declutter

[caravan]

Hi, will be go full time next year. My hubby and I are both retired Air Force and have shadow boxes with US flag flown over the capitol with medals etc as well as retirement certs. Also lots of pictures. What did anyone do with those things when they 'decluttered' will be selling everything else. Downsized to laptop and wireless printers. Would like to hear what people did.

[lindah]

For the pictures, what we did was to scan all of them...that way, we don't have to carry all the weight of the photo albums.

I have no idea about what to do with the shadow boxes with the flags in them...I imagine they're very large and you probably won't have any wall space in your RV to hang them. Do you have kids you could "loan" them to?

[utmtman]

We rented a storage shed and put all the things we did not wish to carry around in storage in sealed tote boxes. We have a big shed at present but are on a list for a small one. Only pay 37 dollars a month for storage and it goes out automatically with bill pay thru my bank.

[caravan]

Will be taking shadow boxes to kids, saves after we kick the bucket. There was an article in a RV magazine about a family who paid all the money for storage and was only going to be road for couple of years which turned into more and more, adding to thousands of $ then they went back to the storage and after looking at it realized they did not need it. Great idea about photo albumn pictures. Have for years been working on family history and once I finish what I want will just add a note that says if you want pictures will send as zip file. have so many will not be able to print them. Selling everything will also help pad the bank account. Am retired military and remember all the moves that meant selling things could not take.

[utmtman]

We go by our shed once a year to check on it and also sometimes we find there are things we had we dont need so we put them in shed than we sooner or later have a yard sale. We just had our first sell since we sold out a couple of years ago and hit the road and did make some 600 dollars for the thing we dropped off over the two years in the shed. Some examples some dishes, books we had read, a couple of different tables, clothes we found we had no need for, and other odds and ends.

[caravan]

Just think how much you can save if you close the shed. People can buy stuff that they may need and you have done without while on the road. You have done without the stuff this long you may not need them. If you sell everything and the rental on the shed could pay for a tank of gas.

[lindah]

A story: When we first started fulltiming in 1998, there were things I just couldn't part with. So we paid for a storage room to put all those "precious" items in.

Fast forward 5 years, we decide to significantly downsize our RV, buy a lot and put a small manufactured home on it. We cleaned out the storage room, and as I was unpacking each box, I wondered what in the world possessed me to keep some of the *junk* I'd kept!

Fast forward another 4 or 5 years, we're tired of staying in the same place each winter, all winter, so we sell the house and go back to fulltiming. This time, my goal was to sell or donate EVERYTHING that wouldn't fit into the fifth wheel. Some of the items, like my grandmother's furniture, was given to family. Everything else was either sold in garage sales or donated to Goodwill or Salvation Army...many of the books we donated to a local school or library.

Now we're back to fulltiming and have no storage anyplace...everything we own in carried with us.

[caravan]

There you go. Besides saving the storage fees don't have to worry about having to travel to going back to town where storage unit the money is available for more important things, like campground fees.

[jdensie]

"The more you own, the more it owns you"
We downsized and only have what we can put in our MH.

[murffdog]

Been thinking about this, let the kids go through and take what they want and sell the rest. There is "stuff" here that I haven't used in a year or two. If there are clothes that I haven't used in 6 months, out it goes.