A season of downsizing

Eleven years ago, my husband and I moved from Florida to California to be near our family. At that time, we owned a house and a few rental properties. However, we had to short sale all of our properties, due to the housing market crash of 2007-08, and as my company needed me to be permanently in California.

When we moved to CA, we ended up renting a house. We had always planned to own our own house again and we had been looking on and off for the past few years. Although, we ended up renting for the entire eleven years. California is a beautiful place, but it can be a challenging place to live in many ways but financially is at the top of the list. 

A few months ago, we finally found a home 15 miles away from the only home we’ve known in California. It was truly a miracle. It is a slightly larger home but was in need of some upgrades to make it our own. As a result, we were able to purchase the house well below market value, gain immediate equity and take care of the renovations before moving in.

While we were home shopping, my husband and I had numerous discussions about starting the decluttering and sorting process so that when we found the right home, we were ready to move in, in an organized and carefree manner. As you will see, our best-laid plans went astray.

Prior to moving, we were able to go through some of our boxes and participate in a free community shredding event. We had the movers take the large items, as well as whatever we could box up while they were there. 

Two days before we had to be out of our house, we ended up having to rent a large U-Haul to carry boxes upon boxes, as well as other things that we forgot we had been storing.

We have learned so much from this experience, however, I will highlight just a few examples.

We have now been in our new home for one month, and although the main portion of the house is fairly organized, we have piles of boxes in the garage, along the side of the house and a mixed bag of sorts in the backyard. As you may know by now, I have more of a type A personality, and I like things within my environment to be nice and neat. As such, I am practicing being patient and kind towards myself and my husband during this season of chaos, disorder and change. 

I have also realized that it helps to have a sidekick to work hand-in-hand organizing each room in our house. I am so grateful that one of my good friends has been working regularly with us on the weekends to help us get organized. My brother-in-law has been a huge support to me and especially my husband in many ways during the move.

I tend to be more frugal in nature, but I am also more apt to get rid of things, especially if I haven’t used them in a while. On the other hand, my husband and great partner in life, is more of a “collector”. LOL! He prefers to reuse, recycle or repurpose things, which I love about him. However, when it comes to organizing and letting go of things, even if he hasn’t used it in years or forgot he had it, he struggles with letting go of things. Given these vast differences in our personalities and approaches to life, I’ve realized the importance of calm compromise, patience and maintaining a good attitude throughout it all. 

Last week, I watched a movie called Walk. Ride. Rodeo., which is based on a true story about a teenage rodeo competitor who returns to the sport after a car accident paralyzes her from the waist down. As she is about to compete in the national rodeo championships, she talks about the importance of attitude by saying “Attitude is a little thing, that makes a big difference. I’ve realized maybe I won’t have control over every situation in my life, maybe I don’t get to make every decision, but when I wake up in the morning, I get to decide my attitude.  And if that’s the only decision that I get to make today, I better make it a good one because with the right attitude, who knows what you can achieve.” 

The other day, my husband and I we’re talking about our move, and he commented that “As human beings, we tend to accumulate. Even though we make an effort to downsize, we eventually begin to accumulate again.”  Isn’t that the truth! We agreed right then to try and avoid emotional decision-making when it comes to the organization of our home. 

The moral of the story: In order to effectively downsize, we had to make a conscious effort to part with the things that we thought we needed or had sentimental value. In actuality, these things ended up sitting in storage so long that we completely forgot about them.