Simplifying Our Lives/Home: Packing

"You kidding? I got a closet full of 'em. I call 'em 'keepers.'"

Now that we've had the yardsale and gotten rid of all (ahem) the cluttery stuff, Husband and I have refocused our attention on the processes of finding land and preparing the house for sale in less than a year (!).

I'm just going to come out and say it—I friggin' HATE moving. I hate packing. I hate cleaning. I hate carrying boxes and furniture. I hate cleaning some more, and carrying some more, and then unpacking. I dread the entire process, from start to finish. So in an effort to not rip my own spine from my back out of sheer frustration and annoyance next year, we're doing what we can to simplify the process.

What's packed as of 6/10/12!

We have the advantage of knowing (approximately) when we'll be moving, assuming the house doesn't sit on the market for twenty-seven months or some shit (please, God, no...). So we're able to plan accordingly. Now that we have our big totes back at our disposal (they were full of yardsale stuff), we've decided to begin packing (let's throw in another set of parentheses here because we can).

Yep. Packing.

The plan is to tackle a little bit every week, packing up anything that we don't really need in the next year. Things like our high school yearbooks, photo albums, books, dress shoes, and those boxes of random shit that we all have but for some reason cannot part with regardless of how useless it is because we just KNOW that something in it is worth money but we can't be bothered to do the research but we're totally going to get to it at some point.

I have a small box like that. Shoebox size. Clutter, yes, but I refuse to punish myself for it because it's so small.

(That's what she said.)

So this week I packed up everything in my armoire except for the stuff I will truly NEED in the next year or so. I made a list of the tote's contents on an index card and taped it to the lid so that we can easily reference it when we actually move. We're going to continue doing that until all non-essentials (and non-staging items) are packed up and ready to go. I hate last-minute, mad-dash packing more than any other part of the process, so we're trying to make this as easy on ourselves as possible. We'll begin with our bedroom, and once that's finished, we'll move on.

The nice thing is that if I find that I really do need my gold peep-toe slingbacks, I know where they are. But I probably won't, so I packed them.

I'm excited that it feels like we're really on our way now! This weekend we have an appointment set to go look at some acreage, and it feels like it's all beginning to come together. Whoo-hoo!