It was pretty overwhelming when we first considered leaving our house and exiting the current state of our adult lives for something entirely new. One of the first things we discussed in our Top Moving Abroad Challenges post was what we both refer to as the purge. Purging accumulated stuff is a major moving abroad challenge. It was a process that ran over a good six month period and involved multiple approaches, opportunities, and challenges. Over years and years you just accumulate so much stuff. Getting it all down to a couple of bags is nearly impossible. Here is a recap of the purge as well as we can cover it.
The Purge: Deciding what has to go
One of the biggest challenges of this entire effort has been the downsizing necessary to facilitate an exit. After 25+ years of building and maintaining a stable life together there is just an ongoing accumulation of things. Just think about the different categories of items and you can name off a whole list. Kitchen supplies, knick-knacks, indoor entertainment, clothing, outdoor gear, precious photos and keepsakes, required documents like past taxes, furniture, etc. At a very basic level you have to decide what is essential. What must you have while travelling? What can you part with completely? What do you have to save somewhere, but maybe don’t need with you? How do you save those things?
The first starting point for us was to decide what bags we wanted to travel with. From there it was a matter of laying out the clothes and other essential items we thought we needed for the destination we were headed to. We set all these things aside and looked around at the rest of the house. For me this was a really difficult process and I had to come to grips with letting things go over time. Dragon is really good at just eliminating things. Her influence was key in this process as she just cuts the items out and they’re gone.
Part of the process is deciding what you need based on your destination. Are you headed to Mexico in the summer? You don’t need anything warm. Maybe a rain coat and a long sleeve sun shirt will do. As it turns out, one of us is headed south and one is headed north for the time being. We’ve had to pack completely different bags. Fortunately we are able to store a few bins of items we weren’t ready to part with in her mom’s garage for future bag adjustments.
The Purge: Digitizing the important things
Most people have important things that we can’t just give away or throw away. Think about all the important documents that have some legal importance: social security card, birth certificates, taxes, marriage license, mortgage, etc. Add to that list a lifetime of pictures you probably have in photo albums and picture frames. How do you handle those items?
There are a variety of options that will allow you to address these issues. Obviously some of the really important documents can be saved in their original form. Maybe, like us, you are lucky enough to have a relative you can store a box of the most vital items with long term. There are also long term storage options like safety deposit boxes. If you feel comfortable with it you could even scan your vital documents and store them digitally.
This is the approach we took with all of our photos. We engaged the services of a company called Memory Wise who digitally copied every photo, camcorder video and CD we brought them and stored them all on an external hard drive. They can even digitize slides. Memory Wise took everything we gave them, including large photos in frames and a poster board sized collage. Once we had every picture digitized we were able to get rid of all those photos. I’m not going to lie, even throwing them away at that point was a challenge. We had some fun with it, leaving out all the pics for people to look at when we had a house party. We let people take pictures if they found one that they really liked. Dragon mailed a lot of photos to friends and family that were meaningful. Be creative, have some fun. This is all part of the adventure.
The Purge: Getting rid of the rest
The Garage Sale- Dragon set up the guest room as “the Garage Sale.” Anyone that came over to the house was sent to peruse the garage sale and if they liked something, they just took it. Our motto was “Everyone leaves with something!” It was true for the most part and our friends and family really helped us out by taking a lot of our things. This feels great for both the receiver and the giver. We get to give our things to loved ones and our friends and family get a “new for them” thing from a loved one. We also used this as a transition zone. Putting things here gave us time to think about if we really could live without said thing. Often times we would add things to the garage sale room and take some things back. Dog found this helpful, it didn’t feel so final if it was just going to the other room.
We sold a lot of things on Facebook marketplace, Craigslist and even to friends. Dragon went room to room in the house. This task seemed to break up the overwhelming amount of stuff into smaller amounts. The house was pretty settled long before the garage and shed were. This was Dog’s territory. Eventually though, it all got sorted and it felt really great to let a lot of that burden go. The priority to keep in mind for us was, do you want to make money or do you want to get rid of it? If you want to get rid of it, then price it to do that. If you want to make money, it may take a bit longer to sell. Give yourself enough time to thoughtfully go through your things. We considered getting a storage shed, but realized we didn’t want that burden to just sit there and possibly never be gone through until our kids would have had to deal with it. Just do it now! Then you at least have some control over where your things go.
We are still packing and repacking our things as our plans change. Dragon’s goal is to only have 1 crate of extra clothes/shoes/things to store at her mom’s place. Dog has about 2-3 right now, but continues to get rid of things. Something to keep in mind is that most places you go will have anything that you need so don’t worry too much. They are just things that you can purge.
