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!