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Showing posts from June, 2017

The $1600 bookcase

The apartment we live in is currently for sale. The owners are asking $429,000. The floor area is 76 square metres. (US readers: 818 sq.ft) With those numbers, a buyer is paying $5,645 for each square metre. (US readers $524/sq.ft) In those terms, it seems really expensive. So many things that just aren't worth the space they take up. The bookcase is not the worst, but at 90cm wide and 30cm deep, it takes up 0.27m 2 (3 sq.ft). Either way, that's $1,573 worth of space. I gets scarier when that maths is applied to a spare bedroom. It reminds me of the book Less is More . Kim says that in the old days items were more expensive but space (housing) was cheap. So it made sense to hoard things back then. But now it's the other way around. Generally items are cheap to repurchase (if we ever need to) but the space to store them is costly. These days it makes more sense to be selective about what we hold on to. In Australia there's a lot of talk at the moment about h...

Basket case

Part of the reason we have so much stuff, or throw away so much stuff, is because we buy too much stuff. A big part of that is the constant advertising messages we are hit with throughout the day. I saw this one recently. In the bottom of a shopping basket. Is there no space free from advertising? OK, this is probably been happening for some time, but I generally avoid the two major supermarket chains. PS. One of the extra advantages of working 3 days per week is moving grocery shopping to a weekday. It is so quick and hassle-free with hardly anyone there.