Of course there are a couple of things involved in moving that are not so sexy and fun. First and foremost is selling the home you are in and if you do, what do you do with all of the things that you have accumulated while in that home, in your married life together, and perhaps things you have from growing up. Don't forget that your kids have accumulated things as well and may not have anywhere to store them.
The selling was pretty easy, once we made the decision to actually build a new home in Marquette. I woke up in the middle of the night in April in a panic, realizing if we were going to do this, we needed to get going. Homes don't sell as well in the fall and winter as they do in the spring and summer. April is already spring. Panic.
We have dear friends who sold their house on their own without a realtor, but I just could not see us doing that. Carol was teaching full time and I was retired from the classroom, but still coaching softball. Besides being busy, selling a home was not exactly a skill set that we felt we had. Even though it would cost us 6%, we went ahead with the agency and managed to get the same person who sold us the house thirty years before.
We got the house ready for our meeting with her and since we had done quite a few improvements and additions since we bought it, she was pleased. Since we had a fire two years earlier, the kitchen was significantly upgraded and modernized. We also had what few homes have in Sitka: a large, 1/2 acre lot. In discussing asking price, the realtor suggested nearly 50% more that we ever envisioned getting and in exactly five days from the first meeting we had, we had gotten an offer of 90% of that asking price: insane. So for us, the realtor, even at the price we paid, was well worth it.
Getting the house 'ready' required an inspection and work to be done... pretty easy. But to actually reduce all of our stuff to an amount that would fit in our soon to be small, three bedroom duplex (plus a heated, though leaky storage unit. What do you keep? What do you toss? We followed a variation on "If it gives you joy, keep it." Well, if you really follow that philosophy, it is surprising how little you will keep. But in our case, it was still surprising how much we kept.
It was certainly motivational to get rid of everything from clothing to artwork to furniture. Everything had to be looked at critically and had to meet some criteria for keeping and moving. It turned out that we threw away nearly 3,000 pounds of items collected within our house. After the second cut, a year later, another 1,000 pounds were thrown away and nearly 6,000 pounds of things were packed into 'cubes' for shipping. The math tells me that we had 10,000 pounds or five tons of stuff. That is a little crazy. I would bet that we were on the low side of stuff that is owned.
One thing that helped with 'old stuff' was the ability to take a digital photo of it and then chuck it. However, the leather jacket that I bought at a huge sale at the Michigan State Fair grounds in 1976 for $140. That bad boy is still mint and I could not part with it. It still fits! It is double breasted! It's a beauty! It is in a tote, waiting to be sent somehow to Michigan. The league championship jacket from the basketball team that I was the assistant coach for in 1988 is also still in my possession, but it made it into the original shipment and is already in Michigan. All of Carol's spare cloth for quilting also made it. It may have been the heaviest tote we had. She claims it will save us money in the long run. I wish I could say the same about my badass leather jacket.
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