Practicality and Making Do

People with means can have what they want when they want it.  The rest of us have to live with deferred gratification, saving for what we want so we can have it later, or trying to find a way to make what we already have work out to some degree of satisfaction.  Lordy, lordy!  'Tis the story of my life!  Once in awhile, you will find people who seem not to have means because they live humbly, but beneath the surface, you find out that they are rich--maybe BECAUSE they have lived humbly?  Inherited wealth?  Who knows?

In any case, I have never had much by way of means.  Most of the time, I had enough to pay the bills.  Most of the time, there wasn't enough money left at the end of the month to save anything.  I did the best I could...but...I also had needs for my daughter, my house, and me.  I learned to make do.

I come by this honestly.  My mother, God bless her, never had much to work with.  As a Navy wife in the beginning, she didn't have furnishings to call her own until we actually bought a house in Danville, IL (and were in it for a whopping 2 1/2 years).  She bought a couch, a chair, and a recliner. The couch and chair were upholstered in a loop pile fabric that wears like iron but is quite ugly. These were a hunter green.  When I was in second grade, Mom told me to be nice to that couch because someday I would be entertaining my boyfriends on it.  I thought she was joking.  She wasn't.  When I was in high school, we still had that couch, except Mom had painted it brown.  She had read somewhere that you could paint fabrics...so she did...but she didn't use a fabric paint.  She used latex wall paint!  That sucker dried rough and hard--so hard that you could run a pair of nylons if you rubbed up against it.  So hard that it required a throw to make it sit-able.  But she didn't throw it out.  The chair, she endeavored to reupholster herself in gold brocade.  She found out that upholstering isn't as easy as it looked.  She did "okay" with that...but it never was the same.

Years later, after she and Dad retired to the family farm, Mom asked Dad for permission to buy a couple of chairs.  (By now, the old couch and chair were finally gone.)  She went out and purchased two of the ugliest recliners on the planet!  They were on sale.  They had means.  She could have had anything she wanted, but she wasn't raised that way, and so she bought matching recliners upholstered in a brown woven tweed fabric that was as unattractive as it was impractical.  Thereafter, I often joked (although never in her presence) that Mom's decorating tastes were all in her mouth! She was making do, trying to make the dollars stretch, as she always had.

That's how I was raised.  I made a lot of life choices based on bad information that left me without much by way of means to have what I wanted.  I learned to make do with what I had.  Some people have told me that I put things together well, but I get itchy, like everyone else, to have new things.

When I bought my little house-on-a-slab in 1992, I was aware that improvements were needed. There was no dishwasher and no room for one without changing things.  The kitchen cabinets were custom built-ins, painted blue, with one door missing.  The counter tops were the traditional white-with-gold-and-mica-flecks that had been in every rental home I had ever lived in.  Cheap.  Ugly.  I hated the kitchen.  I also hated the main bathroom.  I spent a long time trying to figure out what I could change that I could accept on my small budget.

Thankfully, I found ways to do just that.  It worked for me because I am used to making do...but...if I try to sell this place, I'm up against it.  I'm thinking that the only people who would buy my house are people who either don't have money or people who want to flip houses.  This little house has been my home for 22 years.  I've made lots of improvements, only a few of which would produce a gain at sales time.  What is acceptable to me in my old age isn't necessarily in tune with what others want in a home.  Now that I live on a small pension and Social Security, any big-ticket changes are out of the question.  :(

Making do isn't always good.  I have prided myself on doing the best I can with what I have been given all my life...but it might not be what others want.  I'm not selling yet, but I am aware that life is short and the end is coming.  Gives me pause!

It's worth mentioning that my daughter and husband have means but live in a higher-rent area north of Chicago.  They have tentatively bought a house of their very own.  They could have afforded a lot of homes in the area with all of the perks that people seem to want, but they weighed the costs of all of that and went for a more modest place for a monthly savings of about $500 a month.  Don't know about you, but I can think of a lot of things to do with that kind of money not spent on a house!  I think my daughter has inherited some of my "make do" genes!