Travel addiction has its positive side! Especially once you get the flavor of roaming the world. We decided that we would start looking at all the “Stuff” we have and try to evaluate its usefulness in our lives. We had made up our minds that we would rent out our house and move into a small apartment until we were ready to turn on our travel mode.
Back from our Bahamas vacation I was all energized to start living our dream. I looked around and sat down with a sigh! How was I going to get rid of all the
things
in the house? Of course, the first place that I head to find out is Google. I Googled “downsizing” and came across so many good pointers on how to go about getting started. My first project took 2 months to complete. Scanning all our family photos and digitizing them so it is easier to locate them. I needed a scanner to start this project and did not want to spend a fortune on any equipment. After all, I was trying to reduce my things and not increase them. So finally after a lot of research found a small scanner that could scan all sizes of pictures and also scan 35mm negatives (Yes, I had a few bags of these!). So, I ordered a scanner that I thought would do the trick and get all my photographs and film scanned.
The scanner arrived by courier in a few days and I read the instructions on the optimum way to utilize it before I started scanning. The scanning head had to be cleaned with a strip they provided after every 50 photographs scanned. Think that was slow? Not really. I scanned only at the weekends since I was still working a full-time job. But managed to put in at least 6 hours on each Saturday and Sunday for 2 months. And sometimes in the evening for an hour or so. I scanned the 35mm film first. It was interesting to see the negatives turn to positive pictures digitally, like magic! Once all the prints were scanned I stored them in 3 places. My computer, on a cloud and on a flash drive. The project was completed in approx two to two and half months, 34 years of photographs were all digitized.
My son came home one day and saw a box full of photographs that I had pulled out of all the albums we had over the last 34 years, he said, “ What are you going to do with these?” I said, “ I am going to shred all the photos.” He was shocked. So I offered them to him if he wanted them, and that he was welcome to them. He said,” Where do I have the place to keep this?”. So we agreed the best thing is to shred them, and we did! We did have good digitized copies of course. It was liberating!
The next step was to look through the mountains of paper that we tend to hoard. Why? Because we think we will need something one day. Over the years, some of these old documents could have been shed. But as everyone knows, it’s always last on the to-do list. So more boxes of paper we identified were filled with this paper and went for shredding. Did you know that free shredding days are advertised by the local shredding companies? What a great feeling it was, to get all this junk out of the house. Attention went to clothing next. Gently used items went to the Cancer Society as a donation for cancer research. We were doing great! We also advertised a garage sale and put out the furniture and all the odds and ends that we did not want. Its true when they say, “one man’s junk is someone else’s treasure”. The most unexpected things sold. Garden furniture that was falling apart, went first. We realized that garage sales are visited by bargain hunters. The good stuff did not sell because, we were not prepared to just give it away. At the end of the day, we were left with a lot of things. Knowing that our donated items went to a good cause made us execute our next action. We called the Salvation Army Van and scheduled a pickup for donating it. Some more choice items went to the American Cancer Society as a donation as well. It was good feeling knowing that some of the proceeds from this would go to cancer research. A small contribution from us to the society and community that we were living in.
Now the house had started looking empty. We closed the doors of the rooms that had nothing in them. In about 8 months, we had managed to get to a stage where now we could say, “yes, its now going to be easy to pack some of this into a storage unit. We packed things that we wanted to keep in boxes and labeled each box to tell us what was inside each box. These boxes went into a storage unit ( a 5’x 12’), where they would await our arrival after we had our fill of the travel bug that had infected us. Looking at our clutter free life was liberating, and has reduced all the extra work that it made us do. We then rented our house on a lease for 2 years and moved into a smaller rented. We still had some sorting to do and that would come in a few more months. That time would be when we were ready to take the final step to be permanent travelers.