Camping In Our Home

Happily, Jan and I have sold all of our sellable furniture (some furniture is too old and is going to recycling or being donated). We still have some electronics to sell, but seeing as we are from the middle ages and using technology from that time period, the general public are now using netflix and their ipods (not tape decks, vcr's and dvd players). I have a feeling we will be taking these to value village in the hope that there are oldies like us out there who might be interested .... Jan is groaning about loading up the truck again....

The house feels so empty, large and cavernous (no need to yell from room to room just speak and the echo carries). We have the mattress on the floor and it feels so weird to have to go so low to get on and off the “bed”. At least we won't get hurt if we accidently roll out of bed! LOL :o). We will need to get used to this for next month. The food cupboards we were using for our pantry were sold and taken away so now the food is in boxes and is set up on the patio table that has been moved into the house. And , as it turned out, it was a great time to clean out the cupboards - I hate to admit it but we had items in our cupboards that expired in 2009 ... yum! Who knew hot chocolate had an expiry date? The whole process feels kind of liberating, different, but liberating at the same time. It's also kind of scary seeing our stuff go out the door as quick as it was. Watching people you know, and some you don't, walk out of the house with possessions that you had purchased for specific reasons. Some of these had practical reasons but some were just fun. Everything you own had a history of it's own. We made sure that if you bought us a gift you got that gift back. This made for interesting gift giving ­ to Tyler and Jacqueline at Christmas... ­ “So you want a Keurig do you ...” :-) We used to purchase bits n' bobs, dishes, music, etc whenever we found that we thought we wanted something or it would be useful or fun to have. Sometimes things would be used a couple of times and then put in the cupboard to never be seen again.

After this process of selling everything, we are hopefully going to live a more minimalist life style. I can't see us ever buying anything that isn't necessary. It's amazing how you feel you need to have so much stuff around you but in reality you really don't. This was an interesting life exercise. We don't ever want to have to go through this process again, but in a strange way, I'm glad we did as we have a different out look on life now.