The Time has Come to Face our Stuff

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Let’s talk about stuff – the physical kind. The kind that Other Half and I curated out of our life back in 2014. Or so we thought. For the last three years we’ve been living with minimal stuff, at least minimal within our living space. We still had stuff tucked away in a 10×10 storage facility in Ohio. The stuff in storage is what “made the cut.”

On our summer trips back to Ohio we would occasionally visit our stuff. Sometimes we’d even add to it. We’d stop by, take a peak, toss in whatever we didn’t feel like dealing with, lock it up and leave.

We knew that one day we’d have to face our stuff again.

Well, that day has arrived.

Our stuff got here last week in a Zippy Shell container. Zippy Shell is a version of a moving pod. The driver offered to help us unload. Thank God for strong young men. In no time our garage was filled with plastic totes. The only furniture we had stored was a coffee table my Dad built in the 70’s, a small bench and a disassembled bookcase. All three are now displaying considerably more “character” than before the Ohio to California jaunt.

Happy to see our bookcaseI’m excited all of our stuff is in one place. I’m excited to have our bookcase again. I’m excited to see things I haven’t seen in three years.  I’m excited to stop paying for storage.

So why am I crabby?

Half of the totes filling our garageIt took me a couple days to realize what was wrong. We’ve lived l-e-a-n for some time now. We haven’t needed or missed ANY of the stuff that arrived in plastic totes and is stacked in our garage.

So why do we need or want it now?

When we embarked on our Big Rig adventure we lived in a BIG house with lots and lots of stuff. We spent 9 months putting everything we owned through the Curate-the-Crap decision process. The options were: keep, take, sell, gift, donate or pitch. We sold most of the furniture with the bulk of the remaining stuff hitting the gift, donate and pitch category.

The keep category is what’s in the totes in our garage. All I can say about A LOT of the stuff we stored is WHAT WAS I THINKING?

A few too many basketsI like baskets as much as the next person – but really???

When I unpacked the office/craft room stuff we’ve been paying to store – I completely filled our recycle bin.  So far we’ve made three trips to Goodwill with more to come. In our defense, when we loaded our 10×10 climate controlled unit we were suffering from decision fatigue.

What can I say?Is there any other possible reason to have stored this for three years?

So here we are on the other side of curating-our-crap. From what I can tell so far – we’ve still got a lot of crap left to curate.