23 days…..

I’m finding it hard to grasp that we only have 23 days until we move out of our home. O. M. G.  I look around our home, currently staged and ready for rental showings, and think to myself, “how the hell am I going to pack up all this stuff and get it out of here in 23 days?!” If it was just a matter of packing and storing, I suppose, it would be a bit easier.  But we don’t plan to do that (we never do things the easy way… as I’m sure we will all see as we travel on Dakota!).  I have been slowly (veerrryyy slowly it seems) weeding stuff out and trying to get our possessions down to what we absolutely NEED.   I can’t take the overload of STUFF we have anymore.  It’s too much.

See, a couple months ago, I came across the blog Nourishing Minimalism one night, randomly scrolling through Facebook. After reading some of her articles, I felt inspired and moved by how this blogger (and many others as of late) have adopted minimalism and indeed, created mini personal empires based on the simple concept of decreasing the amount of cr*p we have.  I became so inspired that I later registered and attended two webinars on how to do it… and ever since then I have been a minimalizing bandit.  Ripping things out of the house and either selling them online (thank you Rocklin Yard Sale Facebook group!), donating them or trashing them.  And I have to say, it has been LIBERATING.  I highly recommend it.

Nourishing Minimalism compliments my recent reading of the The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, also known as the KonMari method.  These two ladies set my world ablaze and really drove me to work hard on ditching everything that we don’t need and things we don’t even want anymore.  If it doesn’t bring you joy, ditch it!

I got such a bee in my bonnet that I even started looking at houses near us that would fit us better after returning to a land-based life.  I dragged my husband to these brand-new smaller houses, which had just the amount of space we think we might need upon returning, and we both became emboldened to sell! purge! ditch! downsize!

Needless to say, that sort of threw a wrench in our plans and led to some untimely hand-wringing and sleepless nights.  Could I manage to sell our house, ditch almost all of our belongings, put the must-keeps in storage, and oversee the construction of a new-build in less than two months?  And then, while we are already underway down the coast of California to catch up with the Baja rally, fly home to manage renting that new house out?

As you can probably guess, we finally decided that the answer was “no.”  After thinking through all of the variables, including drafting up a spreadsheet to analyze, numerically, whether my latest mad-hatter scheme made sense, we decided to just roll the dice (real estate market-wise) and keep our current home–just like the plan we laid out months ago in my Passion Planner.  Staying the course meant things would be at least reasonably manageable.

Thank god we made that decision.  Because as I sit here now, surrounded by all the things that make our place “home” I feel overwhelmed. Anxious. Stressed.  Now that we are absolutely certain we cannot take our furry family members (Sadie and Guinness, meow) with us (trust me, we tried to acclimate them to life afloat. #epicfail), I must find them a new temporary home for the next year (A task, I have found, that is more difficult that I ever anticipated).  I still have need to iron out the details of homeschooling/boatschooling – and that weighs on me heavily each day. (how much do I need to plan/research/purchase before we go? What can I reasonably put off for a couple months until we get our first big California leg under our belts?)  We have to sell (or donate) at least one of our cars.  The house needs to get rented.  And again, ALL OUR STUFF needs to get moved out of here (movers? do it ourselves?) and into either a storage unit (oops… gotta get one of those too) or donated/dumped/babysat by friends or family.  Nevermind that we have some good things already built into the schedule – our 16 year wedding anniversary trip to Maui (sans kids!), my son’s 8th birthday party (his last land-based party for awhile), my dad’s birthday (the last we will be here for for awhile) and a big family trip to Canada to visit that side of our family after we move out of the house.  Because although those things are sitting on my mental back-burner… they don’t stress me out quite as much as getting out of the house.

23 days. 

Holy shit.

Let’s just hope I get it all done.