to de-clutter my bedroom with Jared. It’s all my junk. I have a lifelong habit of just throwing my stuff anywhere until I go on a marathon-cleaning session.

    The boys’ rooms all need pretty major attention. But Porter has said he wants to handle it himself. So, his room will have to wait until he has gone off to college at this point, probably.

    After the house is relatively clean and tidy, next up will come the finishing of unpacking and organizing the boxes of stuff in the standing crawlspace under the house.

    The goal for the standing crawlspace area is for it to house only outdoor and yard tools. The goal is to free up the closet that holds those things in the garage.

    The garage is going to be my photo studio. The closet that currently holds all of the yard and outdoor tools will be a changing area for the studio, eventually.

    Once the standing crawlspace and that closet in the garage are all sorted out, I will work on the studio in more earnest. There’s still paint, finishing the floor, and putting up decorative tiles on the ceiling in the studio.

    But, all that has to wait until the inside of the house is dealt with.

    You can read more about me here.

  • i love ynab!

    I love YNAB! You Need a Budget is the budgeting software Jared and I have been using since early 2013.

    YNAB uses a zero-based budget which means you budget every dollar you have. You can set up custom categories, and track all of your financial accounts. The software is made to link to your accounts, though I do not have it set up this way because I like to put in every transaction manually, like an old-school check register.

    Our categories are pretty basic and haven’t changed much over the years, since we started. There is a Giving section, subdivided into Charitable Giving (my favorites are Atlanta Habitat and the Atlanta Ronald McDonald House) and Offerings for church. Next is a section for credit card payments, subdivided by each card. Credit cards are debt, but there is a separate Debt section subdivided into our Car Payment and Mortgage.

    Next is Savings, subdivided into Emergency Savings, Home Maintenance, Auto Maintenance, Vacation, and Boy Allowance. After that is Monthly Bills, which includes Electric and Gas, Water and Trash, Insurance, Phone, Internet, Entertainment (which includes all our streaming services), and Web Hosting.

    Then comes Every Day Expenses, which includes Groceries, Restaurants, Gas for the car, Medical, Clothing, Personal Grooming (Haircuts), Pet Care, Date Night, School Expenses, and Surprises. Interest on the credit cards gets lumped into Surprises.

    Next is a section for Business Expenses— Jared’s work expenses,and my photography business expenses.

    Finally, comes Annual Expenses. This includes Gifts, Safe Deposit Box Fee, Car Registration, Christmas, Taxes (this mostly refers to my estimated taxes), memberships (this includes the recreation center when our membership is current, along with Amazon Prime), and Family Photos.

    As you put in transactions and categorize them, YNAB automatically adjusts category amounts accordingly.

    You can set target amounts, both by total amount and by the monthly amount needed, which is supposed to help those who want to forecast. Sometimes I cheat and forecast a month or two anyway, though, based on anticipated income and any goals we may have.

    Anyway, this is our budgeting software and how I have it set up! I love YNAB!

    You can read more about why I write about what I write about here, especially when I write about my budgeting strategies.

  • decorating with what we already have

    Decorating with What We Already Have — Yesterday, I got a wild hair and decided it was time to re-arrange our living room.

    Oliver has been complaining about the fact that we have to turn our smaller couch around any time we want him to be able to sit there to watch TV; our TV is mounted above our fireplace.

    We have a fairly large living room that featured two couches; a leather couch and a smaller green fabric two-seater couch. Most of the time, in case we have company, we have had the green couch facing the coffee table and the other couch. That meant that the couch needed to be turned around when we had movie nights and more people would be watching the TV.

    A little over a year ago, gracious friends gave me a settee for the studio. It will still be used for studio purposes. But in between shoots, the settee is going to live in our living room now. I moved it in, moved the leather couch and our coffee table way back into the previously unused space, and turned the green sofa around. I put the cream settee and the green sofa back to back. We will use the cream settee and the side chairsfor visiting with people. The green couch will be used by the kids or anyone when we are all watching TV together.

    I am thrilled with the outcome. I added the sitting pillow from the peacock chair from the studio, as well as the “You Are My Sunshine” pillow that Jared gave me for Christmas to the cream settee. Our whole living room looks bigger and more inviting.

    I had to be sure there was adequate walking room both between the cream settee and the leather couch for walking. Our primary entry into the house is the double doors right beside the leather couch. We really do not have a back side to our home. We have two driveways and the front door has steps. So, we mostly invite guests to come in the back double doors off our back driveway, by the garage where we park. We use the front door mostly for taking the dogs outside, or for guests that just want to come to the front door.

    Decorating with What We Already Have

    It feels like a new living room, and not a dime was spent on re-decorating. This is my favorite way of re-decorating because our belongings we have are more than adequate for our needs and to be honest- for most of my wants.

    I did discover the limits of our luxury vinyl plank flooring that we installed when we moved in two years ago. There are small, slight scratches below the coffee table and below where the leather couch used to sit. They don’t bother me; actually, the pattern of the flooring makes any scratches look like they belong and blend really well. So, it adds a sort of lived-in character to the flooring. I stand by my earlier statements on social media that this flooring was far and away the best decision we could have made as an upgrade when we purchased this house in late 2021.

    All of the pieces in our living room are either hand-me downs, or sentimental, aside from the leather couch. Our friend Johnny Jackson made the coffee table, our friends the Boyd’s gave us the piano, my parents gave us the green chair and sofa. My parents also gave us the cream chair after my aunt gave it to her, after my Nannie gave it to my aunt. (We pass furniture around in my family a lot, so things rarely actually leave the family.)

    The cream chair’s upholstery has seen better days thanks to our cats, but that chair is well over 100 years old at this point. It originally belonged to my grandmother’s aunt, who was born in 1870. It is still as sturdy as the old days, having been reupholstered at least once. It is one of my favorite chairs in the house. It is so much higher quality than anything you can walk into a store and buy these days.

    Thankfully, keeping scratching posts around the living room really does quite a lot to re-focus the cats’ energy on not tearing up the furniture. We didn’t discover that fact early on, but they’ve been in place over a year now and it’s really saving our furniture.

    That’s all I have for today.

    Love,
    Caroline

  • financial (and perspective) overhaul

    Mom Photographer

    Financial (and perspective) overhaul — I am writing today from the skate park with Oliver.

    Today I said goodbye to the Fuji GW690III film camera, as well as the Fuji X30 digital camera. They got sold at KEH to pay the difference for the iPhone 15 Pro Max I traded my old iPhone 13 Mini for last week. Verizon gave me a very decent deal on the trade-in, but there was a difference and the sale of these two cameras that basically always sit unused more than made up for the deficit.

    When I bought the Fuji GW690III, I thought I would take it regularly to sessions and weddings. It came along like twice, but it never found a solid place in my work flow.

    And to be completely honest, the iPhone 15 Pro Max replaces the “purse camera” function that the Fuji X30 served.

    The Christmas break was a time of introspection and expense assessment, along with re-assessing both current and future priorities. It has been a healthy introspection period and Jared and I (mostly me) made a lot of changes to current expense obligations that will serve us well in 2024.

    I have been a domain name hoarder for a long, long time. I won’t say how many I had, but it was a lot. For no good reason. Well, I thought they were good reasons when I bought them, but those purposes no longer serve me. So the great majority of them will lapse this year. I am 100% okay with that fact. I purged over the series of several days, bit by bit. It was sort of like shedding layers of an identity that no longer serves me.

    I projected our income for the year, taking all things equal as though there would be no business income to rely on, and then I projected all known expenses and obligations for 2024, both personal and business. Then, I re-assessed every expense we have had for the past couple of years. 2024 will be the year of actually consuming the online education resources I have already bought into but may or may not have already used. There will be no more gear purchases unless something is sold, and that will not happen this year as everything is very useful at this point, unless I do decide to sell the gf 35-70 but I doubt it.

    I still have to do it but I have already made a list of the regular groceries we have purchased and like to have on hand on a regular basis, but I am going to go through and itemize them by price and make out a realistic grocery purchase rotation. We have to be careful because grocery budget does get out of hand for us. Our restaurant budget has been out of control the last several months, as well.

    Financial (and perspective) overhaul — Part of what has helped with this finance overhaul has been the solid step toward self-acceptance of the fact that, for all purposes that matter, I am a retired person at 44 years of age and our budget should reflect that fact, and there is zero shame in it, either. This photography business is fun and I love that I can do this, but the reality is that it is likely that I will be on SSDI for the rest of my life (well, until it converts to regular Social Security when I reach traditional retirement age), and 12.5 years into this SSDI journey I am finally coming to a place of self-acceptance with it.

    Next to work on is getting over the shame that it has taken me over a decade of my life to accept that I am essentially retired. But that is work for another day.