30 Days of Hustle

A family member invited me to do the 30 Days of Hustle with her (and a few thousand other people) this January.

The 30 Days of Hustle is a motivational challenge in which each participant sets a goal and takes steps (hustles) towards its completion for 30 days.

Along the way, the program teaches productivity and motivation skills that can be used to accomplish other goals.

I have a pretty quiet month ahead in terms of work. And I know the temptation might be to slip into a Netflix coma. Which would be fine if I needed to rest. But truthfully, I just spent the past six weeks chilled out on Netflix. It was great, but here, in the new year, I feel like getting some stuff DONE.

Tying up a big loose end

Although I'm planning to focus on more than one thing in this month's hustle, the structure of the hustle encourages selecting one main goal, so, my Official Hustle is going to be finishing off a number of my UFOs – which is quilting slang for UnFinished Objects.

You see, for about ten years, I was an avid quilter. I made quilts for people I loved, quilts for friends' babies, quilts for myself, art quilts, etc. I took classes, belonged to a quilt guild and gleefully fed my fabric addiction. I started countless projects — and to give myself credit, finished many of them.

But then, about eight years ago, I lost my quilting mojo. I moved from a 3-bedroom home to a 500-square-foot apartment, so I didn't have much space to work in. I became a performing musician and I became much busier in my life. Instead of just going to work and coming home to my quilting studio, suddenly I was leaving work to run around to gigs and voice lessons. My former "hobby" time was re-allocated to recording and producing three independent CDs.

The past 8 years have been an exciting time, but it's a time that feels like it is winding down for the present. I don't feel like performing shows very often these days. I certainly can't afford to create another independent record and can't even foresee a time when I will next be able to do so!

Right now, my focus is on getting settled on the piece of land that I bought last spring and creating a permanent home for myself. My current home is a tiny house on wheels. I'm thinking about building a permanent home – which will also be tiny, or perhaps micro. And that means that the six or seven boxes of fabric from my quilting "hangover" pose a problem. I can't bring myself to throw them out, but I also don't want to keep them in my space.

A small portion of my fabric "stash",
this is probably about one-eighth of it.

Worse still, there are a number of half-complete projects in those boxes, some of which are unfulfilled presents/commitments from 10 or 11 years ago.

The thought of those unfinished quilts has been weighing me down.

When I moved into my winter accommodation in Lunenburg, I got a membership at The Lunenburg Makery, thinking I would take the opportunity to work on some quilts this winter. I've been over a few times and have probably made three or four quilt blocks of my barely-started New York Beauty quilt. 

It's not that I didn't have plenty of spare time in the fall. What I lacked was motivation.

And so, this project seems perfect for the 30 days of Hustle. I have set my goal: complete four quilt tops in the next 30 days – two singles, one double and one baby quilt.

Here's the "baby" quilt to be –
a partly-finished colourwheel quilt.

I'm getting my hustle on!

The Difference Between Buying a House and Buying a Tiny House

I have not always been poor and rural.

My life has gone through a number of socio-economic phases. I started off as a middle-class urban kid, transitioned to being a poor rural kid, then I was a working-class (but educated) urban young adult, then a middle-class urban adult and now I'm a rural adult artist (more fun than working- or middle-class, but much less financially stable than either).

Almost ten years ago, back when I was a yuppie, I bought a house in Toronto with my then partner. Now, I can't even fathom how I had the gall to do that. That house cost more than 30 times what I paid for my tiny home last month. It was a relatively inexpensive Toronto house, in a neighbourhood that was gentrifying, but still fairly working class. The house was nice and big: 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths; it had great lines, fit our furniture and was relatively easy to heat. We bought top-of-the-line stainless steel appliances and settled in for the duration. We thought.

We both had decent jobs (my then partner's job was particularly well-paid), and we figured we could carry it. And, financially, it was manageable.

It seemed like a dream come true, owning a Toronto house in our mid-thirties. But let me tell you, buying and owning that house was incredibly stressful. We fought about buying it. We fought about how to paint it. We fought about whether to buy a giant flat-screen TV to put in the living room. We fought about how to pay for it all.

And, in the end, we fought ourselves right out of love with each other. (Admittedly, it was not only about the house. There were some other issues that I won't get into here. If you want a general sense of what the end of that relationship was like, you can listen to the break-up album I wrote about that and some of my other relationships here: Love Bites on Bandcamp).

But at the core, there was something that went wrong in that relationship that was directly related to the house. We didn't own that house. The house owned us and after a couple of years, the house, and the stuff inside it, had become more important than loving and supporting one another. I couldn't tolerate the hollowness of it. I couldn't love a house instead of a human being.

It was such a relief for me to walk away from that house, that mortgage and that relationship.

I am struck by the contrast with my experience of buying my tiny home. I feel like I can love this little dwelling. It's almost small enough to hug. And I can afford it (thanks to a kind, informal, interest-free family loan - thank you! thank you!). No stress. No arguments. And, since it isn't big enough for another person to stay for more than a few days: no risk of territorial disputes.

This house is the right house for me. At 232 square feet, it is just the right size. It isn't about impressing anybody. It isn't about all of the "supposed to's" of home ownership. It has everything I need and nothing I don't need.

The Beginning of The Great De-Stuffing!

Today is the day I undertake the beginning of The Great De-Stuffing!

This is probably the most daunting aspect of Tiny Living for me.

Here is what my living space looks like right now:

Oh dear. I wonder if I should share this photo. My space looks like it
should be on a Hoarder Intervention TV show. Yikes. Well, I guess it's a
good "before" shot. It gives some indication of the enormity of me
deciding to move in to a Tiny Home.

As you can tell, I'm not the most organized person in the world. I've lived most of my life in the midst of chaotic clutter.

It's all made worse by the fact that I used to live in a three-bedroom home. I was a yuppie. I had lots of stuff. Not too much conspicuous consumption kind of stuff. Mostly art-related (fabric, yarn, musical instruments), plus books and lots and lots of disorganized paper.

Then, I left that three bedroom home and went to live in a tiny urban 1-bedroom apartment. I got rid of a lot of my furniture, but kept most of my stuff. I was attached to it. And I figured the 1-bedroom apartment was temporary.

After three years of living in a packed-to-the-ceiling-apartment, I moved from Toronto to rural Nova Scotia. A friend offered me a lovely loft space in the upstairs of his home (which as you can see above is now terribly cluttered).

I downsized quite a bit for the move (especially my heavy, heavy books!), but since arriving home three years ago, I've been accumulating lots and lots of stuff. People kept giving me things on the understanding that I was planning to set up house-keeping on my own. Every time someone moved house, they gave their extra stuff to me and I took it – thinking I would soon have a house of my own and that this or that widget/book/record/piece of furniture would come in very handy. And so, the boxes have stacked up to the ceiling. And the books and bookshelves have staged a successful coup in my loft.

And then, I decided to buy a Tiny Home! All at once, a couple of weeks ago. And now I'm looking at fitting myself and my possessions into about 200 square feet of gorgeous converted-trailer heaven.

And so begins The Great De-Stuffing.

I'll be posting about it here. With after photos to take the sting out of the scary before photo above. With descriptions of my precious things and disclosures about what I decide to do with them. Stay tuned!