Stuff

While preparing for this trip, I have been constantly dumbfounded by the amount of Stuff we’ve had to deal with.

First we had to rent a small storage unit when we put our house on the market. We needed a place to store excess Stuff to make the house look appealing and tidy. (And our house was only 650 square feet plus garage, so I didn’t think we had much Stuff at that point.)

Once the house sold we needed to rent a bigger storage unit to store most of our Stuff while we moved in temporarily with Matt’s parents.

Then when it came time to move our Stuff out to the Montana house we had to rent a trailer to help move all the Stuff. The truck, trailer, and MPV were packed to the gills and we still had to leave some Stuff behind. It was beginning to look like the Oregon Trail when things are being tossed out the wagons because the horses and oxen can’t pull the weight. While driving up some of the mountain passes there were moments when I thought that we might actually have to jettison some items because the vehicles were laboring so hard – we could barely keep up with the semi-trucks.

I have to add that during all these months a constant culling of Stuff was occurring, so we actually had fewer things than we started out with.

When we returned from Montana we still had Stuff in the storage unit that we hadn’t been able to fit in the vehicles. Fortunately we had a friend with a fairly empty garage which we could store this Stuff in. (Thanks Libbey!)

Then came the moment that caused some serious despair. We literally had a whole truck load of Stuff that we needed to fit on the boat, and the boat was already fairly full of Stuff. Matt said he had not suffered much serious stress these past few months until faced with this endeavor. It almost pushed him over the edge.

I’m happy to say that we did get all the Stuff stowed away and nothing had to be thrown overboard. This photo is representative of the way all our cupboards and lockers look, however.

In order to retrieve one item, it seems we typically have to move no fewer than five items to get to it. It makes our old 650 square foot house seem like an absolute mansion. But right now I wouldn’t trade our boat for anything. Who needs all that Stuff anyways?