The journey began....

We began planning retirement--trading our home for an RV and traveling around the U.S., probably shortly after we were married, many, many years ago!  Creating our blog took several months, so once a week I will post a blog that works on catching us up to where we started blogging a few weeks ago.

March 16, 2019--an important day for us.  We flew to Texas and put our house on the market in the morning, and sold our house that evening!  Closing on the house would be May 16th and we had a lot of work to do!  Pat drove the RV back from Texas never having driven an RV that big before.

3,000 sq. ft.....

...to 300 sq. ft.

The previous fall we began preparing by separating items into Motor Home, Storage or give-away.    Pat took pictures of everything we were getting rid of and sent the list to our 3 children.  I was told that kids wouldn't want much, but it made me feel better about getting rid of things because they did want quite a bit. They picked out anything they wanted and not many items were claimed by more than one, and those that were, were quickly worked out between them.  Someone said it was easy because we had 3 boys.  I finished scanning in family photos that I had been working on for years.

Pat and Ann in front; left to right in back, Josh, Eric and Chris

Then came the process of getting the boys back to get their stuff, and for us to get rid of the rest in 2 months.  We quickly decided that we didn't want to try and schedule an estate sale, and no way would we have a yard sale.  Lots of trips to Goodwill, Red Rack (Disabled Veterans), and Habitat for Humanity (we took some there and they also picked up).  We found one place in the Kansas City area, Sleepy Head Beds, that took usable used mattresses.  We also had trips to Hazardous Waste and a couple to the county landfill. We got a 5 X 10 storage unit. We started loading up the RV, and moving smaller items to the storage unit.

We sent some items to our oldest son and his wife.  Our younger son made a trip down and got some things one weekend, and then the younger 2 boys flew in the weekend of April 14-16 and picked up Budget trucks.  We had a local moving company come the day before they arrived and move heavy items from the basement and upstairs to the garage, both to make loading quicker, and mostly to save all of our backs!  The boys helped us move our bigger items to the storage unit first,  and then we started loading the trucks.

Eric and Chris claiming their "stuff."

I'm not sure how, but we made it.  The week before we closed on our house we were moved into our RV.  It didn't seem to impact me until the weekend the boys came, maybe because I didn't have time to think about it before then.  I had spent 2 months working sunup to sundown and beyond. After it was all done though, it just felt liberating. Like why had we wasted so much money on stuff?  When we visit their homes and see items we had in our home, I feel like I am home in a way!  This has been a big help to me in letting go of our previous "life."  Getting rid of things was for the most part easy, but it has been a bit of a rough year for me transitioning from our house to our new home on wheels. Next week:  starting our 5 year? journey around the U.S.

Our completed storage unit--very full!  We used Sterilite gasket boxes for the storage unit and the basement of our RV.