One part of getting ready to live full time in any RV is the downsizing of your possessions. The first time I did this in my van, I was pretty certain that I wouldn’t be staying in it permanently as my son would be coming back to me. So I rented a storage unit and stuffed it full of everything but the very few essentials I needed. Even at that, I ended up putting more stuff in the unit after a week in the van. Believe it or not, I didn’t actually miss anything I put away, but that may have been because I knew it wasn’t gone forever.

With our new plan, there will be four of us and two dogs, and part of this new life is supposed to be saving money. Renting a storage unit just is not practical. Aside from that, a lot of the stuff we have is hand-me-downs, and if/when we decide to settle down on a more permanent spot, we would like to buy newer stuff.

We started out by going through our boxes in the garage. These are things that we have not seen nor used for no less than four months, and possibly longer. Going through one bin, I found old mail from 2003. Yea, why am I dragging that crap around?

We set up four areas in the garage, “keep”, “sell”, “donate”, and “trash”. The “keep” area is for things we are either sure we will use, sentimental items, or things we’re not certain we want to part with just yet., the others are self-explanatory. We still have a year before we fully embark on this journey, so we can afford to put a few extra things in our “keep’ area and think about them.

A lot of other stuff wasn’t even an issue with putting in our sell pile. We’ve already sold a bunch of stuff, and there’s plenty more to go as well. Some things are big, a lot is small. My power tools are all going as I won’t need them anymore, my boxes upon boxes of books are a sad item to go, but we won’t have room for them and I haven’t read them in a long time either. There will obviously be some we keep, but not all.

I’ve read from others that this is a pretty hard part of the process, and we’ll find out just how attached to stuff we are soon enough.