Letting Go and Looking Forward!

I've been a little surprised by the reaction some people have had to our downsizing efforts so far... especially my throwing away so many of our family photos. I had one person post on my Facebook page that as she was reading my blog about getting rid of Christmas stuff and going through our photo albums, she could feel a strange palpitation in her chest and was near having a panic attack and it wasn't even her stuff! LOL. Wow. I bet she has a lot of stuff.

Oddly enough, it really hasn't been that hard for me. The photographs were probably the toughest and maybe that's why I tackled that project early on - to get it over with and put it behind me. You know what they say about the best way to eat an elephant... one bite at a time. :) Now that it's done, I feel amazingly lighter. I can still go through my one photo album and have all the memories attached to those pictures... and, should the need ever arise, I can easily grab that one album and be able to save those memories and take them with me.

Knowing we're not going to have a lot of space has really made me prioritize what's important and what's not and I've pretty much decided that stuff is just not that important. Sure, some things are more valuable that others... jewelry for instance. But I don't have a lot of expensive jewelry other than my wedding rings (which, of course, I'm not giving up.) And then there are things we've always valued because of tender memories associated with them but not hanging on to the things isn't going to erase the memories. And isn't hanging on to the stuff with memories attached kind of a way to live in the past? Is that really where we want to live? I don't think so. I want to let go of the past and look ahead to the future.

So with that in mind, I'm heading home from a business trip this afternoon and I'm ready to make another sweep through the house. I don't think I'll find too much that needs getting rid of still... I'm pretty sure we accomplished most of that last weekend. But I do think it's time to start packing up those things we'll be keeping that we may not need to use in the next few weeks... summer clothes and shoes (I heard it got into the 20s at home last night... Brrrrrr!), stuff like that. I think by the time we are actually ready to move, it should be a pretty easy process.

We've got another Urban Neighbors get-together tomorrow evening (a monthly social this time) and I know we're both looking forward to it. Looking forward. That's what I want to do... not live in the past. Look forward. Look forward to new friends (although I AM keeping all my old friends - some things you don't want to get rid of!), new experiences and new adventures with my sweet hubby, not burdened or weighed down by things that just don't matter.

I feel a palpitation in my chest, too, but it's not panic, it's excitement. :)


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Garage Sale Complete!

I've never been a big fan of garage sales -- going to them, or worse, having them. However, they can be a good way of getting rid of stuff you no longer need or want and we definitely had a lot of things that fit into that category. A garage sale seemed like the best solution.

But wait a second... it's almost the middle of November! Who has garage sales in November? Well, people who are moving in mid-December, that's who! And since Oklahoma weather is unpredictable at any season, having a garage sale at almost any time of year is a crap shoot as far as that's concerned. Well, the weather gods were smiling on us this weekend, that's for sure. I doubt there's ever been better garage sale weather in November. We held the sale both Friday and Saturday and both days the temps got well into the 60s. Yes, it was a little chilly in the mornings and Friday was a little on the windy side (What? Windy in Oklahoma? Seriously? :) ) but overall it was terrific.

I posted ads on Craigslist starting mid-week - and included pictures of some of the better items we had in the sale. I started getting texts and emails from people right away, which surprised me. I'd never posted a garage sale on Craigslist but people obviously use it to scout them out. If you post a sale there I strongly encourage you to post pictures, too. When I looked through the other ads, mine was the only one I saw with pictures. They don't have to be great... just take them with your phone. That's what I did.
















We had people waiting for us to open the garage door at 6:50 Friday morning and had a steady stream all day. That surprised me. Don't these people work? :) Oh, wait... I was off work Friday, too. Nevermind. So we sold a lot of stuff on Friday but it seemed we still had a ton left to sell on Saturday. I wasn't sure we could do it.

Saturday started off a little slower... nobody waiting when we opened the garage door and I think it was about 30 minutes before anyone showed up. Once it got started though, there was a steady stream of people and they were all in the mood to buy. Things I thought would never sell seemed to sell quickly! It was bizarre.

Of course there were the people who would offer us $5 for something that was marked $30 (like the $125 coffee pot that was brand new, never used.) I suppose it was worth a shot for them... we could have said yes. But we didn't. We had things priced fairly and, while we did make a few people some really great deals, we stuck to our guns for the most part. Sweet hubby had taken the day off Friday to help and wow, is he ever a salesman! He talked people into all kinds of stuff they didn't plan on. :) It was great.

Heathen daughter brought a ton of baby clothes, a bunch of shoes (her shoe size went up when she was pregnant and hasn't gone back down!) and some other stuff to clear out their apartment. She got rid of almost everything and was very pleased to have made some money for Christmas shopping.

When we finally closed up at 2 p.m. Saturday, we loaded what was left into two small bins and took it straight to Goodwill. By 3:00, the garage was completely cleared out and not a single item came back into the house. When we added up our proceeds from the sale, it was over $800! Wow. How on earth could we, a couple of "minimalists", had that much stuff to sell? I'm not sure... but it turns out we did. Guess we earned ourselves some Christmas shopping money, too. :) Or better yet, maybe some shopping money for some new stuff for our downtown condo. Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket. :)

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Location:Edmond, OK

Our First Downtown Adventure!

When we knew for sure we'll be moving downtown I started scouring the web for all the information I could find about living in downtown OKC. I was pleased to find there was quite a bit more info than I originally expected. I was especially pleased to find out about a group called Urban Neighbors, a neighborhood association group of people who live downtown (http://urbanneighbors.org).

Their website says they're for neighbors, by neighbors. It also says they're dedicated to fostering quality residential living in downtown Oklahoma City and they do that through positive interactive meetings, social events, and issue-oriented dialogue and activities. Hmmm, sounds like something we would be interested in. I signed up for their newsletter and their email alerts.

Just a couple days later I got one of those email alerts letting me know about the final 2013 wine dinner planned at Stella's in midtown. I ran the idea by sweet hubby and he thought it sounded great (uh, hello... it was a WINE dinner, duh!), so I emailed them to let them know we weren't technically urban neighbors just yet but would like to come if they had room. Got an almost-instant response telling us to come! Hooray! (they're obviously smart people, huh? :))







Last night was the night so we were off to Stella's for our first Urban Neighbors event. No idea what to expect really but we were excited. And wow, were we ever right to be excited! What a fun group they were! Looks like there are some great people living downtown. We met people who live all over downtown -- as I've said in this blog before, there are plenty of choices for living downtown. Not something I would have imagined 10 years ago, that's for sure. We met people from Park Harvey, Sycamore Square, Avana Arts and we even met our upstairs neighbor (she lives in the condo directly above the one we'll live in) from Block 42. How cool is that?

Everyone was very friendly and welcoming. They encouraged us to participate in all their events -- quarterly dinners and monthly socials. Their November social is next week at Artspace at Untitled (http://artspaceatuntitled.org). I'd never heard of this place but when I looked it up it looks pretty cool! I think we'll definitely try to make it. Artspace at Untitled is within a short walking distance of our new condo, so that will be really awesome once we're actually downtown.

A big thanks to Monty, Shelly & John and Francie for helping us feel so welcome and for making us really look forward to future Urban Neighbors events. Can't wait to get to know all of them better.

We're really looking forward to being downtown for the holidays. We should be moved in by mid-December. So much going on downtown then... and it should be so pretty, too.







The garage sale is all set for this weekend and we'll hopefully be that much closer to our downsizing goals by then. Come by if you get the chance - lots of great stuff! I may even share a mimosa (a garage sale tradition) with you. :)

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Amazing progress!

Wow… did we accomplish a lot this weekend!  More than I ever expected we would.  That’s what’s so funny about a huge project like this downsizing… it seems so overwhelming at first but once you get started on it, it moves pretty fast – and then, the more you get done the more you want to keep doing and before you know it, you’ve made great strides.  I love it!  This is going to end up being the easiest move ever and I know we’re going to feel so good to have lightened our load by so much.

First, we’ve decided to have a garage sale this weekend to purge as much as we can.  Heathen daughter was thrilled to hear it because, now that our sweet angel grandbaby is almost 5 months old, they have a TON of baby stuff she’s already outgrown (clothes and accoutrements).  That’s great because baby stuff is always a good garage sale draw.

We made a big sweep of the house through every closet, every drawer, every nook and cranny to find everything we had tucked aside with the idea that we might possibly use it sometime.  Some of it, of course, had been untouched for years.  Now that the idea is not to hang on to anything we don’t actually need, nearly everything can go.  The re-gifting closet (don’t act like you don’t re-gift!) is now empty.  :)  The kitchen cabinets are now cleared of all the gadgets and gizmos and small appliances that never see the light of day.  Tons of gift wrap and at least a bazillion assorted gift bags (I didn’t actually count them, it’s just a guess, but I think I'm pretty close!), out to be sold!  It is amazing how much lighter I feel and we haven’t even had the garage sale yet. :)

Sweet hubby had a huge project – the garage.  Now, if any of you have ever seen our garage, you know how incredibly organized he is.  However, he had a ton of bins (16 of them!) to go through – bins with everything from tools to electrical supplies to nuts and bolts.  It took him all weekend long but he did it!  He sold some of the bigger things (mostly aircraft tools and such) to a co-worker (who already came by to get them!) and added more to the garage sale.  Now he’s left with only one bin of house stuff that we’ll actually leave with the house.  So proud of him.  :)

And then there were the photo albums.  Sigh.  I’d already gone through them once and pulled out all the pictures I knew we wouldn’t keep but there were still 24 mostly full albums of pictures from the last 35+ years of my life (I didn’t have many pics from before I was a teenager – being 6^th of 7 children, mom was not much into pictures at that point – can’t say that I blame her.). Here is what we had though...

But I had a goal – to end up with only one album of my very favorite pictures.  And you know what?  I did it.  In fact, the album isn’t even completely full!  I’m so impressed with myself.  (pat, pat, pat on the back)

I also made an album for each of the heathen children and, before I actually tossed the photos out, I let them go through the stack of pictures I didn’t think any of us had to keep.  They each picked out about 5 pictures from that gianormous stack and the rest of them went into the trash.  Wow.  Talk about a liberating feeling!  I realized if there had ever been something like a tornado or fire, there would have been no way I could have grabbed 24 photo albums and saved them… and my favorite pictures were scattered throughout all 24 of them.  If something happened now, I could easily grab my one photo album and flee with it… and ALL… every single one… of my very favorite pictures would be safe.  I like that feeling.  Here's a shot of our cabinet of photo albums now... (the two albums on the top right are mine and heathen son's... the others belong to sweet hubby and he has to go through those!  The yearbooks on the next shelf are next!)

We'll have a busy week ahead getting ready for the sale and then hopefully clear everything out in the garage sale (donating what doesn’t sell) and then I’m off to D.C. next Sunday for the annual Youth Tour Directors Conference.  Oh, and this Wednesday evening we’re joining some people from Urban Neighbors, a downtown neighborhood association for a wine dinner at Stella’s in midtown.  It will be nice to get to meet some other people who have chosen downtown living.  Maybe we’ll meet some of our new neighbors before we even move in!

It sure feels good to start a week with such a sense of accomplishment.

6 week countdown!

Wow, we’re already on the 6 week count down to our condo move in!  How exciting.  :)  We’ve had a really busy week but we’ve made some headway on a few things.  

Last weekend, our first big project was the file cabinet.  We managed to go through our extremely stuffed four-drawer file cabinet and find a large pile of papers to throw away, an even bigger pile of papers to shred and we managed to dwindle everything down to one drawer of files that isn’t even quite full. 

It’s amazing how much paperwork we keep when it’s not really necessary.  I think it’s just that if you have space for it, you’ll find a way to fill up that space.  Now that we know we’re not going to have a ton of space to fill up, I bet we’ll be a lot more cognizant of what we keep.  For instance, we googled it to find out how many years you need to keep tax records and it turns out you only need to keep your last 3 years.  So the plan now is that every year we file our newest tax returns, we’ll get rid of the oldest, which will then be 4 years old.  So it turns out that we no longer needed those tax records we had from 1984!  Seriously… I’m not joking.  We had all our tax returns since 1984.  WHO does that?  Sigh…

We had just finished going through everything when the realtor called to tell us someone wanted to show the house in 30 minutes! Yikes!  We told her we’d be ready in an hour and went into overdrive cleaning everything up.  We finished with about 5 minutes to spare and the showing went great… no word on it yet but we’re keeping our fingers crossed.  :)

The next project we started was the Christmas decorations.  You’d think this would be really overwhelming but we had actually gotten rid of a lot of Christmas stuff the year before.  We currently had 2 large bins and 2 smaller bins, all completely full, of course.  We separated out the things we had to keep… tree skirt, stocking and precious ornaments.  I picked out a couple of my favorite Santa Clauses (that I started collecting each year almost 30 years ago!) and decided to let the rest go.  We put together a bin for each of the heathen children (it’s an affectionate term, for those of you who don’t know) and we completely eliminated one of the large bins of stuff.  We are keeping only one large bin so we downsized by about 75%!  Not too shabby!  Oh, and the beautiful Christmas tree went to a good home, too.  Really happy about that – I always loved that tree.

Next up was the collection I really wasn’t looking forward to because it was just so overwhelming.  The photo albums.  ALL THOSE PICTURES!  Whew… thousands.  Literally thousands of pictures to go through.  It was actually nice on one hand… a definitely walk down memory lane.  I don’t know that I’d ever actually gone through my entire collection of photo albums at one time before (thank goodness for good wine!)… but I did it Sunday afternoon (and evening… and night!).  I finally made it through them all but this was just the first go ‘round.  I counted them and there are 24 albums in all.

As I went through the albums I removed all the pictures that were just places (no people).  There were some great shots but there’s no need to keep those.  Trashed.  I also, oddly enough, removed pictures of people who I just wasn’t really sure who they were.  LOL.  Oh, they were usually in my house… I recognized that part… but I wasn’t sure who some of them were.  I may have known them 20 years ago but I didn’t need a picture of them now.  Trashed.

I started pulling out photos I could give to other people… my older sister, who I’ve always considered to be the keeper of photos in our family, is getting the biggest stash of them.  My younger brother is getting a large batch as well.  So is our wonderful family in New Orleans (they’re actually my firsthusband’s family but they kept me in the divorce!).  Then I had some great pictures to send to far away friends from over the years… I would like to see the looks on their faces when they get that package in the mail (mailed them earlier this week!).  I hope they enjoy them.

So this weekend, I’ll go through the photo albums (that have been cleared out quite a bit already!) with a new goal.  My goal is to pick out only my very favorite pictures from each album and put those into a new album that I will keep.  ONE album.  One.  Uno.  Wow… can I do it?  I think so… (cue the Little Engine…)  We’ll see.  :)

I’ll also put together an album for my daughter and one for my son and give those to them to keep.  I asked them if they’d want to go through the remaining photos to make sure there wasn’t anything they wanted to keep but they both said no, one album would be enough for them.  I wonder how many pics will be left when I’m done?  I may have to take those to my sister just to make sure she doesn’t any before they get tossed away.  Would that be enabling her?  :)  Surely not…

We’ll get started this weekend on gathering things up for the garage sale.  We’ve set the date for November 9th… the weather is forecast to still be pretty warm and my daughter has said she’s already got some baby stuff to add to the sale.  I’m sure we’ll end up with a garage full of stuff!  Whew…

So… here’s to a busy 6 weeks and a continuation of a very cathartic process.  :)