I dislike moving. I have moved several times in my life, never staying in any particular house or apartment for more than 2 years. Since moving to San Antonio in 2011 I have moved at least 14 times. I moved so much I could pack an entire apartment in 8 hours, solo. I got used to living out of boxes and never putting anything up on the walls while preparing for the next move.
There are two places I’ve stayed longer. My mom’s for 4 years in high school, and our house, which we’ve had for 5 years. When we bought this place the intention was to not move again, but life had other plans.
Life on Our Homestead
Since we have been here, our lives have changed radically. We were no longer living in apartments, working separate schedules, or eating convenience foods. We suddenly didn’t have internet (until the last 3 months the only access was my cellphone), trash or recycling services, and were far enough out that food delivery isn’t a thing.
I could grow things in the ground. We could gather family keepsakes. I could paint the side of the house white. I could gather tons of pallets, building materials, and hoard every little thing I felt even remotely connected to.
Because of this, we have a lot of stuff. Well, mostly me. I have a lot of stuff. Stuff that we clearly have no need for while we’re preparing to move, like my numbered pick-up tag for the car window from when I was in elementary. We also both have a lot of knick-knacks, collectibles, and keepsakes that no longer make sense to keep in our lives. Do we really need our high school cap and gowns?
Preparing to Move
This last couple of weeks we have been in the process of a major downsizing while preparing for our big move. It has been stressful to say the least. I don’t exaggerate when I say I have almost every craft item you could want. They fill a 12×14 room.
We also have two sheds, both over 150 square feet ( ~14 meters squared) stuffed with tools, pots, assorted salvaged building materials. We have 3 rooms full of large furniture: 9 bookshelves, 3 beds, 3 dressers, a huge China cabinet, a massive desk. I had to take the door off its hinges to get it in the house! We also have several chairs and several standalone cabinets including file cabinets.
I have been slowly moving things to a friend’s house in town so she can host a better-attended yard sale. In the past 2 months, we have thrown away more stuff than we have in the past 2 years. We’ve had to modify lifelong habits of gathering useful materials from roadsides when we drive by or saving scraps to make veggie stock before composting them.
We’ve also had to rehome or eat through our animals. The pair of us have begun eating through our food stores. We’ve even begun to downsize our sizable seed bank, movie and book collections, and pare down the kitchenware while preparing to move.
Preparing to move is not easy. But over the process of going through everything, it has been as cathartic as it has been exhausting. We are purging so many things we don’t need that don’t fit our lifestyle anymore. We are paring down the mountains of stuff to get to the core of what we really need, what is useful, and what truly matters to us.
Simplifying our lives now makes it so when we begin our new homestead, things will fall into place more easily.
So where is this new homestead? That’s complicated. We’ve been fairly quiet on our plans as we’re moving forward because they are rather unconventional. Don’t worry, even though we are, this blog isn’t going anywhere soon.
