Strange title, but yes, our “house” is shrinking. We rented a storage unit, about the size of a single car garage, but the ceiling is not as high – about 6.5 ft (just over 2 meters). All the shelves we stored stuff on in the basement have been moved out to the unit and set up to receive our goodies. We purchased a bunch of plastic tubs to protect the stuff from rodents while we are gone, and the real work has now begun.

We pared down our clothing – TWICE – packed that up and took it out to the unit. Most of our kitchen supplies except for a few pots, pans, plates and glasses now reside in the storage unit. All the clothes we are not taking with us, most of our furniture and books, workout equipment, skis, the wall unit I made and a few other nostalgic items are now gone from the house.

Garage sale stuff!

The downside of all this is we have a HUGE pile of stuff in the living room – things we are selling at our garage sale – its hard to believe that we, who consider ourselves somewhat minimalist, have so much stuff we don’t need. Its sobering to realize how much you accumulate over a lifetime and it feels so good to let go of it and get rid of things. We always go through a clothing purge – once in the spring and once in the fall. Then we would go thrifting to get our “new” clothes. We have purges twice in the last month and we both keep wondering whether or not we have TOO MANY clothes – funny how your perspective changes when you are forced to pick and live with only absolute neccessities.

3 empty bedrooms

The other thing we have noticed is that the more we pack, the more stuff seems to show up – its almost like its breeding in a dark closet somewhere! We take out 5 or 6 tubs of stuff and we have still not made an apparent dent in what remains. It gets discouraging, but in actuality we really have made progress – the basement and 3 of the 4 bedrooms are pretty much empty. Some of the better furniture is now up on Craigs List – that will pare things down even more, so at some point we will actually see the fruits of our endeavors and feel like we have made significant progress.

As of March 31,  we will have an active virtual mailing address. It is located in Tallahassee Florida, and it will allow us to “open” our mail from anywhere in the world. They scan the front of the envelope and put it into our inbox. I then indicate a disposition; open, shred or forward to a physical location. When you request them to open it, they do so and scan the contents and you then are able to view the contents online. There are a number of companies that offer these services to sailors and RVers – we took the least expensive option in a state with no state tax. Best thing about it is no more junk mail! Contact me privately and I will share the mailing address with you.

This is the part that drives me crazy! We aren’t moving out until the month of April, so we cannot really pack until later this month, but we are both starting to get really excited. And time is ticking, so we feel anxious and the desire to make progress toward the goal every day almost becomes an obsession. The last thing we want to do is have a BUNCH of stuff to do at the last minute. So we pacify ourselves by doing one thing towards our goal each day.

The last 2 big events on our social schedule were my stepson’s wedding and a visit to my parents in Virginia. The wedding was a ton of fun! All the groom’s cousins and aunts and uncles came, so it was like a huge family reunion. The last 2 family meetings have been for funerals, so this was a nice change – a celebration of a happy event instead of the passing of a family member.

We drove down to see my parents and took the only mattress we have (a double) off our bed and put it in the back of the van. We slept at a truck stop to save money and made it down early Thursday. We had a nice visit and then headed home on Saturday to pick up the dog and now we have nothing between us and move out day except prep.

At this point our house is pretty empty. We have a basement full of food and tools, most of which we will take up to the boat. 3 of the 4 bedrooms are empty, so we are left with a double mattress, a dresser, a chest of drawers, 2 dining room sets, a glass table, some folding chairs and the stuff in the garage. We have given the kids all their stuff – pictures, memorabelia etc, and now we need to start moving the things we are keeping into storage for when we return.

Once we have that accomplished, we will have a garage sale and the rest of the unsold stuff will go to charity. It has been very liberating to slough off the trappings of a land based life. You realize when you go through the process how much junk and useless stuff you accumulate. We actually need very little, and our purchasing decisions from now on will be based on needs and not wants.

Some have asked us why we are keeping anything. We are not sure what we will do when we return. We don’t know if we will enjoy the nautical life too much and not want to return to land. We may go to California, and explore the West coast of our country, as well as Vancouver and Alaska – we just don’t know. So we are keeping the bare minimum; bed, place to eat, cookware, some clothing and tools.

I spent a fair amount of time resolving technical issues to ensure that I can work properly while on the trip. Part of that meant upgrading to newer phones that could handle the GSM signals – our old phones did not. Our nearshore internet issues were resolved when Verizon added an unlimited plan for $100/month – I was paying the same amount for 20-24GB, so that will help us when we are in cell range, and our satellite phone will only need to do voice.

Our next step coming up will be to virtualize our mailing address; we will be “moving” to Florida even though our physical location will be at home or in the marina until we leave. We are doing this early to ensure that everything is properly in place and all the kinks ironed out before they actually need to be.

We are also in the process of aquiring a storage unit and will start moving the stuff we know we are going to keep into the unit so we can fully ascertain what we will need to get rid of at the garage sale. Fun times ahead!

We are both getting antsy and the excitement is building. Poor puppy knows something is up because stuff keeps disappearing. We can only reassure him that he is coming along, beyond that I don’t know what he is thinking…