We are currently packing up the few belongings we have here at the rental preparing to move in less than a week. A co-worker is coming to take our shelves, table and chairs (she is grateful for the free stuff, we are grateful it will be GONE!). My son and DIL came by yesterday for my grandmother’s nesting tables — promised to me by my mother but in my possession for only a few months. Ah well, at least they will stay in the family. My niece is taking the microwave, but I’m not so sentimental about that.
I am very pleased to see how much storage there is in the new place — in the kitchen cupboards, the bathroom cabinets, under the stairs, even in some of the furniture.
But as I pack I am confronted by items for which there will be no space. Baskets on the shelves, with no correspondent shelf to place them on in the laneway. A set of plastic drawers that were perfect in our old condo for storing small things under the bathroom sink. Our new bathroom sink already has drawers,
And the two bathroom cabinets, stacked along a wall, are not deep enough to hold the unit
There’s plenty of room to hold the things that are in that cheap, dollar-store set of plastic shelves, but no room for the shelves themselves.
Shall I find a new use for those shelves? Or just toss them?
Now imagine making decisions about dozens of items — not precious or expensive in any way — just THERE.
NOW imagine the process of going through all the boxes in our storage space, repeating this over and over again.
That’s what downsizing means — and that’s why it is going to take us so long.
We will be doing this for months…maybe longer. It’s tiring, it can be exhausting.
But it’s liberating, too.
