We are a month into our transition from house to road and have already sold one vehicle, our house, and half our furniture. We have one week before we have to be out of the house. I have been so busy packing, staging, selling, and cleaning, that this is my first post. I thought I would share how we have approached getting ready to move out.
Since there is limited space in the rig we can’t take much. Most of what we are taking is a “need” followed by some “wants”. We are also creating “swap” boxes which are “wants” we can trade out with when we come home to see family and friends. That includes some clothing, games, toys, books, crafts, movies, and items we aren’t sure if we can take but might want the option to have down the road.
Then there are the items we love but can’t take, which makes up our “to be stored” items. We kept a few nice pieces of furniture, wedding gifts, photos, files, decor items…basically, things we know we want when we settle down that we don’t want to or can’t replace. These items however are limited to a 16′ x 8′ x 8′ Pods container. It arrives Tuesday. Hopefully we can get everything in without too many hard tearful decisions over what must go. The nice thing about the Pod is that we will have it for a few days so we can Tetris our stuff inside. It will be stored with access until we figure out where we will settle 2-3 years from now and can be delivered to that location. It will be like Christmas opening it up again!
Everything that is not a “take” or a “store” will be a “sell”. I have to say that the sell list is an impressive list of items. Our neighbors, Bible study friends and friends of friends have come and shopped at our house. We were so successful selling to them we decided against the need to have an Estate Sale. Plus it was against HOA rules and a hassle. So now we are posting the remainder of big items on Craigslist and are seeing great success. I feel confident at this point we will have everything sold by our move-out date. The smaller stuff we have gets picked up bit by bit as people come in for the big things and leave with some small things too. Perfect! Whatever is leftover will be donated to Goodwill. We also heard of a charity that looks for some of these smaller items so will look into that as well.
We definitely have packed too many “take” items because we aren’t sure what will fit, we find things we want but already packed it’s duplicate…lots of misc reasons. But since we will have the time to live in our rig after purchasing it, we can really figure out what we want and leave the rest behind as “swap” or “store”. Our overall goal is to NOT overfill our rig. We don’t want to duplicate this lifestyle and end up with a bunch of stuff creatively crammed into the rig. We really want to live as mimimalistically as we can. We have purged ourselves of quite a bit already and I can honestly say I don’t miss any of it.
Sounds like you’re moving along great. That only means you’re on the right track. I know the Lord has some amazing times in store for you and the family. Take it slow, enjoy the ride and take a break when you need if you can. Expect some bumps along the way, that’s just life. Keep HIM in control of everything. Love one another, look past the little things.
Rose