I’m home in Ottawa and taking a break from my task at hand. We are decluttering before moving aboard, downsizing to fit our essentials into our Honda Odyssey mini van. We’ve bought a St Francis 50 catamaran, SV Aphrodite. And, in July or thereabouts, we will drive to Florida and begin our live aboard adventure. We have tenants moving into our house on June 30th.
Table of Contents
Decluttering Before Moving Aboard
Anything that can’t fit in our van will be sold, donated, or thrown away. What remains will be considered important or sentimental and put into storage.
Our rule is simple: if we cannot take it aboard and do not consider it important enough to store, it has to go. With six people moving onto a catamaran, every item has to justify the space it occupies.
The reality is that we begin by hoping to sell our belongings. Then we resign ourselves to the fact that selling things is actually a lot of work, and there is not much of a market for used furniture, particularly mattresses, even really nice ones.
Finally, we load our van and make trips to the thrift store. In the end, we will probably give our things away to anyone who passes. We will be much like people with a zucchini garden who bring zucchini into an office to give away to their coworkers.
Altruism is not entirely our primary motivation. We need this stuff gone.
Deciding What to Keep, Sell, Donate or Store
While we are on the boat, we will have a roughly 5′ x 10′ space to store our things. We have more than 200 boxes to sort through. We packed these boxes last year when we thought we might move to California. So, I am sifting through the boxes — posting free wrapping paper to Freecycle, and wondering if I’m wasting my time.
For the most part, our boxes have remained unopened for the past year. Some things we inherited are license plates and cutlery.
We have boxes of towels, cups, glasses and so on. Today, I reluctantly put a chinois in the pile to go to the thrift store.
There is a delicious irony of the chinois — a conical mesh device to strain soups and sauces — ripe with snob appeal, finding its way to a thrift store.
We discovered the chinois when my husband and I took an evening course with Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa. I enjoy cooking, but I rarely use the chinois. It’s just too messy. My kids will have to deal with more fibre.
Downsizing 200 Boxes Before Moving Onto a Sailboat
Meanwhile, my husband is attempting to scan all of our papers — dating back as early as 1985. We have 11 filing cabinets full of paperwork, and numerous boxes of personal mementos with labels like “paperwork — to sort”.
If there’s any lesson to draw from this experience, it is to have a strong, ongoing regimen of personal organization. And, since I’m not that disciplined (or I just enjoy doing other things) — I vow not to acquire this level of stuff in the first place. That is, until end of June, when we acquire more paperwork from the end of another school year.
Yesterday, I sorted through our wedding folders — parting with pictures of dresses, cakes, rings — it took me down memory lane. We have scanned all of our cards, RSVPs, I could go on — there were 260 scanned pages from a distilled version of paperwork from our wedding alone.
But, I expect you are like me and have things to do.
Break over. Game on. Back to decluttering and downsizing.
