We are so close to getting this house on the market, but it’s like the last 6 miles of a marathon. Even though the finish line is nearly in sight, it feels like the biggest part is ahead of us.
If you’re new here or missed our major announcement, we’re packing up, selling our house, and moving our family of 6 into an RV to travel the country for a year.
This post is sponsored by Allstate.
I think if we weren’t perfectionists and if we didn’t take so much pride in this place and if I hadn’t watched so much HGTV while I was pregnant last year, maybe it would already be sold.
But we just couldn’t overlook the carpet in the office, so we put down tile at the last minute…
And the lighting fixtures downstairs weren’t bad, but we found some that were better. While I did talk myself out of completely renovating the kitchen, I couldn’t resist new hardware.
And then we had to do something about the floor in our closet where we ripped out the carpet the dog peed on. Repeatedly.
No more, though. Enough. We have to draw a line somewhere, and here it is. We’re done with the renovations and painting. I’ve been checking in with the Allstate Moving Center, and it looks like we’re coming up on the purging portion of the process.
I’m hitting up the online garage sale pages to list a bunch of stuff this weekend- one of the ways Allstate suggests we can save money during this process. We’re not selling everything we own, just a lot of it. What’s left that won’t fit in the RV will get stored locally. We’ll use the money we make to pay for a couple months rent, and we’ll save money by not having to rent such a big unit.
This is when it starts to get emotional. We’re not just letting go of a house, we’re letting go of STUFF. As much as I like to think I’m not super sentimental, stuff still finds a way to attach itself to my heart in unexpected ways. The same is true for the kids, of course, and their toys and video games.
The last 6 miles of this process is going to require some emotional stamina. I’ll have to rely on the checklists and tools on the Allstate Moving Center to be sure I’m not missing anything important along the way while I’m convincing my heart that the electric knife I cut my first Thanksgiving turkey with doesn’t really deserve to take up space in a storage unit for a year.
Are you in the process or about to embark on moving? The Allstate Moving Center is a great resource, full of tips and even some useful printables, including checklists and packing labels.
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I read this article recently, about photographing ‘special’ items before donating them, and how it made it easier for people to part with their stuff.
Donating (vs tossing) stuff also helped. Donating + photographing was the best. A lot of people actually felt -better- overall (memories preserved and clutter gone) doing it that way.
One or two digital photos of the knife – maybe with a picture from that first Thanksgiving if you have it/can find it (hahahaha for me, but maybe not for you) – might make you feel a lot better. Takes up no real space on Google photos or something similar either.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/17/health/photograph-clutter-partner/index.html