Do this and win free Birkenstocks

This may be the coolest thing that happened to me this week. I follow Bree on Work Clothes I Suppose and this past week she was talking about how she and her fiance recently purchased Birkenstocks.

Now, to be fair, they live in Seattle and Birkenstocks are practically formal wear up there. Nonetheless, I was reminded of the Birkenstocks I had in the early days of high school (junior high?) that I used to wear with socks. Yep. Socks. So I went online to see if I could find myself a pair of discounted Birkenstocks. Um. Well, Birkenstocks apparently don't go on discount. Unwilling to relive my high school days at an $80 or up price tag, I gave up on the hippie sandals.

The very next day, I was out at a volunteering event and the woman coordinating the event was wearing blue, rhinestone Birkenstocks. Playing the fool, I asked her if by any chance her shoes were the famed leather sandals. Of course they were. I gushed over them and told her that I had been looking just the day before and was dejected that I couldn't find a pair at the right price. "Oh," she said,"I have a pair in my car right now that I can't wear because they gave me a blister."

Now I was nervous. I never say no to someone's castoffs, but the ones she was wearing were flashy/fancy, which is not my current fashion preference. She went on to tell me that she had like nine pairs and could totally unload the ones in her car. I just had to remember at the end of the afternoon to ask her.

So I had an internal conflict. Was she just being nice and I was supposed to forget? Well, I wasn't that conflicted. We were, after all, talking about free shoes. At the end of our shift, I "remembered" our conversation from earlier. And, look! I got free shoes.

Vintage Ralph Lauren holds a place in Sarah's heart

Sarah posted a new profile picture today of herself wearing a vintage Ralph Lauren plaid button down that she's had for years. Family, it reminded me of "This Shirt is Old and Faded" by Mary Chapon Carpenter. Anyway, sort of in jest, I pulled all of the photos I could locate of Sarah wearing this shirt off of Facebook. They span many years. It's remarkable this shirt has lasted this long considering that Sarah purges her closet, like, every two weeks or something. This shirt has made it through many slashings. And it still looks good. Rock that hot hippie look, Sarah. That shirt has become part of your skin.

Because there's too much junk in my trunk

I am a frugal (read: cheap) person. So cheap that I sometimes skip over items at the Goodwill because I deem them to pricey.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have been known to spot a furniture item in or near the trashcan, remove it, and place it in my home.

A favorite example is the wooden bookshelf I picked out of a dumpster in college. The previous owners for some unknown reason had thrown eggs at the poor bookshelf and the left it in the summer heat. I felt a deep, strange pain for the piece of furniture. So, I hauled it up to my apartment, Clorox wiped it all down and now, five years later, it sits in my living room.

Furniture has soul. People buy furniture to make life better. If it’s good quality it’s passed down. My sister, Sarah, has a trunk from the early days of mom and dad’s marriage that she uses as a coffee table. I think I hold on to furniture because I see stories within it.

I think it all started when I was just a young girl and Mom would take me thrifting. Back in those days, the Goodwill had an awesome selection of furniture. If feel like you don’t see as much these days. I remember looking at this radically vibrant upholstered couch and thinking, ‘wow, someday when I’m a grown up I want to decorate my house in this cool stuff.’ I thought that would be the dream.

All of this is to say, I occasionally am a hoarder. I work hard to remind myself that things are just things, but I really struggle here. When I moved into my most recent apartment I went down a whole room. Well, more than that if you count the loss of overall square footage and closet space.

I’d like to think that I jigsawed everything into my apartment nicely. I will admit, however, that the day I moved I sat crying in my new home in a red vinyl wheeled chair that I’d pulled out of the dumpster at my old apartment as Jarrod tried to convince me that it “just won’t fit.”

(I tell you what, I can’t wait till the day I get to tell him that his 8 foot stuffed black bear “just won’t fit.”)

(For the record, that chair has since been described as the best part of my apartment. Thank you very much.)

The lesson that is working on my heart right now in the early days of 2014 is that just because something is cheap/free/a great deal/antique/will otherwise fill a landfill, doesn’t mean I need it in my home.

As a former poor college kid that’s still convinced that Santa Clause will come along one day and reclaim my adulthood, I’m finding it difficult to really take to heart that being an adult means sometimes leaving that really expensive Shark vacuum cleaner my neighbor left out for another dumpster diver.

So, I was really proud of myself this morning as I left for work and saw that a neighbor had put a very cute shelf out by the dumpster in the universal free-stuff-here spot. After I did a mental scan of my apartment, I realized I have no more space. And I walked on.

Here’s something that my friend Chelsea understands in a way that I hope to someday: If I don’t fill my home with garbage, I can be very intentional about my purchases and decorate with quality items that I will want to have in my home for years to come.

I’m still getting there. But working on it.