My biggest guiding principle in life did not come from school, church, or the sanctuary of my Adirondack chair. It came from an appliance store.

And not a Home Depot or Lowe’s—where limitless possibilities of appliances stretch on beyond the do-it-yourself aisles in their own galaxy of stainless steel—but from a small-town showroom.

It all began with a compact washing machine from Sears. I was newly-married and living in the attic apartment of an old Victorian house turned medical building my friends nicknamed The Hobbit Hole. Perched in the eaves above a dentist office waiting room we had to weave past on our way upstairs, our little love nest had quirks, and one major perk: Rent was $25 a week, all utilities included. And, it was right next door to Sears, issuer of my first credit card. This was back when Sears thought women couldn’t be held responsible for their purchases until they had a husband so, according to the card, I was Mrs. Thomas Clough. But, as such, I had enough laundry to decide that the Lilliputian-sized washing machine on wheels with its screw-on faucet hose was way better than trips to the laundromat. And for $25 a week, I could push that sucker over to my kitchen sink, plug it in, and let it use as much hot water and electricity as its dinky little agitator drum could handle.

So in I marched, to the far left of the short line of Kenmores, to the special display space reserved for the smallest budgets and living spaces. There was one compact washing machine in stock and, even though I’d admired it from the window and knew I was already sold, I lifted up the lid and walked around it a few times to seem like a savvy consumer.

“You guys deliver, right?” I asked the Sears salesman as I dug out my credit card. “I’m right next door.”

The next day, patients sitting on the bench outside the dentist office had to curl back their toes and scooch their legs 90 degrees sideways to make room for my first new appliance on its way through the narrow waiting room and up the spiral stairs to The Hobbit Hole. I hoped they weren’t the same patients who, a year or so later, had to repeat the maneuver for my second new appliance: a portable dishwasher. Not much bigger than a file cabinet, it had one knob and an optional magnetic face plate that changed it from white into a contemporary avocado-colored appliance. And, when I wheeled it in the corner opposite the washing machine, it doubled as a typewriter stand.

Both machines served well beyond their move out of The Hobbit Hole—past a bench full of patients I hoped had not previously swiveled sideways for my appliances—to our first house. The avocado dishwasher joined my second-hand copper-colored stove and harvest gold refrigerator in my new kitchen where they perfectly matched my vinyl floor. (Yes, in 1979, Congoleum actually sold a pattern with all those colors, enabling me to complete my “psychedelic autumn explosion” decorating scheme.) For a while, my hodgepodge remained functional and stylish—and I remained blissfully outside of the appliance showroom.

“There’s more for your life at Sears!” When I had to start venturing in again, that’s what the new slogan promised. But that’s not what finally drew me back. Dire necessity and the lack of big box store options did. I didn’t need more for my life—not until I replaced my refrigerator that just crapped out in the middle of July, my washing machine that was agitating my nerves instead of my clothes, or my dead dishwasher. And I didn’t need Consumer Reports or much brand knowledge—except that I wanted brand spanking new, and I wanted it now. So I did what any young, blonde woman with a Mrs-something credit card would do back in the days before Google and political correctness. I asked the Sears sales guy for advice. (Yes, in the days of Mrs-something credit cards, saleswomen never made it out from behind the catalog desk far enough to help with appliances, so it was always a guy.)

I’d do a semi-confident domestic goddess stride past the showroom lineup of whatever appliance I suddenly needed—lifting lids, fingering controls, trying to look fussy. Then I’d cave. “If you were buying one of these, which one would you pick?” Invariably, the sales guy would meet me about halfway up the line—past the bare minimum models on the far left, but before the ultra trendy models closest to the store window on the right. “You don’t need a lot of that stuff,” he’d agree, pointing toward the high-end. “Unless you have a huge family, entertain a lot, or want the thing to practically run itself, then you’re better off going with something like this.”

And “something like this” was usually spot on, the best bang for my buck. Middle of the road plus a tad extra. A dishwasher without a control panel designed after the space shuttle command center, but with more than one knob and an on-off switch. A stove that was better than a grown-up girl sized EZ Bake Oven, but not jacked up with too much Martha Stewart sophistication, either.

By the time I was creeping up on middle age, aiming a few stars up from mediocre had gone from a purchase plan into a full-blown philosophy, a lifetime maintenance policy born of Yankee frugality and the blessed wherewithal to do something special with what I’d inherited and earned. I’d figured out how to apply the two-thirds yardstick to pretty much everything in my career and my leisure. I knew when to slow down a wild sprint, how to go from super-sizing to skimping and back again as needed. Somewhere between what my mother would call “hoity-toity” and “ticky-tacky”—that’s about where I wanted to end up.

And now that I’m two-thirds up the line of my life’s journey, I’m doing better than ever at holding that sweet spot—physically, mentally and financially. “It ain’t the Ritz, but it sure ain’t the Motel 6, either,” Tom and I say these days as we settle into our vacation destinations. We have enough Rent-a-Wreck memories to keep our sights this side of ultra el cheap-o, and enough savings and foresight to know we can splurge on what we really want to remember when our travels are done. So whether it’s our mud season home away from home or a bucket list excursion, I scroll about two-thirds down the booking site, and away we go. Then we come back to our little cabin and, within reason and good sense, finagle every last ounce of usefulness out of the things we’ve come to call necessities.

Like our 15-year-old stove. Or “range” as they call ’em nowadays—as in price range, meaning a price range this side of four figures only gets you a notch above one on the side of the road with a “still works” sign taped to it. When my newfangled glass cook top cracked in one corner recently, I was glad my appliances-paralleling-life analogy was more philosophical than literal. “Good thing I don’t have to be thrown in the scrap heap now just because I have some surface cracks,” I said when I found out you can’t do a facelift on a Jenn-Air downdraft drop-in range unless you want to shell out more money than poor Jenny’s worth. So sensibility and the risk of electrocution won out over the argument that old Jenny was still 80% serviceable, and I went into market research mode again. Online this time, filtering by function rather than my usual default of cheapest ones first, I found a four-star range that fit right into my “not just camp anymore” kitchen. It’s Bluetooth-enabled so, supposedly, I can give it cooking instructions from another room if I ever decide to stop doing that to my husband.

This could be the start of the “last one of those I’ll ever buy” phase of life. If so, I plan to slide into it gracefully, pointing my compass a few degrees north of moderation and mediocrity as long as possible. I’ll stop side eyeing my other not-so-new appliances long enough to look around at where I am—living just large enough by the lake. I’ve come home for good now, to a place where I no longer wash dishes in a bucket or cook on a Coleman, where I’m still making do with a few relics from my Hobbit Hole. And when and if the time is right, I’ll have no problem whipping out my very own credit card like a new age Sears chick to keep this slightly extraordinary streak going strong.

Joy’s blog can be found online at rootedinrangeley.com.