Well, it was a lot of work. I mean a whole lotta work. But we finally emptied out the house and moved out. Another milestone in the rear view mirror.
It wasn’t easy. It took three garage sales and many, many trips to recycling, various charity organizations and our storage unit to empty out the house. Even though we sold off maybe half of our stuff (see the garage sales post here) we still had a lot left. I guess when you start with a lot of stuff, 50% of a lot is still a lot. We should have gotten rid of more but were simply running out of time. We had a deadline for turning over possession of the house to the new owners and we didn’t want to go back and ask for more time. We probably could have but that’s just not us. We worked long hours everyday not just to meet a legal contract date but also to meet a personal milestone for ourselves. Selling the house and moving out was a major turning point in our transition from a traditional home ownership lifestyle to a full time mobile lifestyle. It was big. It meant we were really doing this. No turning back. It was an exhausting process but we were excited about the next phase.
Getting rid of things responsibly takes a lot of time. We didn’t want to simply get a 20 yard dumpster in the front yard and throw everything in it. It certainly would have been easier but trucking it all off to the landfill was not the right answer for us. Donating as much as we could to charitable organizations was part one of the solution even though it meant a lot of running around. Part two was taking things to the recycling center. Much of that stuff should have gone a long time ago. Even with all that, we still filled up a large storage unit with the stuff we were keeping. Keeping for now that is. We will have another round of purging at some point since storing stuff costs money. You reach a tipping point where it’s cheaper to just re-buy the stuff in the future than to pay to store it. Yes, it does take a lot of work to downsize 30+ years worth of stuff but it’s doable. Just stay focused on the goal and work through it bit by bit.
For the time being we’re renting a furnished condo in a nearby town so that we can work on the sailboat over the winter. I talked about that in the sailboat vs. motorhome post here. We’ll put the boat up for sale in the spring and then purchase the motorhome. We do have a couple trips coming up however so it’s not all work. In December we’ll be out in California for 10 days visiting Yosemite and Lake Tahoe. January through mid March we’ll be in Florida enjoying some warmer weather, then it’s back to the condo to get the boat ready for spring launch and up for sale.
So, one more milestone checked off the list. Put that one in the rear view mirror. It was a big one. For some it’s a scary one since home ownership is such a major goal in our culture and giving that up is hard to contemplate. But when you look at it as just stuff it makes it easier to work through. And for us, most of that stuff was just in the way and getting rid of it has been liberating.
