The trade-off for such a huge temporary downsize was to get a storage space while we live here for the next foreseeable future. We usually eat together at night in the living room. Instead we use the dining nook next to the kitchen as our home office space. We are trying this new thing where we don't have a dining room. We picked a small town home with two bedrooms. It's fortunately very easy to find an apartment around here. Then on the weekend we toured our top picks, picked one and signed the lease. Now I get a regular high when I can fill up a whole trash/donate bag.Ībout a month before we had to move, we began searching online for an apartment. The more familiar I have become with the process and working through all the feelings, like the guilt of letting go of the vase from aunt Agatha (I don't really have an aunt Agatha) and the 'just in case I need it later' things and the 'I better hold on to this half of something until I find the other half' things, the process gets easier. Since then I have gone through all our belongings once or twice a year. A few things did emerge from the depths that we kept, but most of it went straight to recycling. The bathroom rug was the first thing to go. So I quickly concluded that we must have 24 boxes of crap things we didn't need, so why did we even have them? I went through those boxes with a vengeance. We could not name a single other item in those boxes. I remembered a bath rug (that I didn't like anymore) and an answering machine. After the boxes had hung out up there for 6 months, I asked Frank to name 10 things in those boxes. During that time we had stored 24 boxes of things upstairs that would eventually go into those rooms once they were finished. It was a two story house and we had only finished the downstairs, where we lived while finishing the upstairs. We had just moved into the house we had built the year before. Let me tell you about one of the first times I went through all my stuff. It instantly lifts the energy of your whole house. The great thing is that when you sort out all the crap you don't care for, you are left with a pile of stuff you really love. Plus, after you are done, you will know where everything is and what you have. Touching all of it and making a conscious decision to keep or toss. It's not about being ruthless unless you want to, it's about going through your stuff. If this is your first time purging you can definitely take a softer approach. I got totally into it and there was so much purging and it felt so good. Every time I packed up another bag for trash or donate, I thought to myself: "Here is another box worth of stuff I don't have to pack, carry, pay to move, unpack and then store". "Cut deep, cut wide" was the motto I used. Our new apartment is only 1350 square feet, so I had my work cut out for me, but I welcomed it. This move, we were downsizing to half the size. More space?, less space? I make a loose plan about what to keep and what to sell. I do this every year also when we are not moving, but when I know we am moving, I cut a little deeper.Īs I am going through this process, I am already thinking about the place I am moving to. Get rid of everything you don't love or use. Only keep what you really use and what makes you happy. Go through all cabinets and drawers, including the ones you are moving with you and sort into sell, donate, trash or keep. And I do start a couple of months before the move itself, to plan everything. Of course careful planning needs to take place to pull this off. But if it only takes a week, you are back to your regular life in no time. I think one of the reasons some people don't like to move is that they let it drag on and on and on. Packed into 71 boxes in 7 hours over the course of 2 days.Īnd I have done it several times, with this proven system. I want to share it because for the past couple of moves I have fine-tuned it and I now know I can pack my house in those two days, spending about 3 and a half hours a day on boxing it all up on average.
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