Stuff!
It is amazing how much STUFF you amass as a married couple for nearly 30 years with two kids! Good grief! We started pulling things out of closets and corners and cabinets and kids’ rooms and the garage … it never seemed to stop! And even after emptying a room, the next time I'd go in there, there'd be more stuff! I swear someone was sneaking in at night.
I was never one of those “the guy who dies with the most toys, wins” kind of people but still this was ridiculous. We had been downsizing since buying the “new” house 4 1/2 years earlier. I had wanted to spend time in the garage and woodwork or some other hobby and maybe even start a side hustle selling something or fixing cars, etc. so we had been slowly “letting things go”. That said we had left a 3100 sq ft house for this smaller one and had even purged a bit before moving. We spent the next several years having garage sales and giving away stuff to shrink the mess but even with all that, we were left with a huge amount of STUFF.
We had to pare it down somehow. Some things were easy. We made a “Must Take with us” pile/list, a “Give Away” and a “Throw Away” pile/list. Deciding what went in those was the easier of the choices. If we hadn’t pulled it out in a decade then we’d offer it to the kids, sell it or give it to the local Thrift Shop that benefits a Christian School. Four trailer loads ultimately went to the Thrift shop. Older furniture we probably wouldn’t want in a new home and that our kids didn’t want, were quickly hauled to them. Also, we had clothes, lots and lots of clothes in the Master closet. You know the ones, the “These fit me now” section, the “I can get back in these soon” section and the “Maybe someday I can get back into these” section. I hate to get rid of perfectly good clothes! It’s a thing for me. But, my wife and I had to come to grips with reality and let stuff go.
I kept only the “fits” and “soon fits” sections with most of those put in boxes and placed near the door of the climate-controlled storage room so we can swap out clothes more easily. We had to consider that we’d been living in the heat of south Texas and rarely used any long sleeve shirts or heavy coats. Even jeans were a rarity! But, now that we were traveling and one goal was to spend the hottest months up north in cooler weather, we needed to plan for warmer clothes. Some of our friends just come back to their home or storage units to change out for winter wear and others take a mix of cloths with them. We decided to do the later but go light on clothes in general. I picked two good pairs of jeans, one good set of Dockers and a couple of good shirts just in case and the rest was daily wear T-shirts and collared shirts and shorts. Lots of shorts.
Three loads of STUFF went to the local dump at a significant cost per load. Old mattresses, box springs, some tires from a Snowman my wife built each Christmas (hey, it was cute) and more STUFF I can’t begin to name went with it. And when I say loads, I don’t mean carloads, I mean trailer loads!
As for the “Must Take With Us” pile that was also rather direct though we had some trades to make. We had always been weekend warrior type campers for the most part but we had done a couple of 2-week jaunts. Older pots, pans, bedding, Tupperware, silverware, pillows, etc. would get demoted to the RV. Now we down-selected from our good stuff what we would take but had to be very weight and space conscious. Kim picked a couple of good pans (including two cast iron ones I had recently re-seasoned) and a small number of good plates and some plasticware because we had to keep the weight down. We had a bit of fun picking each others piles apart, “do you really need that?” The existing RV stuff was donated to the thrift store for some college students’ use or thrown away.
Since we rented a spot at the lake every year for 4 months beginning 1 July, we had somewhere to put the RV and a place to retreat to when the potential buyers came calling. We used that time to work out the bugs in our STUFF that was going with us. Sometimes we decided it was just too much, too big, or too little used to go with us and it went to the storage unit and other times something in storage turned out to be necessary. Overall, the time was well spent making those trades.
A quick example of a trade was when the power pedestal on our site at the lake burned up one night. They said we could move or just plug in next door. The standard shore cable wouldn't reach but we had an extension in storage that we could quickly get to save having to move the rig at night. That extension has since been used again when we visited Kim's Mom and plugged in there. It has earned a permanent spot onboard. The reverse is also true. After making our first major trip in the rig, we realized that we were paying a lot for Dish network that we just didn't use enough. After talking with friends, we decided to dump Dish and go with YouTube TV, a cheaper option, that meant we could store the Dish antenna, receiver and cables.
