Our New Mud Room
The importance and challenges of living within your means
I’ve been wanting to write about our new mud room since last July when Eric started working on it. But I wanted to wait until it was complete, which it is almost entirely now, a year from start to finish. That seems like a long time to build an 80 sq. ft. extension but not so much when you take into consideration that Eric did it entirely alone and had to pause for winter.
Mud is My Nemisis
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that ever since we moved to our off-grid home in 2020 during the shelter-in-place quarantines, mud has been my nemesis. You can read about it here and here.
The caliche soil of this mesa top holds water like a vessel. It takes hot days of baking in the sun for the mud to finally dry up. Since we don’t get an enormous amount of rainfall, it’s not so much a problem most seasons. Mud season begins in the late winter/early spring when the weather warms up and the snow melts. Every new snowfall is followed by days and days of stubborn mud.
Our driveway would regularly become a mud pit, and my Subaru barely made it to the house. Even if it did, my tires inevitably needed to be realigned each spring. Between the Subaru chugging down the drive and Eric’s Sport Trac grinding a pathway, large ruts got carved into the ground, worsening the situation. Walking down the driveway instead resulted in the risk of losing a boot and the predictable ankle-deep mud coverage that would then be trekked into the house no matter how hard we tried to avoid it. Our front room which consisted only of coats, shoes, wood pellet stove, and drying rack, was always mud encrusted.
Just remembering those days gives me agita.
Here’s the thing, for a long while, mud was not our priority. We had to plumb and electrify the house, and all the iterations that were required until the systems were in workable order. We had to figure out how to balance the compost toilet to avoid flies and “soup poop.” We had to gravel and fence our yard for the dog. We had to redo our grey water systems and establish our garden. In other words, there were a lot more important things to get done.
Ridding ourselves of the mud problem was a luxury.
In many American homes, the more efficient and immediate way to go about this would have been to get a renovation loan by refinancing your mortgage and then hire a contractor to take care of it for you. You could easily explain this expense by reminding yourself that this is what everyone does, it’s a long-term investment, you can carry the payments right now and you don’t have the time, desire, or ability to do it yourself. And I might agree with you.
But I might also remind you that there is another way.
Living Within Your Means
This other way entails living within your means. It goes against many of our unspoken capitalist ideologies such as immediate satisfaction, accumulating wealth by going into debt, bigger and faster is better, and keeping up with the Joneses.
The idea behind living within your means is that you do not buy something that you cannot afford. This also entails saving up for what you want instead of putting it on your credit card and paying it off in the future with interest.
Even if there is no interest on the loan, you may be making less money in 6 months than you do now or get a divorce or move to Europe, and you will no longer be able to afford that loan. You may still be paying off the loan long after you stop deriving pleasure from the purchase.
Early in our marriage after our wedding, purchasing a new home and having a baby, we racked up so much credit card debt, I had to hide our credit cards for a year to pay it all off.
While capitalism claims freedom as an essential tenant, there is no freedom in living in debt. As long as you are in debt, you will have to work harder and longer to pay it off, tying you to a job or worse, a job you don’t like.
Back to the mudroom a year in the making.
Piece by Piece
Building slowly and only when you can afford to do so is one way of living within your means.
For example, most people cannot afford to buy a house with cash. This does not mean that you must have a mortgage. In fact, mortgages are rip offs (more about that here). You could save money to buy affordable land. Then, save money to put a tiny home on it. Then, save money to put down a foundation on a larger home. Then save money to put up walls. And so on. Yes, this process sounds long, and it seems much easier to just get a loan with that initial investment instead of buying land. That’s what most people choose to do after all.
Part of our off-grid lifestyle includes choosing to live independent of debt. And so if we want to solve our mud problem, we need to do it slowly, piece by piece.
You do not necessarily need to do it all by yourself like Eric did. Eric had minimal construction experience and used YouTube videos pieced together to figure out how to make it all work. It requires a willingness to make mistakes and to be imperfect. You also must have the desire to do this and to learn the process. We say, if you don’t have the desire, don’t do it.
Instead, you could hire a local carpenter who might be willing to do it as a side job in their downtime for a much lower rate, using you as an assistant laborer. You could have “work parties” where skilled friends come over for the day and help you out in exchange for pizza and beer. Or you could save up and hire someone to put in the foundation then save up and hire someone to do the framing, etc. Or you could save up to hire someone to do it all at once. Or any combination of these.
All of these require patience. But I will say, it makes it even more worth it. Waiting for something creates a kind of gratitude that you cannot achieve with instant gratification.
Solving Our Mud Problem
Eric had completed the interior of the mud room by Xmas and it was the best holiday gift ever. I never thought I would be so happy to get a mud room for Xmas. Some women prefer diamonds, but I don’t give a shit about diamonds. I want ease and freedom instead.
We spent Xmas day moving our coat closet and shoe racks into the new room and then played with what to do with the resulting new open space. We ended up putting in a desk and reading chair, which had previously been our bedroom. Now our bedroom had more space, giving me a fabulous meditation corner. The quality of our life felt so much more improved.
The driveway was another situation all together. We did not have the capability of graveling our own driveway. We would have to hire someone to do that. So, we saved up and when we had the means, we had a truck dump over a hundred tons of gravel on our driveway. The cost was higher than originally estimated and we had to dig deeper into our savings than expected, but with good financial planning we did not have to go into debt.
The expense was immensely worth it. One mud season has come and gone with lots of squeals of elation from me every time I drove down my new drive and deposited my less muddy shoes in their specially designated mud room.
Our new driveway (which is technically a shared easement with only one other house on it so far) withstood the test of a very snowy spring. So fabulous was our new road that our one neighbor farther down the road had to block it off from his direction, so people wouldn’t use it and put ruts onto his side of the road. Everyone wanted to use our fabulous road as a thru-way! Plus, our old cars will last longer because of less wear and tear.
Worthwhile Sacrifices
Yes, there is some sacrifice involved in living within your means.
For many people, it is important to have a shiny new car, and this requires a loan. For others, no loan means no car at all. It requires you to not care what others think of you or if other people have nicer cars than you. It requires you to not feel bad about yourself because you drive a shitty car but instead to feel good about yourself for being debt free. It requires you to not buy things you want for a while, so you can save up for things you need.
If you are thinking that you are too impossibly broke to live without debt than consider, how will you ever be able to get out of it? If you don’t shift your spending habits now, then when will you?
For a while I lived without a car in the northern outskirts of Seattle and had to take a bus to get to work and buy groceries, hitching rides off friends whenever I could until I got a better job. I used to stand at the bus stop, envying people driving past me and giving them the stink eye they did not deserve. That was challenging but also inspired me to find better work faster.
There were also a couple of years when I lived at my job and didn’t need a car. I had accumulated credit card debt and took a job in the Alaskan bush as a dorm RA for a high school. You could not drive to the village and had to fly in and out. Jobs in the Alaskan bush are generally high paying to encourage people to leave everything behind to go off the road system in subarctic winters. That “sacrifice” of two years in the bush led me to meet Eric.
Now I drive an old car that I plan to sell to my teenager. I am saving up for a newer used car. The roads out here, graveled or not, are rough and there is no point in having a fancy new car that will just get banged around. Instead, I prefer to change up the seat covers and bumper stickers every couple of years, to freshen things up.
With the combo of new road and mud room, our mud problems are a thing of the past. We never have to look at our new easeful circumstances with resentment because it created a bunch of debt for us to work off either. We only need to be grateful for the little pleasures in life. Next up, a new living room extension! I’ll tell you all about it in 2025.
