Purging T Minus 511 days:Totes for moving

I only had a few minutes to purge, so, I walked around looking for something. I found a tote in the toy room. When I opened it, I found some tools and some wood from my wood shop that were broken up. Apparently my 16 year-old was breaking up wood one day and just never cleaned up after himself. I don't know how long that tote has been sitting in the toy room like that. I emptied the tote and now we have one more empty tote! That is a huge accomplishment because we have 250 totes (yes, you read that right) in total to go through.

I have been buying 18 gallon totes every time they are on sale because I imagined totes would be better for moving than cardboard boxes. Recently, I read that Totes are perfect for storage but are horrible for moving. Apparently, totes will crack and break during moving where a cardboard box won't. I am very disappointed to hear this because I have a huge investments in totes! Regardless, I still plan to pack and move with totes (I just won't buy any more of them!).

511 days sounds like a lot of time, but there is so much that needs to do. I had a life and was very busy before purging became necessary, and now this is an add on. So far, I am hitting the low hanging fruit - all the easy stuff. I dread the days when I am going to have to make really difficult decisions about what goes to Florida and what wont.

Purging T-Minus 512 days: CDROM

I have a cabinet in the basement store room that is filled with CDROMs. The cabinet is filled with game CD's, program CD's, cdroms that come with new computers, audio CDs, and many many backups of computers, documents, videos, and pictures.

I decided to tackle the CD's and I filled an entire garbage bag! I had Windows 98 installation CDROMs and a bunch of Windows 98 games and programs. Old versions of Turbo tax that we buy every year. I had many ten and fifteen year old training CDROMs for my work. There were many music CDs I had created, but in the age of online streaming music, who listens to music CDs?

As I was purging, I came to realize that almost none of our computers have CDROMS anymore. Even if I wanted to use these CD's, I don't have many machines left that I use those CDs on.

Any CDROM that I created went into the garbage. Some of the CDROMs that were created by a manufacturer will go into a "free" bin at the spring yard sale, but most of them also went into the garbage..

Purging T-Minus 513 days: Video Tape Purge

My wife and I grew up in the age of the VHS video tape. We had hundreds... perhaps a thousand VHS video tapes. We displayed them proudly in our living room: three book shelves filled to the brim, double packed on every shelf.

And then came DVD. And Red Box. And online streaming. Today, I can stream almost any movie, and what I can't stream? I can rent for $3.99.

Perhaps ten years ago, we decided the shelves in our living room would be better served with decorations. We threw away hundreds of video tapes containing TV shows we had recorded. The family video tapes (including all of the treasured Disney videos) would stay in the living room. The rest (which was mostly my movies (war, action hero, and scifi) would be relocated to shelves in the toy room.

Fast forward ten years. While some of the videos were watched during those ten years (usually in the home gym while I was working out), most were not. And now... it is time to purge.

We decided that the first round of purge would not touch the family videos in the living room nor any DVD. What we would focus on is the hundreds of tapes in the toy room.

I decided to keep three of my favorite movies, any video tape that I recorded on with our video camera, and the 9-11 videos we recorded from when the world trade center fell. All of the videos that I had recorded TV shows and movies on? Garbage. All the store-bought movies would go to the yard sale, although we doubted anyone would buy a VHS tape. Maybe if we put $.25 on them?

We filled two large garbage bags with video tapes before decided the bags were too heavy and risked breaking, so, we introduced a third bag. There were a couple of movies that I was sad to see go because they were some of my favorites, but I just reminded myself "worse case? It is a $3.99 rental if I want to see it."

Purging T Minus 514 days: All the garbage

We are purging and throwing away so much stuff. My wife had suggested we rent a dumpster, but those are expensive to have for a long duration of time. Instead, we decided we would just put out an extra two trash cans every week. But would I get in trouble for doing that?

I called the garbage company and explained that we were spring cleaning and asked how much another one of their cans would cost. They told me the cost would almost double. Wow. But... they said our trash subscriptions allows us to put an extra 8 items out each week. An item could be a trash bag, or something large like a vacuum cleaner. That was a great answer because we had been putting out the equivalent of 3 or 4 extra bags each week and I was worried we would get in trouble.

I have several folding metal chairs. When the boys were younger, they sat in the chairs, leaned back, twisted and broke the chairs. Whenever they broke one, they didn't say anything - they just went and got another. This kept up until they broke all four folding chairs. I didn't throw them out because I thought I could just unbend them and fix them.  My honey-do list is around 12 pages long. I stay busy but there is just more work than I can keep up with! Fixing those chairs just kept getting placed lower and lower on my list. So, I purged them. Good bye broken chairs!

We brought several box fans from our last house nearly twenty years ago. Our current house has central A/C, so, we never needed the fans. Nevertheless, there they have sat in the basement for all these years. They are good working fans, well used, but functional. Now, they are purged.

We finally got Christmas put away. We love Christmas and like to keep it up through January. We have probably 20 totes and several boxes filled with Christmas decorations, so, putting away Christmas is a four or five hour job. I'm glad to say: task is done, Christmas is put away for another year!

We thought about what we might purge next. Over the years, the kids would bring home art from school. These little masterpieces were treasured and carefully packed away into totes. Uhm. Nine totes. That's right, we have nine totes of kid art. We are going to attack the kid art next. We'll keep just a few treasured pieces, take pictures of the best, and toss all the rest. That'll be a task for another weekend...

Purging T-minus 518 days: Board Games & Outside Toy Purge

Another week and more trash cans filled as we continue to purge.

We have twenty-five years worth of board games. The best solution is to just take the board games and toss them all into the trash. No one wants board games... maybe we'll get a quarter for a game at a yard sale. Regardless, it is difficult to take all these games with all the grand memories and throw them away, what an incredible waste! Instead of throwing them away, we decided to find all the missing pieces, assemble the games, and put them into rummage totes. We spent many hours looking for all those tiny cherries for Hi-Ho Cherries, and all the other game pieces to make games whole. I know it is a complete waste of time... but it feels like it is the right thing to do.

We have complete sets of various toys. My wife would like to sell them in Ebay or some other online site. I think that is a huge waste of time and just want to get rid of it. Neither of us have time for that. But maybe our adult daughter would be willing to sell some stuff in exchange for a cut of the sale. We decided to talk with her about this in a couple of weeks.

Once we had done as much as we could with the games, we went to a store room in our basement. The storeroom is lined with wooden shelves containing odds and ends: outside Christmas decorations we haven't used in years, snow sleds designed for children, volleyball nets, baby toys, and more. As we stood looking at all these treasures, we realized we didn't want any of it. We hung a sign on every shelf "Rummage items".

Next, we purged the "outside toys" totes. These totes have balls, Frisbee, and various items used during the summer for playing outdoors. We decided to save many of the items for our dog to play with and tare apart this coming summer, the rest went to the rummage shelves in the store room.

Then we went to the Beach and Pool totes. These totes had buckets and shovels from when the kids were young, and a bunch of pool floats from our many trips to Florida. Pool floats are cheap, so, we decided to donate everything and buy new floats when we move to Florida.

Our adult daughter has a lot of items stored at our house. She stopped by for a few hours to go through several of her totes and reduced things down.

The good news? We filled another two trash cans (could have used a third). Out of 250 totes, we now have 30 empty totes. We have five totes in the rummage pile, and most of the store room is all rummage.

We have a long ways yet to go. 190 totes remain, all the closets and cupboards, the draws, and everything else. But we made good headway!

Purging T Minus 520 days: Cost of moving

According to our plans, we have 520 days before we move. We decided NOT to go to Florida during the Summer of 2019 so that we could, instead, save money for the move. I have read many reports that people moved with just a few thousand dollars. I have read other estimates the cost is $10K-$20K. When our friends moved, they recommended we have $12,000 for the move.

Our goal? Save an much as we can. I don't know how much that'll be, but we are trying. We are still maintaining our life style (we aren't tightening our belt too much) but we are putting money in savings to support the move.

Purging T-minus 525 days: Christmas Decoration Purge

For whatever reason, the purging bug has hit us!

Every year after Thanksgiving, we transform our house into a Christmas wonderland. We love our Christmas decorations and have a lot of fun. We enjoy it so much, we never want to take the decorations down. Nevertheless, our goal is to take the decorations down by the end of January.

We decided that a first step to taking down the Christmas Decorations was to purge our decorations. We would get rid of anything we haven't used in years, consider getting rid of anything we didn't use this year, and question decorations as we put them away.

I have an entire tote of Christmas Lights where some of the bulbs are not working on the string. I have kept them in case I ever want to fix them, or, I need some spare bulbs. What I have been doing instead of messing with old Christmas Lights is to wait until the after-Christmas sales and buy a bunch of new strings at 75% off. As a result, I have several totes of new Christmas lights that can be used for future Christmases. So... why do I need a tote full of dead lights? Those went in the garbage.

Once we finished purging the Christmas items, we were struck by the purging bug and kept going. We have 250 totes in our tote store room (we call it Tote City). Every tote is numbered, inventoried, and categorized.

We created three piles: Totes to sort first. Totes to be donated. Totes for a rummage sale. We started collecting boxes and flattening them for moving. We also have a bunch of color stickers and we have been walking around putting stickers on things: Blue for rummage, red for donate, and yellow for keep.

At the end of the weekend, my wife and I sat on the couch completely overwhelmed. Our heads were swimming at the scope of all the work that needs to get done. My wife suggested we might need a dumpster, but those are very expensive. We decided, instead, to put an extra two trash cans to the curb each week until the trash collectors complain.

We decided that at some point, we are going to hire the trash collectors. They come to your house and you just point at things and they carry it out and put it in their truck. You then pay for how full the truck is. We'll use that for some of our large items when we get closer to the move.