Camping Out...At Home

Camping out:  Leaving the comforts of a middle-class home to experience the outdoors, feel the freedom of not having material goods, and take in a much-needed change of scenery.

That definition, admittedly, was made up to fit our current circumstance.  It does seem to fit well more literally than we had originally planned.

To do what we call "move smart," we had to use the limited time we had wisely when getting our physical possessions in order.  You have no doubt been reading The Great Jettison series on the blog, so you are aware of our plans for many of our larger pieces.  What do we do with the things we don't want to sell or trash?  When can we get rid of them?  Where will they go?  How do we live in the meantime...?

We looked in to storage units for some of our possessions, sticker shock set in right away for me.  Most of the goods we wanted to store had more sentimental value than monetary worth, and the cost of storing them per month was going to be outrageous.

Next idea- pare everything down even further and ask our loving parents for basement space.  Bingo!  Now, how to we get everything to their homes in one easy trip.  See another post for the actual Moving Story.

We got out the calendar for the Spring of 2013.  Certain dates were very important.  Mayor's Cleanup Week was a big one.  Other weekends were at a premium, so our move had to happen three weeks before closing on the home.  This meant packing up the good stuff:

...And getting some cheap stuff to use in its place:

Chairs?  Gone.  Desk?  Nope.  Dining table?  Outta here.  The bare floors and empty spaces now echo when we speak too loudly in the room.  We borrowed a card table and some extra camping chairs for oh-so-comfortable sitting in the living room.  Other than that, we're down to just the bed, built-in dressers (thank goodness for those...), some cheap plates, bowls, and silverware from Goodwill (see photo), and the meager pile of things we are taking with us to Ireland.

People laugh when we describe living in the empty house, but I firmly believe we will have the last laugh when our actual house closing arrives and we can just walk out the door with our suitcases.

To celebrate getting the rest of the house packed up, we opened the last bottle of Megaman 4: Drill Man apple champagne I made last year.

...and then we washed and packed up the champagne flutes.  Cheers!

As always, read, subscribe, comment, and enjoy!