What a whirlwind the past few weeks have been! I apologize for not writing, I started to write some posts about the moving process, but I became too overwhelmed to continue. It is amazing how much stuff can induce stress. Going through this second move made me thankful that we had been simplifying our possessions all year, but also made me determined to cut down even more. My goal with this post is to give a recap of how we went about downsizing, packing and moving over to the U.S. and in future posts I will highlight some of my strategies to remain and work on becoming even more minimalist as we set up our new home!
Back in Israel we managed to sell/donate/give away all of our furniture and housewares. In a matter of 1 week we donated 7 bags of clothes and linens to charity. We had trouble finding charities that would take our housewares and we had very limited time, so I created a facebook page and posted pictures for friends and family to view and claim items. We made deliveries and gave our things new homes. We were encouraged to leave the remaining items outside the apartment building, and sure enough our things were scooped up incredibly fast by neighbors and passer-bys. One woman who took many of our kitchen supplies had been through an apartment fire the week before and lost everything, we were thrilled to be able to give her our things.
Even after my past post: "Paper Clutter - It Happens To Us All", I still found we had way too much paper to attempt to take to the U.S. I spent 2 hours sifting through our paper, we made one binder of things to leave at my inlaws, one binder to take with us, and a stack of papers to scan and keep digital copies.
After all the sorting, purging, organizing and packing, all our items fit into 4 suitcases, 2 carry-ons, 1 purse and 1 computer bag. We shipped 1 large and 1 medium box of items to our new place.
The contents of our suitcases included clothes and shoes, but also a Queen sized down comforter, 2 pillows, duvet set and 8 place-settings of dishes. Items we shipped included 2 robes, 4 sweatshirts, long sleeves shirts, 2 light coats and some smaller housewares we love and wanted in our new home. Overall I feel good about the amount we traveled with. We were able to condense and fit everything into a sedan once we reached stateside. We do need furniture and other home supplies in our new place, and I will report on those decisions in a future post.
In conclusion: everything arrived safe and sound and we are setting up quite fast in our new space since we do not have a ton to put away, but more on that later! The 2nd international move in 1 year is officially complete! Phew! We made it! Cheers to that!
No comments:
Post a Comment