Moving out of a house we have lived in for 13 years proved much more difficult than we expected. The amount of stuff accumulated over that time is just staggering, and with limited time to vacate the house by December 5, we didn’t have enough time to evaluate our need for each item. So while we did get rid of some things (the Salvos did very well), we ended up with a pretty big load of stuff to be moved and stored.
It doesn’t look like much, does it? Apart from the things we left in our house for our tenants to use, and those we will carry with us, this is pretty much everything we own. And of course we got it into this garage the hard way – hiring a 2-tonne truck and moving it all ourselves! It was actually 1 and a bit loads in the truck (two return trips in one day), another load a few days later in a large van, and several car loads. Getting a mover would have been easier, but we decided to save the money for our trip and do it ourselves.
It did make me think about how dramatically our lives over the next year will shift from having this many things around us, to just what we can carry on our back. We will need to consider the value of everything we carry very carefully, as each item has a cost in weight and space. Perhaps when we get back we will apply this thought process to our home life as well – certainly weight and space are less of an issue at home, but accumulating too many objects still has some kind of cost as is shown in the photo above!