I’m notorious for starting projects and not finishing them. For having an interest I explore for six months and then never revisiting it again. It’s one of the reasons I was hesitant to go back for my PhD, initially. How could I commit to one thing for so long? Eventually I came to realize that an academic life would have much of the variety I hoped for in an intellectual life–so it made sense to pursue my PhD–but I always try to stay cognizant of my natural tendency to start but not finish things.
In a small world sense, this also translates to projects around the house. I’ve always had aspirations to become more handy–I have dreams of building a tiny house or converting a van–but I haven’t done too much to pursue these outside of watching many youtube videos.
My boyfriend and I recently moved to a new apartment, and so we’ve been trying to get things together here, and something he brought up after we moved is the state of our couch. Even with being just few years old, it’s gotten a lot of wear in the pandemic by two humans lounging on it and working from home. In addition, it’s been well-loved by two cats. His initial thought–as would be many others’–was to consider replacing the couch with a new one.
Well, there’s nothing like the thought of tossing a couch in a landfill to spur me into home project action it seems. I thought I’d take the opportunity here to write about why I wanted to fix our couch and why it aligns with some of the values I try to live out, specifically: sustainability, frugality, and creativity.
Sustainability
This was my first motivator to not throw the couch out. Just imagining this large piece of furniture being hauled to the dump and taking up space in a landfill was enough to get me thinking about possible solutions. I realize there’s a degree to which that this kind of thinking plays into the false narrative we’ve been sold about individual responsibility for the damage we’ve done to our planet. But I do think there is still benefit to considering our own individual choices and how they contribute to climate change. I know it would be hard for me to not feel guilty about throwing a worn-but-otherwise-perfectly-good couch into a landfill.
Frugality
While paying off my student loans, I learned a lot of the benefits to frugality. While I did take it too far at times, leading to overwhelm, I have been grateful for the habit I’ve cultivated to wait and not just buy something to solve a problem I have. It’s motivating to think about what the cost of a new couch might have been and to imagine instead saving that amount of money, investing it, donating it, or using it for a better purpose. Spending money on a new couch, while at another time might make sense, was not the best choice right now.
Creativity
The final benefit I got from saving the couch was from everything I ended up learning from going through the process of fixing it. I learned how to check the structural integrity of the couch by examining the wood and springs, what I needed from the fabric store to fix it, and that many others have had the same problem as I did and how they went about fixing it. It turned out our couch really just needed a bit of stuffing and new batting on the bottom. And it seems to be working out so far (see below!)
The Lazy PhD 