What it feels like to sell all of your stuff

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to get rid of all of your stuff?  I hadn’t given this aspect of the move much thought until last week when it was time to start the biggest purge of our lives & I’ve learned a lot over the past week about what truly matters to me. Thankfully our house is small by modern standards, there are no basements where we live, we have very limited closet space and neither of us likes to shop, but you know what? We still have a decent amount of stuff that needs to go.

Our new house is furnished so we have to get rid of pretty much everything. All of our furniture, kitchen stuff except for a few favorite things (my microplane and food processor are coming!), artwork, tools, lawn equipment (our new yard is rock) and a lot of our clothes. When I walked around our house last weekend to take pictures of everything we had to sell I’ll be honest that I felt a little sad at first.

The sadness quickly faded and morphed into liberation as I thought about our plan. Save some money, get rid of real estate, get rid of stuff, break residency with our current state, leave the rat race. We’re on the 2nd to last step! We’ve been working toward this plan for years and this is the next step. It’s by far the biggest & most life changing of all the steps so far. And as much as we love this little house and the area we live in it’s a barrier to the next step. It’s a financial anchor that will hold us in this one place for as long as we have it.

And none of this stuff is my life, it’s just stuff. I realized with the exception of very few things – none of it matters to me – and the things I find value in are the ones that are valueless to others. It’s not the nice dining room set we bought a few years ago when we remodeled that I’ll miss. It’s our friends and family gathered around it. It’s hosting a special dinner for someone I care about. There’s no price that can be put on that.

The other things in our house that hold the most value for me is our artwork. We made a point to buy some kind of artwork on almost every trip we took so walking through our house we’re reminded of all the great trips we’ve been on. One of my favorites is a painting of blue tangs we bought in Bonaire. I love them and we saw them on almost every dive. I have to walk by that painting every time I walk into the kitchen and it never fails to make me happy. That’s priceless to me, but to others it’s just a funky piece of art they want to pay $20 for.

The rest of our artwork came from our neighborhood’s yearly art show featuring all local artists which is held just down the street behind one of our favorite restaurants. My neighbor T starts the day by hosting a wonderful brunch for everyone. It’s probably the only day of the year we drink in the morning. Once we’ve had enough food, bloody marys, mimosas & screwdrivers we all walk down to the show. Despite being heavily buzzed while shopping I’ve managed to make some great selections there! I’ll definitely miss this yearly tradition!

The other weird part of this process was purging our clothes – especially work clothes. I’ve had a corporate job for the past 17 years & until last December I was the office 4-5 days a week. Now that we work from home full time we don’t need to keep more than a week’s worth of work clothes, one for warm trips and one for cold trips. Our wardrobes were minimal as it was, I couldn’t care less about fashion & I hate clothes shopping but we both still donated a good amount. All of the clothes we have in the world now fit into a few boxes. The thought of never being in an office full-time again makes my heart sing with joy! Goodbye fluorescent lights and cube farms! I will not miss you one bit! I could dedicate an entire post to the joys of working from home. I think I will once the craziness calms down. We’re in the home stretch now, we just need to get through the next 3 weeks. 3 weeks from today we’ll be out of our house & checking in for a week of much needed relaxation in the Outer Banks.

So now that I know what I truly care about people need to come buy our stuff! It feels extremely freeing knowing most of our stuff will fit in our two cars and that includes our dogs!

I’d love to hear your experiences with huge life changes & taking a risk in the comments! Did it turn out well for you in the end or backfire? You know what? I’d rather have a big risk backfire on me then be left wondering what would have happened if I gave it a shot. Happy Sunday everyone!

That’s all for now, I’ll see you next weekend! We have tickets to see Band of Horses & Death Cab for Cutie this week. I’m so excited to see them both a final time!

Until next time …
Warm thoughts to all!