© Becky Stern https://www.flickr.com/photos/bekathwia/
Beforehand:
“Yes, let’s do it!”
After so many years, we were finally going to realize our dream of pedaling around the world!
We relished the moment. That is until we entered our spare rooms…
They were crammed with books and CDs. But the real disaster was our attic. There we had managed to stack crates to the ceiling, filled with tools, slides, photo albums, and assorted junk.
What were we supposed to do with all of it?
After checking out storage costs, (aigh!), we decided to start getting rid of it instead.
Our early optimism soon turned to despair. There is nothing more disheartening than spending entire weekends sorting through stuff, only to look around afterward and realize you’ve barely made a dent.
Russ Roca and Laura Crawford of The Path Less Pedaled also downsized before their trip. Read about it here, here, and here.
George Carlin’s video on ‘stuff’ is also not to be missed.
The downsizer’s mantra:
“You own more than you think you do. And it will take longer than you expect to get rid of it all.”
For those who aren’t ready to part with too much, here are some long-term storage tips.
The downsizing begins:
Start early because you need more time for sorting.
We were never able to get rid of everything in one go. 75% would end up on the recycled paper stack, the sale pile, or in the bin bag. But the rest ended up on the ‘save’ pile. “I just have to keep this!”
It was an emotional process. We ended up re-visiting the ‘keep’ pile several times since it became easier to purge things after we re-visited it.
Plus, we regularly came across items that brought back memories, such as old school yearbooks. So we’d stop sorting to flip through the pages, remembering those days and our classmates. Digging through our belongings turned out to be a bit emotional at times.
Photograph sentimental stuff
Take pictures of souvenirs and sentimental items. Even if you haven’t looked at them in years (because they were buried under everything else), it’s still emotionally difficult to get rid of them. By taking pictures that you can view later, it’s easier to bin them.
Set analogue media over to a digital format
We’re from an earlier generation, so our house was full of records, CDs, cassettes, photos, and analogue slides. My husband couldn’t bear to lose any music and he spent countless hours digitalizing it.
For the analogue slides, we managed to get hold of a slide scanner with an automatic feed. Even though it took a couple of months to scan them all; it didn’t cost that much effort.
We also digitized all our photographs using a flatbed scanner, keeping only a shoebox full of our most sentimental snaps.
Selling stuff
We both worked full-time until just before our departure. This left only weekends for sorting, trip planning, and selling off our possessions.
As anyone who has sold something online knows, it’s a time-consuming process. You have to research prices, take good photos, write descriptions, and more. We simply didn’t have the extra time, so we ended up selling only our larger, pricier items that we didn’t regularly use.
Smaller items were donated to friends and a second-hand store purchased our used furniture in one go. (We didn’t own designer furniture.)
Selling tips from others
Some downsizers have had success selling their possessions via a ‘stuff blog’—posting photos of all for-sale items on a website—or creating a ‘stuff page’ on Facebook and sharing the link with friends.
Others have turned their apartment into a garage sale by placing price tags on everything. When someone came to pick up an item, they would ask if there was anything else they were interested in.
Storage Tips:
Calculating storage costs
The Shurgard website offers a space calculator to estimate the cost of storing your belongings.
For example, storing a two-person couch and a coffee table near where we live would cost upwards of €40 per month.
Note: It is possible to find cheaper storage units in rural areas.
Curver plastic storage boxes
Garages are known to flood and attics are often full of mice and insects. So plastic crates with lids are a better way to go, at least for the boxes that will be sitting on the floor. Additionally, plastic boxes also hold up better when they are stacked one on top of another.
Print out large labels with your name and e-mail address on them and stick them on all sides of your boxes.
We stored our boxes in a friend’s attic alongside her belongings and other people’s stuff. (Her attic was the storage depot for a whole slew of friends). Every time she needed something, she would rummage through all the boxes in search of it. Fortunately, she left ours alone since they were clearly labeled.
Labeling is especially useful if something happens with the person you’re storing your boxes with—such as if they need to move house. Other people will then know who the boxes belong to and can contact you.
Label the box that contains extra winter/summer clothes.
A couple of times during our trip, we returned home for a week and wished we had labeled the box with our extra clothes. It would have saved us the hassle of opening every box to find them.
Label the box that contains replacement camping and cycling gear.
If you need some replacement gear sent to you, it’s much easier for your mom to find it if she only has to rummage through one box.
Thoughts after the trip
On our stuff
Now that we’ve been back for a while, we still can’t think of anything we got rid of that we now miss. Even today, we can’t remember most of the stuff we purged!
In fact, many of the things we stored during our trip ended up being discarded shortly after we returned.
Is it because we’ve become extreme “non-hoarders”? Not really. It turns out that that’s quite common with people who have downsized before their trip. Other cyclists also spoke of opening their 10 storage boxes and looking at half of their stuff thinking, “Why did I save this?”
Our new home
We went from living in a 100m² house to a 30m² apartment. Even after some time, we still love our new apartment.
In contrast, we know others who were forced to downsize from 200m² to 100m² homes, and they still feel depressed about moving into smaller living quarters.
Why do we feel differently? During our RTW trip, we lived out of bike panniers and a three-person tent. Compared to that, our new 30m² apartment feels like a real upgrade in terms of space and luxury.
We also appreciate the lower living costs of rent and utilities. As another downsizer put it:“It seems insane now, to pay for larger and larger living spaces just to store our stuff- but that’s what we did.”