The Woman Who Wastes Money on Moving

Wasteful Encyclopedia: Secret Stories of Bad Friends

I recently read a book called this, and the stories about other people's love-filled consumption activities were incredibly interesting. (I heard the second volume was recently published, congratulations!)

Influenced by that, I thought about my own wasteful lifestyle.

I am definitely "the woman who wastes money on moving." This is it.

You might be thinking, "Hey, is this really the text you're writing after such a long time (about a year...)?" but I just felt like writing it. It's also a confession about my past spending habits. Yes, that's right, it's a waste of money!

I have lived in 5 houses in 7 years. That's an even faster pace than moving once every year and a half.

I will write down the history of the houses I have lived in here.

1st time: Ikebukuro, 16 square meters, 1R with a loft, newly built, 65,000 yen.
My first time living alone. I was a professional dancer earning 140,000 yen/month, living in extreme poverty. I couldn't afford high rent, but I had to live near the studio to keep my body going, so I ended up in a surprisingly small property where there wasn't even space to sit down comfortably.

2nd time: 4-minute walk from Yoyogi Park, about 35 square meters?, 2DK, probably over a decade old, 200,000 yen.
Less than a year after I started living alone, I began living with someone else due to marriage. My husband's younger sister ended up living in my previous place, so I left the furniture and appliances behind and bought new ones. The property itself was a normal condominium, but the rent jumped suddenly because of the location.

3rd time: 10-minute walk from Yoyogi-Uehara, 25 square meters 1DK, 35 years old, 75,000 yen.
Due to various circumstances, we separated, and I lived alone again. My self-employed dress shop was barely scraping by, I had no mental breathing room at all, and it was the time when I had the least amount of money. I thought if I didn't have money, I'd get by with ingenuity, so I got into DIY, laying down cushion flooring in the 35-year-old dilapidated apartment, sticking plywood to the walls, and painting them.

(I only have messy photos)

4th time: 5-minute walk from Yoyogi Park, 50 square meter designer maisonette with an atrium (floor area is probably about 35 square meters), 20 years old, 210,000 yen.
After my divorce, I started living with someone I was dating again on impulse in less than half a year. Partly because the proportion of my work at a company increased, I let my guard down because I had a regular income, and due to the reaction from the poverty before that, this was when I had the most wasteful lifestyle. A strange house with curved walls.

5th time: 1-minute walk from Yoyogi-Uehara, 33 square meters, 1R, 40-year-old renovation, 130,000 yen.
Currently. I found out that the person I had been dating for about two years was someone who couldn't think about the future at all, and while I was feeling conflicted about whether I should stay with them or not, they abruptly broke up with me, for a common reason. My third time living alone.

It's something like this.

Since I started living in the Yoyogi Park/Uehara area, I've moved 4 times within a 10-minute walk, which is honestly crazy. The fluctuations in rent are also too extreme, and the order makes no sense.

In total, even if I estimate conservatively, I've spent roughly 2 million yen just on initial costs and moving. Three of those times, I replaced furniture and appliances on a fairly large scale due to various circumstances, and when I think about the fact that I also bought small interior goods, the amount is now impossible to calculate; it's terrifying just to think about it.
Including rent, it was a 20s where I poured an incredible amount of money into my living environment.

Naturally, I end up exhausting my savings every time I move, so as I approach 30, my current savings are about as meager as the amount you'd get from wiping a rag and wringing it out. In other words, I'm broke.

If you ask why I go to such lengths to move, the answer is mostly due to unavoidable circumstances where I had no choice but to move at the time (marriage, separation, living together, separation, etc.). However, if you were to ask if my own curiosity about living environments prevented me from staying in one place for long, I suppose I couldn't deny that either.

If I could have compromised on that, even if moving itself was unavoidable, there were other ways to handle it, like moving back to my parents' house or continuing to use the furniture and appliances I already had...

The reason I didn't do that is simply my longing for a lovely home. That's all.

If you ask when I started liking it so much, there isn't a specific time I can point to, but before I knew it, I had become a person who stares at property listings all day long, follows every stylish overseas interior design account on Instagram, endlessly pins related images on Pinterest, constantly checks BUYMA, Yahoo! Auctions, Mercari, Rakuten, and Amazon to see if there are products that match my vision, and feels compelled to enter any lovely thrift store I find in town. I've pretty much mastered the second-hand furniture and overseas-inspired shops in the Shibuya area and have been inside all of them at least once. Meguro-dori, where interior shops line the street for hundreds of meters, is like heaven to me; just going there makes me feel happy.

Whenever problems arose in my personal life, what always supported me was the excitement of the future of creating a beautiful home. Each time, seeking comfort in a cozy space, I bought and discarded all sorts of furniture and interior goods.

Well, having left all those messy past memories behind along with my homes, I have recently started my third attempt at living alone. For now, I am satisfied with the coordination and environment of my current room, if not 100%, at least to a passing grade.

After moving five times, you really start to grasp the tricks of stylish interior coordination and your own preferences, so I guess if you spend money and gain experience, things turn out okay. I've even been featured in a special segment of the current issue of the magazine, Tokyo Graffiti, and I think I've managed to acquire the sense of someone who can create a stylish room.

Before I knew it, thinking about rooms and analyzing them became my life's work, so I continue to check them without fail. However, since there's nothing more I can really do with my own room, I've recently been visiting friends' rooms to offer advice here and there.

This doesn't require spending my own money, there's no heavy labor like moving, and I get thanked for it, so it's actually quite nice.

So, if you want to make your room look nice but don't know what to do or how to do it, please feel free to consult me lol

I think I'm done with moving for a while, probably.

Ah, but if I were to move next time, I'd love to renovate a property that allows modifications, knock out the ceiling, and try painting the walls blue...