From the Big House to the Little House

With only 5 days to go we have moved from the house over the weekend and into the caravan. As much as I am looking forward to traveling moving house is not high on my list of enjoyable tasks. The though of all that packing, throwing out old things, selling the stuff you don't think you will need again and finding a place to store what you want to keep is not that appealing to me. It would have been easier to leave everything in it and lock the door but since we were relying on rent from our house it was our best option.

We had made the decision to sell a lot of furniture not so much as because of the trip but we would have sold or given it away when we moved back into our own house. Now selling is not as easily as you might think when A) your worked hard to buy it in the first place and B) you were not replacing it with a new piece. Anne was quite upset as we sold each piece as she saw it as a little bit of herself walking out the door. I was also surprised how little you get for your furniture when it is second hand no matter how much you paid for it when it was new. It was hard to sell even for 50% of the original value especially when retailers are selling similar looking items even though the quality of workmanship or material is not the same.

What we did keep had to be stored. Now we are lucky that we have family who have largish properties. Originally we were going to store our stuff in one of the sheds but realised this would become a bit of inconvenient to the owner of the shed especially if they need the space so we hit on the idea of using an old sea container which could be placed behind the shed. After looking on the internet we found a local supplier who could deliver for under $3,000.00. Now while this sounds expensive for storage the supplier advised us we most likely would sell it for near the same price when we had finished with it.

Once the container arrived we started shifting all our possessions in. Something I didn't count on was how hot it gets inside a container. Even though it is between the shed and some rather large trees there is still a time when the sun is overhead and when steel warms up it transfers the heat into the void within. Stretching some shade cloth other top reduced the heat inside to a more acceptable level.

With all our items in the container it was time to organise the caravan. The caravan already had a fair bit of stuff in its own right trying to fit in stuff we wanted to take from the house well lets just say I took a bit of reshuffling and shoe horning the main items were food from the pantry, Laundry and bathroom it would be such a waste to just throw them out.