My wife and I have moved 11 times. Moving has taught me the real (low) value of stuff.
The first time we moved long distance, we needed an entire 18 wheel tractor trailer. For our most recent move, we has pared down to less than 1/3 of a tractor trailer.
Between our first move and our last move (I really hope it’s our last move!), I want to share how we got there and a few practical lessons we learned along the way.
I didn’t have a lot of stuff growing up. I never went without food, clothing or shelter – we just didn’t have a lot of extras.
Everything I owned fit in my bedroom (or my half of a bedroom). I had 1 pair of sneakers, 1 pair of dress shoes, 2-3 pairs of jeans, a bunch of T-shirts, 1 light jacket and one winter coat. It all fit into a few dresser drawers, a wooden chest and a closet.
I kept a shoebox full of mementos like letters from relatives, souvenirs from trips, and photos.
Other than that, I had some furniture, a watch, a radio and some drumsticks.
That was it. Of course, I wanted the stuff I saw advertised on TV and in my friends’ houses. We just couldn’t afford it.
So after moving away from home and starting a family myself, I started buying and collecting stuff:
- 100s of books
- TVs in every bedroom
- Summer and winter clothes
- Shoes by the dozen for every family member
- Computers, CDs, Stereos
- Boxes of photos
- Extra sets of dishes
- Enough furniture to outfit 2 houses
- Exercise equipment and weights
- A 5 piece drum set
Even after the kids moved out, Ellen and I filled a 3 BR house with our stuff.
We had boxes stored in the basement and attic. Every closet was jam packed with clothes.
When we had a garage, there was no chance we could park in there- it was too packed with extra stuff.
Things are different now. But it took a lot of moving to learn these lessons.
Lesson #1 – Nobody wants your stuff
For our first long distance move to Florida, we were leaving a spacious house with a garage and attic to move to a rental that had less space.
We had to get rid of my garage full of commercial quality weight lifting equipment, our spare full size sofa, an inherited piano that was in perfect condition, plus 100s of books, our old china set, cooking utensils, winter clothes, a drum set and much more.
Here’s a rough breakdown of how this went:
- Weight equipment – Paid over $4500. I had only one interested buyer who bought it for $500.
- Drum set – New it was $1000. I got $100 for it.
- Piano and sofa – We begged relatives to take them.
Everything else we could hardly give away to friends and family. This included like-new Ikea furniture, books we had paid $1000s of dollars for, high quality winter coats and clothing. We donated most of it to charity.
Lesson #2 – Stuff in storage will get ruined
In our first Florida home, our garage was packed floor to ceiling with boxes. Forget about fitting a car in there, we could barely walk in there!
When I was packing up the house, I realized that at least half of what was stored in the garage was ruined. The heat and humidity had melted plastic and rubber, mildewed clothing and destroyed furniture.
At the other end of the temperature spectrum, much of what we stored in our Pittsburgh basements was ruined by dampness, mold and rot, regardless of how carefully we had packed it in cardboard or even airtight plastic containers.
So we got rid of nearly all of it.
Lesson #3 – There’s no point in owning it if you can’t find it
I’m embarrassed to admit the number of times I bought another tool, piece of clothing, flashlight or some other seldom used item because I couldn’t find the one I already owned. The original was stuffed into the back of a closet, a random box or a crowded drawer.
My solution to this is simple. Get rid of enough stuff so that everything has a highly visible and easily accessible place. If you don’t have space for this, keep purging.
Lesson # 4 Your stuff isn’t worth nearly what you paid for it
This goes hand in had with Lesson #1.
Here’s what really brought this home to me.
We had purchased a new washer in 1998 and didn’t want to leave it when we sold our home. So we took it with us to our new house, even though the new house came with a washer. I figured it would be our “spare” in case ours ever broke. We carted this spare washer around with us for nearly 4000 miles and stored it “as a backup” in 5 different houses. Then one day, I needed more room in the garage and thought, let me check Cragilist to see how much I can sell this for.
I got $50. Had I held out and negotiated harder, I might have been able to get $75.
For carting around a spare washer that I never needed. – for 10 years.
If you are storing spares, backups, and stuff you just “paid too much to let go of”, do yourself a favor and try to sell it on Craigslist. You’ll quickly find out that you’ll be lucky to get 10%-30% of your purchase price.
Also, if you need it back later, you can buy someone else’s of Craigslist at a bargain price.
Lesson #5 Having less stuff is better
Around 2010, minimalism became popular.
There were blogs by mostly hipster young adults who lived with just a backpack of stuff and could relocate on a moment notice.
I read the 100 Thing Challenge by Dave Bruno, who wrote about his experiment to live a less materialistic life.
Somewhere I read,
What if everything you owned was your favorite?
I couldn’t get this idea out of my head. What if everything I owned was my favorite? I loved wearing my favorite clothes. Why not just get rid of anything that I felt was just so-so?
I started purging. I began by getting rid of clothes that no longer fit or that I didn’t love, books that I already read, tools that were spares, furniture that was stored under sheets in the garage.
It was life changing.
My garage was cleared. I knew exactly what was in my closet and it was no longer jam packed. I could find almost everything easily.
Over the next 12 months, I occasionally had a few issues. I’d miss an old sweater or forget that I had tossed out the rain jacket I only wore once a year. But that feeling of loss was fleeting.
Lesson #6 Purge photos and mementos
As part of our most recent move, I convinced Ellen to go through her lifetime photo collection. She spent weeks sorting through photos that we had stored in boxes for decades.
Many were pictures of people we didn’t know, duplicates, bad shots of thumbs and blurry images. Others were people, places or things that no no longer had any interest to us.
We went from 15 boxes of photos down to 3. We now have these photos in our living room and dining room on display or accessible so that we can look at them occasionally.
As for the mementos like the artwork from when the kids were little, the statues, the figurines and other stuff – if we would display it, we kept it. If it was going to be packed away only to be seen the next time we moved, we took a digital picture to remember it with and gave it away.
Lesson #7 Date your boxes and purge anything not used in 2 years.
I now label every box and write the date it was packed.
Any box that hasn’t been opened in the last 2 years (or since we last moved) is ruthlessly considered for elimination. 90% of these are gone.
And in case it’s not stored away, don’t forget to look around your house and get rid of anything you don’t use anymore.
Just a note – my wife Ellen was not so thrilled with my newfound enthusiasm for owning less.
So I just burned stuff we didn’t use in the fireplace when she was out shopping (haha…I’m kidding of course).
Actually, I used the “date the boxes” technique to help convince her. I’d pack stuff away in a box and we agreed if we didn’t need it for a year, it was a candidate for elimination. That has worked well. Sometimes I was proven wrong. (Occasionally I’d even admit it).
The result?
A garage that we can park in.
We can find 95% of our stuff easily.
Drawers and closets that are organized with contents easily perused.
Moving and unpacking takes a few days instead of weeks.
My house is much easier to clean.
We buy less. We’re more conscious of what we are spending and the value we will get from each purchase.
It’s an never ending process. Stuff tends to accumulate and every so often I need to clean out the junk drawer, go through my closet or simply not buy something just because I want it right now.
But it is a far simpler and better way to live than how we did before.