The Year of No Shopping: Quarter 2/3 Update

I haven't done one of these in a while, so here's a quick update.

If you missed it, the original "Year of No Shopping" post is here. So, how have I been doing with the rules I set for myself around shopping? Let us take stock.

• No wine shopping/buying beyond what I'm already committed to through clubs. If you recall, part of the reason for the "no buying of wine beyond club commitments" rule was that all of our wine (we are talking maybe ~1500 bottles) had been in storage and I had lost track of exactly what I had and what would be ready to drink exactly when.

  Now before you ask, yes, there is a database (we outgrew spreadsheets long ago), but from about mid-2017 on I got really lazy about a) entering everything new I bought and b) marking bottles as drunk when we drank them. So I knew that there was a lot unaccounted for. And I didn't, for example, want to buy new bottles that would be ready to drink around say 2021 and then find out Oops! We already have more than we'll possibly be able to drink that will be ready that year!

  
  No shelves in the cellar yet so it's just stacks of case boxes which SHOCKING! is not the easiest way to organize.

  So, when the house was done and we finally got everything back out of storage, I was able to go through it and pull out wine that should have been drunk either in 2017 or 2018. (It was a lot. Oops.)

  The good news was that there actually wasn't all that much that would be ready in the 2020-2025 range. So, when a few good deals on some really nice bottles came up that would be ready in that range, I caved & bought them. Yes, I technically broke the rules, but I feel like it was a sort of calculated breaking and didn't violate the spirit of that rule, so I don't feel all that bad about it. That said, I'm still planning to buy nothing or almost nothing else until I can get things organized in the cellar and know exactly what types of wine we'll actually be short on in the next few years vs. what we actually have.

• No new running clothes or shoes, barring maybe a Boston souvenir or two (Update: I got a T-shirt & a hat) & probably some new sports bras which are truly needed (Update: I've bought two new ones so far.) The only exceptions to this so far have been 1) buying a running top once because I was stuck somewhere & forgot to pack one & I was super bitter about it, & 2) buying shorts, socks, and a headband for my Wonder Woman running costume. I don't consider that breaking the rules because it was for a particular occasion that I'd planned for a while back (vs. an impulse or boredom purchase), and I think I got a pretty cool & recognizeable costume out of it for very few items & very little money spent.
  
  BOOM. Redwood City OktobeRun 5K, 11/28/18

• No new clothes/accessories shopping via idleness/anxiety, crushing on something for no new good reason, or feeling like I need something new for a particular occasion. I've stuck to this! YAY! I'm pretty sure I've bought zero new clothes or shoes this year except what's listed above.

• No new books unless I *actually*, *literally* have nothing to read that I'm excited about. The only books I've bought so far this year were Gravity's Rainbow and the companion reference guide (because a group of us were doing a reading group on it & it was going to take like six months); Things Fall Apart and No-No Boy (because they were two of my 2018 classics that I didn't already have/couldn't find elsewhere); & The Giver and Between The World & Me, which I got for after Gravity's Rainbow. So you can probably say I've stuck to this one, I think.

• No 'gadgets' unless it's something we legitimately need. (ie, no seeing an online ad for some handy gadget & going "Ooh! I could use that!" [add to cart]). Stuck to this one too! I did buy a few particular things I wanted for our party in October (like this and this and these), but those were things I decided ahead of time would make serving food at the party easier & more efficient AND THEN went and specifically shopped for those particular things; I didn't just go browse amazon & start "adding to cart" on a whim.

• No window shopping since it pretty much involves all the same bad habits, just without spending money. It's funny how I haven't even been tempted to do this since I'd already decided I wasn't buying anything unless I really, truly NEEDED it and NOTHING I currently owned already would suffice.

In general, I'm pleased to say that all this has only gotten easier with time. I think I've actually broken these habits now; randomly browsing internet shoe/clothing/wine outlets is no longer a thing I mindlessly default to doing. I've managed to get off a bunch of email & catalog marketing lists & that helps a lot too. It's really been much easier than I anticipated. In fact, I've been so focused on getting rid of old stuff that the thought of bringing NEW stuff into my house is kind of traumatizing.

There is one new little shopping wrinkle that has come up for me. If you'll recall, I said that I still planned to buy what I needed to in order to furnish & decorate the house. Neither Don nor I had a ton of furniture or housewares when we bought this place and most of what we DID have was old and cheap (think college/grad school era or just after), and we didn't really bother getting much at the time because we knew were about to do a bunch of renovations.

So, now that's done, and we are woefully without most things like furniture and decent towels and water glasses and what have you, and we've been little by little acquiring the things we need when we realize we need them.

But see, the thing is, with things like housewares, sometimes the line is a little unclear between things you need, and things where you just go ooOOOoo, nifty! or I better get one of these just in CASE we end up needing it.

Like. When I outfitted the guest room, a definite NEED was bed linens. But to me a guest bed should have a few cute throw pillows on it. Is that a NEED, because it's sort of part of bed linens & reasonable decorating, or is it frivolous shopping & a waste of money because no one actually needs throw pillows?

Tell me that's not an attractive tiny guest room.

Back in October we threw a little shindig and in the weeks beforehand I definitely grabbed a few seasonal decor things here & there. Reasonable, or frivolous shopping?

SUCH AUTUMNAL

The extra blanket we had in our bedroom was old and cheap & severely clashed with the new paint, so I bought a nicer new one that matches. Reasonable, or frivolous shopping?

What I'm saying, I guess, is that once you've taken care of *actual* needs, like guest bedroom linens & a grown-up set of matching water glasses that aren't just a mismatched set of logo pint glasses, things like art & decor get a little bit fuzzy in terms of what is reasonable shopping & what is just browsing on Etsy/West Elm/Williams Sonoma because you're procrastinating something else. So I'm trying to figure out exactly what that line is & make sure I don't just transfer my newly-broken bad habits to some other category of Stuff just because I have this fig leaf of plausible deniability. ("But the House! So NAKED!")

So, in general, I would say it's going well. It might just be that I need to set myself a monthly "housewares" budget for things that are not completely frivelous but also not real NEEDS, either. At the very least, I am not sitting around shopping mindlessly for housewares to buy, so that's a plus.