We are moving, house closes next week, and no clue as to even what state we will end up living in. No worries thought, we typically spend our winters in our motorhome, so this snowbird season will just have to start a bit early. Over a long time frame, we have been working at decluttering, and minimizing our needless stuff. We probably eliminated half of our needless possessions in the last decade. We are leaving a 1250 ft. home that is far from cluttered, with one secondary bedroom lightly furnished, and the other empty. No garage, basement, attic or shed stuffed full of shit either. We temporarily rented a 10' x 30' locker to move our stuff into.
I have to say that it has been a shocking experience. We have 90% of our smaller stuff in the locker, and I can't believe how must shit we still own! At one time we bought about seventy of the Rubbermaid brand 18 gallon totes. We have whittled our supply down, but we still have 24 full ones in storage, and an equal volume of cardboard boxes. This does not include any furniture. We also have just enough stuff left in the house to get by with, for daily activities, and a fully stocked motorhome. We comfortably spend 5-6 months at a time in our motorhome. It's a bit over 200 sq. ft. and is loaded with storage, which we never even come close to filling up. We are quite the opposite of hoarders, and own a small fraction of the stuff that friends and neighbors, of our age group own. We get a lot of friendly abuse for living like monks, from that crowd.
At this point, I'm thinking that the rental locker will be a very valuable tool, especially to help the wife to let go of some stuff. We agreed that before we transfer anything to a new place, we will be looking at every single item, and donating what we haven't missed while it sat in lock-up. I hope that this can cull another 40-50% of our stuff. It's frustrating dealing with the DW on this issue, since she defaults to equating owning shit, to some sort of standing among her peers. "you are being irrational, it's normal to own all the stuff, most of my friends have three times as much!" is one of her arguments. Well, yes they do, and we can certainly hold on to several food processors, blenders and another hundred kitchen tools that you haven't touched in years, just so you can experience the pleasure of owning them..................... It makes my toes curl to even type this.
The distance between what we need to be happy, and what we currently own is frustrating. The difference between what we need to be happy and the average American family with a home, basement, attic, garage and/or rental storage packed full of shit, is mind blowing.