Frugal

It's January, so it must be time for a little redecorating.

And I kind of hate our dining room rug.



The print is off-center, it's faded in spots (thank you, urping cats), and the blue floral design goes with precisely nothing else in the living/dining/kitchen area.

So I did this:



Meet the new rug, same as the old rug. The rug is dead, long live the rug!

I was inspired in part by Melissa, who recently posted a tour of her quite lovely, semi-monastic  bedroom and got an interesting discussion going about making do, beauty versus function, and money for possessing things versus time for living life.



I find these discussions of stuff--the having of it, the getting rid of it, the buying less of it, the doing without it--endlessly fascinating. They often seem peculiarly American to me. Protestant, somehow, in the way that the rejection of materialism acquires a moral quality. I can't quite put my finger on it but maybe Thorstein Veblen could explain it to me. Or is this not Protestant at all but more like Thoreau's doing?

Anyway, I'm not criticizing these discussions--just overanalyzing them (typical). And the truth is that I'm also endlessly susceptible to them. The idea of LESS really appeals to me. But when I try to put it in practice, I find my rebellion against the anti-consumerism I grew up with at war with the authentic anti-consumerism I've developed as an adult, and I'm never sure where to draw the armistice lines.

I think what all this means is that I still want a new (well, new to me anyway--I'd prefer it were not actually new-new) dining room table and chairs, but I'm pretty happy with my old "new" rug.

I mean, not bad for an investment of fifteen minutes and zero dollars, right?