How to live with less (part I): De-owning

Picture: bt.com

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Anytime is a good time to start de-owning but maybe a Transatlantic move beats them all. That is where our story begins. Two years ago, my husband was given the opportunity to work in Chicago. We've always lived in Barcelona, that's where our 3 kids had been born, so the idea was pretty exciting.  Besides the emotional turmoil that it generated, we had to deal with a lot of practical details, starting with: What do we do with all of our stuff? 
Luckily, we had already started introducing Voluntary Simplicity into our lives so the steps towards reducing, de-owning and making our move easy were quite clear.
We had to start with the 4 Box Method:

• DONATE/SELL: I went around the house many times, taking pictures of everything I really didn't want to take with me or store. I also told my kids they could fill just one box with what they did want to keep.
  • The next step was to put a price tag on each picture and a pick-up date. Prices ranged from $1 to $100. I sent the pictures to  family first and, after they had chosen, to our friends.
  • What nobody wanted was donated​ to charity.
  • For hard-to-part-from items, I came up with the Quarantine Room Method: I'd put the item in a Quarantine status for a couple of weeks, until a day came when I had the perfect "let go energy." When that happened, I gave it away immediately, so I didn't have second thoughts.
• KEEP: Imagine you have to pay a lot of money to keep your stuff. That was our case. The more we kept, the larger the overseas container had to be, the more expensive the move. To make it easy we used one premise: The item had to be something we used daily or weekly.  Our list came down to:
  • Essential furniture (tables, beds, chairs, sofa...)
  • Essential kitchenware and linens
  • Some books, pictures and ornamets. (exception to the rule, but we had to make our new home look like home!)
  • One medium box per kid with whatever they chose (yes, whatever...)
  • Current wardrobe and outerwear (Chicago, remember?!)
  •  Eventhough we really tried to keep it down to the essential, we still had 130 items transported overseas. The moving company said it was a small load but I was surprised nonetheless.
• ​STORE: The tricky one! Once we had decided what stuff we were taking with us, we realized there were some things we loved but didn't want to send overseas.  Books, some kids'  mementoes, my husband's Mountain Bike trophies, legal stuff... Things I will get back to and purge the minute I return to Barcelona, now that I have experienced living with less and how liberating de-owning is .
  • Having to pay for long term storage is a deterrent to storing a lot of stuff. Even if you can store everything at your dad's garage, set a storage budget and store only as much as you would be able to afford if you were using a storage facility. Or even better, pay that amount to your dad for using up his space!
• DISCARD: A lot will end up in this pile when you decide to reduce your belongings. Since we wanted to avoid the landfill as much as possible. It took us a while to find facilities that accepted used paint, bookshelves, old toys... although in Barcelona we have deixalleries, free municipal waste collection and storage depots. In the U.S. you can find where to recycle all sorts of items in your community in this great website.

Overall, we spend 6 months in this process but that's because I started way too early (I realize now I was craving to de-own most of our stuff) but I think it can be done in 4-6 weeks from beginning to end.

De-owning over 50% of our stuff was an eye-opening opportunity to question if our belongings satisfied our needs and to analyze if those needs were real and still worked for us. As we de-owned things, we felt lighter and many ideas and decisions became clearer. Now, may months later, the benefits of those decisions are for us to experiment and enjoy every single day. But that is food for another blog entry.