Here We Go

After much discussion, and more than a little trepidation, we’ve decided to move from a traditional “sticks and stones” home to going full time in an RV.  Associated with this, is the decision that I will be joining my wife in retirement sometime in the next year or so and we think traveling the country and seeing places we’ve never seen, or not seen in a long time, is something both of us will really enjoy.  The reason to start so far ahead is that we aren’t totally sure how long it’s really going to take to put all of this together.

One of the first big projects, and it’s one everyone faces looking at real downsizing, is dealing with what to keep and what not to keep.  Some things are easy:  we’ve got a lifetime of photos, 35mm slides, movies (yes, real 8mm silent home movies from the 30’s and on), video, etc.  While not worth a plugged nickel commercially, they are priceless family treasures.  Then there are all of the saved gizmos from kids, parties, and all that stuff.  Some we’ll keep, a lot we won’t.  We are just starting through boxes and boxes of that kind of saved material and we’ll have to see how far down we can pare it.  It’s a pull between not saving things that will never see the light of day again and disposing of a lifetime of collected items.  We know we’ll have a storage unit for the real treasures, but it gets expensive to keep things that aren’t needed.

For the bigger items, we’re working with our two kids to see what they want to get out of this.  No reason to wait for our passing and then having them deal with items they would get then, and have to deal with along with the other emotional baggage that comes with death. We’ve decided, if they don’t want it, then it’s better off to find it a new home where someone can benefit and use things.

The biggest issue so far has been how to deal with disposing of things, and how to sell the house.  We’ve gone back and forth between putting the house on the market and then having a crunch to get out of the house by closing, and getting out of the house (and starting to live in the RV full time before I retire) and then selling.  After several back and forths, we’ve committed to disposing of everything that’s going away first.  So we’ve scheduled an estate sale for early April and are frantically working on a combination of house painting and clean up, and sorting out what we are going to keep.  All of that has to boxed for storage and retrieval so we are effectively out of the house in about 4 weeks from now so the estate sale people can come in and get set up.

Being right in the middle of all this, it’s hard to see how it plays out.  The purpose of this blog is to document the process more or less as it happens for anyone who is interested.

February 28, 2015

Somewhere in Texas