For the past couple of weeks, very little progress has been made on building the tiny house. It’s come to a point in our build that we actually have to put construction on hold, and focus mainly on DOWNSIZING OUR STUFF! With a deadline to move out of our Middlebury apartment by June 30, the crunch has been on to get rid of things and get down to tiny house size. We’ve always known this point would come since we started dreaming about a tiny house, but I never thought about how we’d really do it. Here’s a few tips regarding purging stuff that we’ve come up with through this journey:
- Make a Deadline: For years we have moved from apartment to apartment, and carted around many boxes of things. With each move, we had intentions of sorting through stuff, but it never really happened in earnest. Having the dimensions (and weight!) of our tiny house gave us a goal, and having a move out date provided a concrete deadline. It has really been a crunch leading up to that deadline, and it’s been satisfying to see all the progress that’s been made just in the past couple of weeks (see the photos below).
- Give it Away! I’ve come across tiny house/downsizing advice online with strategies for how to sell your stuff online, hold yardsales, etc. This is great advice, and a good way to earn some extra cash. If we’d been more proactive over the past months/years we could have done more of this, however between building a house for the past year and making our move out deadline, it has not been feasible. We have sold a couple things, but mostly we’ve been making: bags of trash (unusable old things), bins of recycling (all the papers that we’ve kept over the years), carloads to the Habitat ReStore/Goodwill (usable stuff going to a good next home), and memory care packages for family and friends (special and useful things that we hope our loved ones will enjoy- thanks to folks for taking these!). If you really need to make some money sell away, but since our primary goal is to get in our tiny house (and we’re fortunate that we have some savings) this has taken a back burner.
- “Do What Moves You”: This is a poetic way of saying: sort through whatever you feel like working on at the time, rather than forcing yourself to work on a box that isn’t calling you. I have learned this especially, since I often look at things around the apartment that I wish would be downsized- but I have to be patient and wait until Jeremy is ready to work on that stuff. Whatever you are in the mood to purge, go with it and make some progress. Eventually it will all get done!
The challenge as we are nearing the end of this current downsizing process is that we’ve gotten rid of the things that are easy to part with, and now we must face the things that we feel more attached to. Our plan is to move out of the apartment, tow the tiny house from Vermont down to Keene, NH, and park the house in a friend’s yard for the month of July. There we will finish the flooring, kitchen, shingles, etc. And then we will move our stuff into the house, and find out what really fits! Then come early August, we will be hitting the road towards Eugene, Oregon! Gotta go help Jeremy sort/pack up stuff now…
Go Tiny 