Getting rid of almost everything to travel

[aloevera]

I'm preparing to get rid of my house to go back to nomad-ing (I work online). I digital nomad'ed for 18 months, came home about 2 months ago. That time, a family member sublet my house so it was easy, I stopped in occasionally and always had "my place" but no expenses. This time I think I'm letting it go completely - it's a rental.

I am leaving in about 6 weeks and first stop is 3+ months on an island, so no car, no shipping stuff, just what I can carry on the plane. Will have an unfurnished room (in an apt) at first. Guessing I'll sleep on an airbed for a bit.

So I have 7 years worth of stuff to deal with. Fortunately not 22 years of stuff - I did THAT in the latest move. But there is still a (smaller) house full of stuff. So, baby steps...I began selling things today. Beginning with Christmas stuff I'm not using, furniture I'm not using,  furniture I use less often, etc. After the holidays end I'll get pretty serious and get rid of...everything, pretty much.  Today's little facebook selling wall escapades netted about $150, which was nice.

I'm much more scared of dealing with the personal stuff. Photo albums...kid drawings...artwork. I almost cried over my spices yesterday. And I just bought a really nice plant :(

An older relative leaves nearby and I will store a few boxes there, and probably my bedroom furniture and my car, for now.

Eek. It feels like standing on a cliff edge with gorgeous turquoise water below. I want to jump but I'm scared!

Ideas for digitizing the older photos and kid art and general supportive comments most welcome!

[MonkeyJenga]

You can do it! I never got around to digitizing my sentimental stuff when I gave up my apartment to travel, but I stored some small things with family and it all worked out. My biggest suggestion would be cull the photos before you digitize anything, whether you're paying someone else or doing it yourself, to save time and money.

[bacchi]

SO used a local service to digitize old family pics and got back a DVD. I copied it and put both copies in a safe deposit box.

Taking pics also works for other things: old concert tickets, high school graduation mementos, tchotchkes with sentimental value, etc.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with tools. We may lean on a relative as well.

[undercover]

You should start a journal - would be interesting to read I’m sure and also cathartic for you.

[rahby1us]

My wife got one of these things: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Portable-Handheld-Wand-Wireless-Scanner-A4-Size-900DPI-JPG-PDF-Formate-LCD-Display-with-Protecting-Bag-for-Business-Document-Reciepts-Books-Images/980937605?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=18988&adid=22222222227309756067&wl0=&wl1=g&wl2=c&wl3=392416565463&wl4=pla-830390947660&wl5=1014654&wl6=&wl7=&wl8=&wl9=pla&wl10=125210027&wl11=online&wl12=980937605&veh=sem

and absolutely crushed through about 5 bankers boxes of family photos before we moved (she just put on a show, binge watched and kept cranking through them, it went fast for her she said). It remains to be seen if we'll ever actually look at the digital versions, but it was a relief to be rid of the boxes. My advice is to save some of the best in physical form, but you likely won't notice the others are gone. Maybe put a calendar reminder every 6 or 12 months to go page through them for good memories.

On the wand, i just picked the first link i could find, probably well worth it to drop extra money on one that works fast if you have a lot of photos. You could always buy used and resell when done with your project and just break even on the "rental"

Good luck!!

[EndlessJourney]

We did exactly this in 2012, when we sold everything and hit the road, scanned in photographs, turned music into mp3s, VHS tapes into avis, etc.

Seven and a half years later, these are some of the lessons we've learned:

1. Keep lots of backups. We've had magnetic media fail several times during our trip. I'm fastidious enough to archive our pictures in separate volumes and keep multiple backups (since they're the only mementos of our past and records of our present nomadic life). We've since moved from platter-based hard drives to solid-state drives (SSD) which handle vibration and shocks a lot better. Who knows what the future mediums will be. Embrace new technology and back-up regularly!

2. Consider cloud-based back-up. There are some free services like Google Photo, Dropbox. But if you have *a lot* of media, especially multi-media, you may have to turn to fee-based for larger storage requirements. Unless you're keeping your physical backups in multiple locations, if they're all in one place, you run the risk of losing everything due to theft, natural disaster, etc. Also, having everything online makes it easy to call up on your smartphone or handheld device without attaching hard drives and cables, etc. Which leads me to:

3. Index everything! Keep them organized in folders, try to create meta tags with descriptions, names, dates, locations, etc. When your media archive gets huge, you'll be thankful that you can find photos and other multi-media quickly because you tagged/organized them, instead of trying to remember filenames like DSCN8006.JPG...

4. Back in 2012, we didn't have Spotify/Netflix. I spent an inordinate amount of time ripping cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs. Now, most of my music and movie collection can be found online via streaming services, but if there's anything you have that's obscure or non-mainstream, either rip it or don't throw it away. Even in this age of Big Data, not everything gets archived. So thankful I saved my stash of 80s Canadian New Wave Music!

5. Rip/Scan at the highest resolution available today. I look back at the stuff I ripped a decade ago and I'm a bit let-down that I was too worried about file size, and that I scanned at lower resolutions. I didn't foresee that storage and bandwidth would become so cheap and plentiful. VideoCDs -> DVDs -> Blurays... technology keeps marching on.

Hope this helps, good luck and safe travels on your nomadic journeys. Perhaps we'll run into each other out there!

[EndlessJourney]

It remains to be seen if we'll ever actually look at the digital versions, but it was a relief to be rid of the boxes. My advice is to save some of the best in physical form, but you likely won't notice the others are gone. Maybe put a calendar reminder every 6 or 12 months to go page through them for good memories.

We're in different hotels and AirBnBs all the time, so we picked up a Google Chromecast puck that you can plug into the TV wherever you are and watch streaming TV via the Internet connection.

A nice feature that we didn't know about is that Chromecast can reach into your Google Photo account and pull up random pictures from your archive to display as a screen saver when you aren't playing streaming anything. So wherever we are, we just leave the TV on with Chromecast plugged  in in the background and it continually plays our old photos back!

[aloevera]

Thank you all for the comments!

I already use Google photos, and everything - i mean every digital photo i ever took - is there (and on dvds, and on a hard drive). My kids were a bit old such that the first few years are film photos. Maybe a nice Christmas project this year when they are both here, to go through everything and take photos of what we care about keeping.

I do have a family member to lean on for a few storage totes, perhaps my bed, and some smaller things.

But if you feel it would be too difficult giving up everything right now, I'd look into having a friend or family member store stuff for awhile. While I've never had any regrets about getting rid of everything myself (just a lovely sense of giddy joy and freedom each time I let something go) I know many people who did have regrets so maybe you'd be wise to keep some things until you are ready.

I am both "not ready" and "giddy", but giddy is beginning to take over :)

[aloevera]

You can do it! I never got around to digitizing my sentimental stuff when I gave up my apartment to travel, but I stored some small things with family and it all worked out. My biggest suggestion would be cull the photos before you digitize anything, whether you're paying someone else or doing it yourself, to save time and money.

Thanks for that reminder.  When my parents died, taking photos of their photos (that we wanted for memorial/funeral purposes) worked very well.  I think that will work here too.

[aloevera]

You should start a journal - would be interesting to read I’m sure and also cathartic for you.

It probably sounds like i need catharsis!

I used to blog my vacation-travels but didn't blog at all the 18 months I was nomad-ing, because that coincided with my growing concerns about online privacy.  A journal here might be the best thing, thanks :)

[Mr. Green]

We decluttered our townhouse over a period of about 3 years, knowing we had a move coming up and we didn't want to move a lot with us. The digitization process for pictures sucked a little bit but I'm glad we did it. We held on to one box of physical copies and threw the rest away. We also ended up with a 5x10 storage unit because we weren't sure how long our nomad period might last and didn't want to sell things like tools on the cheap only to rebuy them at full price 6 months later. We just passed 2 years with the storage unit and the longer we have it the more the argument could be made for selling that stuff because it costs money just to sit there, but some of it my wife isn't going to want to let go and we have no good place to otherwise keep it. I figure $900 a year isn't a bad price to pay for a small amount of personal storage.

[aloevera]

We also ended up with a 5x10 storage unit because we weren't sure how long our nomad period might last and didn't want to sell things like tools on the cheap only to rebuy them at full price 6 months later. We just passed 2 years with the storage unit and the longer we have it the more the argument could be made for selling that stuff because it costs money just to sit there, but some of it my wife isn't going to want to let go and we have no good place to otherwise keep it. I figure $900 a year isn't a bad price to pay for a small amount of personal storage.

I'm grateful to have a family member willing to store "some stuff". Getting rid of all my furniture is one thing, getting rid of everything I have collected, purchased, been given, made myself, over a lifetime 9given a couple of major moves in that lifetime in which I did clean some stuff out)...is another.

It looks like my son will take some things to his new city with him - art, things that fit in a car. My daughter took a very few when she moved also.