Where we’re at with the process of moving into an RV full-time. From the decision of whether or not to get a storage container, how we’ve decluttered, and the strategies we’re using to make it happen.
In the video we mentioned the following extra videos and resources: Moving into an RV pt. 1 and RV-renovation costs.
STORAGE CONTAINER
We decided to get a storage container because of the value of the items we wanted to store. Here’s the example we used in the video:
- Renting the storage for 12 months is $2,300
- The contents of the storage unit are worth about $9,000
- If we were to sell these items, we would make about $2,000
- So either we can sell and make $2,000 or keep and spend $2,300
- We opted to keep now to test things out and if we love life on the road, we’ll sell later, which in the end would only cost us $300
- As opposed to selling everything for $2,000 and next year having to buy everything again, which would cost us $2,300 + $9,000 to replace everything
THE DECLUTTERING PROCESS
It’s been easier for me (Leanne) to get rid of stuff. Kevin enjoys holding on to things. He says this is because he buys high-quality things that mean something to him every time, whereas I buy junk all the time. Perhaps his theory is right…
The process we’ve used to determine whether or not to keep things was:
- Does it make us feel good?
- Is it practical?
- Do we want to pay to store it? Every item we keep, we assess whether we want it to take up space in the storage container.
While we were decluttering, we created six different piles, donation, recycling, storage, RV, trash, and selling.
For selling items, we sold low-value items that we knew we could get a bit of cash for, but not the high-quality items as we knew we wouldn’t get much of our money back. Overall, we’ve sold over $6,000 worth of things. We used Kijiji, Craigslist, and Varagesale to sell items. We had the most luck with Kijiji.
THE REPEAT DECLUTTERING STRATEGY
There are areas of your home that will likely have more stuff in it than other areas. For us, this was the basement, garage, and my closet.
When we attacked these areas the first time, we got rid of about 20% of the stuff. But that wasn’t enough. So we let things sit and revisited it a couple of weeks later, we were able to get rid of another 20%, and a third time, 30%.
We’ve found that running through the collection/room/etc. multiple times, a couple of weeks in between one another, has allowed us to look at things in a different light, realizing that we don’t actually need the item.
SPECIAL THINGS
I have a lot of journals, diaries, photos, albums, scrapbooks and more. And, while they mean a lot to me, I don’t want to be carrying around pounds of books and photos I’ll rarely look at.
So, we spent an entire evening in a Netflix binge ripping apart photo albums and scanning each individual photo. We scanned a total of 1,626 photos for a total weight of 72 pounds (the albums they came in were ultra heavy).
We started the process with an Epson ds-30 picture scan, but it was a piece of junk (pictures were loaded crooked and the images were cut off no matter how hard we tried), so we went back to the store and traded it in for an Epson v370 photo scanner and loved how EASY it was.
We’ll be back in a couple of weeks to the share the process of us actually moving INTO the RV. It’ll be one crazy week! But we’re pretty excited 😉