How come we have so much stuff?"
It is midnight and we will be leaving our Lake Monticello home in about 12 hours. Gretchen and I spent all day packing and tidying up the place so we could leave it as we found it, clean and empty. I filled in two cat doors, repaired a commode seal, and spackled over all of the holes we put in the walls. That’s the good part. We still had the bad and the ugly to deal with.
I made another trip to our local storage lockers late today and we are tapped out for temporary storage space. I have loaded two 10×10 lockers and one 5×10 locker from floor to ceiling. I thought I underestimated our vault requirements by 300 cubic feet. Wrong! I underestimated our storage needs by 1500 cubic feet! That was the bad part.
The really ugly part of this move comes tomorrow morning. We still have another 250-300 cubic of "stuff" sitting in our empty house with only a Subaru, a 15-passenger Dodge van, and a 6×10 utility trailer to carry it all. The cat cages alone take up 10 cubic feet so you can see where this is going. All of the remaining "stuff" is what we planned to take with us because it is so valuable, fragile, or because it is alive.
Gretchen is the plant person in our family and we are taking four large crates of house plants including her her collection of miniature African Violets and her 20-year-old ivy which had to be painstakingly torn from the walls of the master bathroom. It has been moved many times before and it happily takes over any room where it is placed.
I have worked this problem of excess, but valuable, "stuff" over and over and have come up with only one possible solution. I will have to impose on a friend and get him to let me store four large cartons in his basement for a few weeks. This will handle about 32 cubic feet of valuable "stuff" and should allow us to carry the rest with us.
I will take a picture of the fully loaded caravan and will post it when we next have internet access. I think stuff just accumulates over time. I can remember when all of the stuff I owned would fit in a Volkswagen bug!
If any of you are planning to move in the next decade, I would suggest that you start getting rid of excess stuff. You will barely have enough time, if you start now. Otherwise, you could end up im my situation, out of time and out of space. I reserved excess storage space early, but it wasn’t enough. Tomorrow is Sunday, so the storage unit office is closed…
Tune in tomorrow to see if and how this problem is handled.
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