One of our aims in moving to Valencia is that we are much more flexible in being able to move the next time we want to move. We have managed to amass so much stuff so far in our lives and we want to get rid of a load of the clutter and just be able to fit our lives into a set of cardboard boxes - load up the van and move on.
In total time it will probably take about 8 weeks for us to have sorted though all of our stuff in the UK and box it up, redecorate our house and buy a van to travel in. When we are in Valencia we would love to just be able to decide to move onto somewhere else and know that all we have to do is hand our notice on a flat in and then pack up and move on!
We started the process of decluttering our lives this weekend by sorting out the loft. The loft has just had stuff added to it since I moved into the house in 2002 and then when I went away in 2003 I moved everything up there and only took out the stuff I really needed when I came back in 2004. In 2004 we also added a load of stuff from Nicole’s parents house and in 2006 my mum gave me a load of stuff that had been sitting up in her loft.
So this weekend was spent going through all of this and categorising this as either going with us, going up into my mum’s new loft, going to a charity shop or going to the tip. This took a very long time and has made our house a complete tip. Luckily at lunchtime today we got rid of the last of the stuff for charity shops (4 different charity shop visits with a full car!). We have visited the tip three times with a full car and tonight we will drive over to my mum’s and load up her loft with all the stuff we just couldn’t chuck out!
The spare room at the moment is our store room for the stuff we want to take with us - it just feels great to be able to look in there and see how little stuff we have got our lives down to .
I think over the next 6 weeks we will probably decide to get rid of some more stuff especially as we cope with the reality of the size of the van we are getting and realise we are going to have to take even less than we thought.