Friday 4 May 2012

One step at a time

I love how the internet can connect people with similar dreams, goals and interests.  I spend ages on the internet (really?  You're surpised aren't you?  ;o) ) and mostly it's due to finding blogs or forums with people who are interested in what my current obsession is ;o)  As you can imagine there are a fair few blogs related to travel and decluttering and simplifying so when I've had a minute I've been having a read around and getting inspiration.

Inspiration is very much needed when I look around the house at the amount of stuff we have.  This is not helped by almost everyone I speak to asking what we're doing with all our things when we leave to which I reply 'oh we won't have much stuff left, we have a few furniture items we'll keep but other than that we'll get rid of most of the stuff.  I'm not really sentimental.'  Sounds perfect doesn't it?  An empty house and maybe a few boxes with photos and other such stuff left?  In my head I think I will be able to do it, but in practice it is so difficult!  I wonder whether I should keep things, if it will come in useful, etc etc.  You get the idea.

We're going round the house mentally thinking what we'll sell, give away and keep.  But the keep list is getting longer by the day!  It's very worrying although I'm sure as d-day approaches we'll be more ruthless.  Well I can hope can't I? 

A friend is also hoping to get rid of stuff this year and has set herself a challenge like mine to get rid of stuff and build up a pot of money for things she wants to do.  Excellent - always good to have others doing similar crazy challenges so we can cheer each other on!

There is another thing that is making it all hard though.  It's still 11 months until we go so there is no real point in going crazy with getting rid of stuff that we'll still use (take note James!), but at the same time, if we do nothing, in 8 months time or so we'll have a mountain to climb.  So I'd been thinking that we need to find a way to give us a boost so we feel like we're doing something, have a head start on when we *have* to make these final decisions about things, and don't get burnout.

Enter more internet inspiration ;o)

So I was reading a couple of blogs and this post jumped out at me.  It's an old post, but isn't it funny how sometimes you come across these things?  So the idea that this family did was for each of them to get rid of 4 things each day.  We can do this!  It won't feel too hard, we all will have an easily reachable target for each day and hopefully by the end of May we'll have purged the house from a good proportion of things we don't need now, are broken, and are useless.

Once I'd put the idea to the family, who are thankfully fully behind the idea, I then saw this blog post from the fabulously inspirational Family on Bikes blog (in awe - I so could not bike that far!  I love the idea of it though) about how to eat an elephant.  Sometimes that is how this part of our adventure is feeling.  Huge, too much, not fun, never ending, overwhelming.  It needs to be done though, so we'll have to take it one step at a time.

Wish us luck!

5 comments:

  1. Good luck with the decluttering. I'd be happy if we managed to get rid of 7 things a week! Home ed does seem to accumulate clutter - well that's my excuse ;)

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  2. Love your plans for adventure. We decluttered almost 2 years ago now and went off to Spain for months. We sold and got rid of whole house of furniture only keeping a few sentimental items and things the children didn't want to part with. Since returning we have been staying with family (fortunately large enough to accommodate us) and we still haven't any real furniture to speak of whilst we plan for our next move. We found it very liberating. Good luck with everything.

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  3. One step at a time, baby - that's all it takes. Thank you so much for the kind words about us - it always seems so odd to hear people call us inspirational. I don't feel that way at all. I feel just like you - overwhelmed with all the crap we've got stashed away in the barn :)

    Good luck! It'll happen one box at a time.

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  4. Getting rid of possessions would be easy for us, we don't have much to begin with and always get rid of anything no longer used. But-I'm amazed by all of you explorers, I couldn't be that adventurous. I know that banks aren't paying much interest-but the quicker the money gets in the account, the sooner it can earn some interest, even if it just buys a days worth of food, it'll be worth it. Good luck!

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  5. Thanks for all the comments :O)

    Yorkshire Crafts - boy does Home Ed accumulate clutter! I think it goes with the territory. I used to think you could never have too many books, but last time we moved I changed my mind on that!!

    Angela - You give me hope that we can do it! Spain sounds lovely, my DH has always wanted to live there.

    Nancy - thanks for the good luck wishes. It helps to know we're not alone, although I wish we were similar in less overwhelming ways!

    Elizabeth - I like your thinking with regards to interest - every little helps!

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