The Purge (Part 2)

BOB

I’ve read about people jettisoning everything they own and moving to Mexico with just a couple of suitcases and a dream.

Other people pack all their things up and have professional movers transport them to their new, permanent home south of the border.

We belong to a third category, one we are inventing.  

The Third Category

We love our house and its location in Colorado. We also realize that we won’t be able to travel forever, and its one-level, ranch-style living will be perfect for aging in place someday. Therefore, we plan to come back at some point. In addition, our kids aren’t out of college yet, and they will want their things when it comes time to move into their own places. So we are keeping the house and renting it out to friends. This decision means that we don’t have to get rid of everything. However, it does complicate things by forcing us to decide what we’re going to take with us and what we’re going to store for an extended period of time.

This is where our stuff will live

Filling a Truck

Since we have a truck, we decided to purchase a topper for it so we can take more with us, particularly since we’re also traveling with three cats and Lexie for the first year. At this point, we’re hoping we can get everything we want to take into the truck. (More on how that goes when the time comes.)

Storing the Rest

In the meantime, we’re left with deciding what to put into storage. That’s been difficult for several reasons. First, both and Lisa and I “collect” things. Not necessarily formally collect things, although I do have some stamps and coins that I collected when I was a kid, but more along the lines of accumulating things and keeping them on the off chance we may want them later. We had accumulated so much stuff that when we built the garage at our current house, we had to make it extra big so we could store all of this stuff.

Purging

We fit all our stuff in 3 of these. We are trying to cut down to 2.

Knowing that the more we store, the more a larger storage space will cost each month, which could produce a very large bill over many years, we realized we need to undertake a purge. Actually, it is more like a pare-down. It is my goal to pare down by one-third. I have a decent idea of what that looks like, since when we moved to Colorado in 2009 we moved everything in three 8’ x 8’ x 16’ PODS. Therefore, I’d like to reduce what we store by the equivalent of one POD, or 1,024 cubic feet.

Working backward from that number would require us to rent a 2,024 cubic foot storage unit. We’ve rented a 10’ x 20’ x 11’ (2,200 cubic feet) unit so the math works out. All that leaves is the pare-down. More on that later.

To be continued ...