Part One: Preparing the house (and ourselves)
Now that we have set a launch date for our full time RV life – how are we preparing?
We have been crazy busy getting things ready and preparing for lift off in late July. For those who don’t know – we have decided to rent out our house in Virginia Beach for now. When we bought this house, we looked at 50 houses before we agreed on this one! Yes – 50 houses! So neither of us really want to have to go through all that again, so we’re keeping the house. For now.
To get it ready, we updated the kitchen and master bathroom (see pics below – how can we leave this??). Something we should probably have done sooner to enjoy it for a little longer. Sigh. But oh well. We have been enjoying it for the past few months. We are also going to be doing a little touch up painting, and carpet replacement, but that is about it for getting the house ready for tenants. The biggest task has been purging everything inside the house and garage.
Purging!
We made the decision to keep only things that had great sentimental value to either of us. John has a large collection of National Geographics he partially inherited from his father that we boxed up for storage. We also have a few antique books and papers from significant dates in time that we kept. We decided to donate, give or sell all our furniture, except for two trunks that we inherited from family, and a mid century modern dining buffet that we just don’t want to give up (it is too cool!) So we donated 30-40 boxes of books, dozens of bags of clothes, and boxes and boxes of miscellaneous items. Our local library was ecstatic when we brought over the book donations.
Interestingly, I had a pretty easy time purging stuff. I looked at most things and tried to apply the KonMari Method™of decluttering. If you are unfamiliar with KonMari, it is a method developed by Marie Kondo who is Japanese organization expert. Simply put – does it bring you joy? If not, it’s time to let it go. You can read more about it here, but many RVers are applying her methods to both the purging process before they move in to their RV, as well as the organizational methods while organizing their RV. Check out her folding techniques!
Does it bring you joy?
John, on the other hand, had a harder time parting with a lot of his collections. He is a Star Wars and computer geek, so he had a lot of things he had collected over the years that had great meaning to him. He ended up keeping a few things and parting with a lot. I am proud of how much he was able to give away. We have moved on to the garage now, and that is a little easier. Most of the items are going to family and the rest will be donated. We’re getting there…
