This weekend has been a tough one, folks. With just a day or two over two weeks before we vacate this place, we're facing the hard truth about all of our stuff: We still have too much.
We ordered our POD today. It's arriving Friday, July 3 for us to load. Two weeks from tonight we'll have it locked and loaded, ready for pickup bright and early Monday, July 6. Then, it'll be shipped off to the midwest, where it will sit in climate-controlled comfort for who knows how long.
Our POD is small. At just 7 x 7 x 8 feet, that adds up to just 392 cubic feet for us to store everything we want to keep but don't want to take along in our 300 square foot motorhome.
As soon as the Salvation Army truck pulls away on Wednesday with all of our unsold Craigslist items, we're going to tape a 7 x 7 foot square on our garage floor and start stacking. That will be very interesting.
Our game plan from here on out is to start emptying rooms. That's a little tough to do, because all of these rooms will have staging stuff in them until the 1st or so. Today, our goal was to empty the guest room. On the surface, that sounded like a quick, one-hour project. After all, it was just the closet. Seriously, I didn't think there was that much in there. But, I'm sad to report our guest room is not yet "cleared".
Ugh!
To be fair, the guest room closet emptying project sort of spilled over into the office closet. So, I found myself dealing with stuff in that black hole, too. It ended up taking several hours and it's still not done. But, it's progress, I guess.
Of special note in today's cleanup was my knitting stuff. I'm a newbie knitter who, I discovered today, appeared to have become quite interested in this new hobby. I demonstrated my new found enthusiasm by buying more yarn than I needed and starting and not finishing two sweaters and at least one pair of socks. Today, I had no room in my psyche for UFOs (Unfinished Objects). So, out went the sweater pieces. The collective hours that went into the trash today was tough to take. But, as Boris pointed out, one way to look at the time I spent on these two UFOs was as entertainment.
"It's like watching a movie," he said. "If you enjoyed it at the time, it's worth it."
Good point, dear. Thanks!
I reduced my knitting clutter to one bag, which should ride just fine in the moose. Knitting is a great hobby for the road. It's lightweight and doesn't take much space or many tools.
I cleared my quilting stuff, too. I'm taking a wee bit of stash and a few essential notions with me on the road. It all fits in one small plastic container. Another container had notions I won't part with, and that will go to storage. The rest of my fabric, batting and my stash cabinet will be delivered to a quilting friend later this week.
So it goes!
It's trash night once again, so time for the Sunday night check in. Our neighbors have a bulky trash pickup scheduled for tomorrow. They placed a few little things at the end of their driveway and invited us to add to the pile. We did! Thanks, neighbors! Our bins are once again filled to the brim. And, we have a couple of extra bags that will find a home in a neighborhood bin later tonight.
What we're noticing right about now is how we're feeling about getting rid of our stuff. Some things, like the sectional in our loft, we're ready to take a chainsaw to them if that's what it takes to get them out the door. (Long story.) As we face the idea of purging smaller things, now this is the stuff that's made it through many cuts.
In the end, the fate of the remaining little stuff will be determined by what will fit in 392 cubic feet.
And, that's hard.
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