Empty Nester Downsizing: Are you doing this?

The downsizing continues… More sifting, sorting, tossing and saving. Are you doing this? Lately, I seem to read a lot about how people are downsizing, buying smaller homes and some of them have adapted to a nomadic lifestyle. They just travel and don’t even have a permanent home any longer.

Our children now are grown, we looked around and noticed… we have lots of stuff. I’ve written in the past about how we had a much bigger home and downsized to a smaller home which we completely renovated. The entire experience was a gratifying and exciting adventure. However, what we came to understand was that we collected too many personal possessions! Sound familiar?

It has been almost exactly 30 days since we started our #6monthsinSeattle adventure.

We drove for three days and nights from California to Washington and the drive was (mostly) fun.

I have already learned lots of great things about the city as well as myself from living in Seattle just in one short month!

1. I can live with much less “stuff”.

We started this whole downsize to a smaller house adventure and I knew that we would need to purge our belongings because the new house is half the size of the old one. We ended up storing about two thirds of our personal possessions in storage and kept one third to be used in the new house.

While we were renovating the house and had to move out, we then hatched the brilliant plan to move to Seattle, to be near our daughter after nine years of living apart, in an urban high rise… in a teeny tiny apartment.

We then had to pare down our belongings even more because of the lack of room and closet space in our apartment. Evidently, I can live without a great deal of what I already own.

In one month, I have not longed for or whined for any of my other clothes, dishes, glasses, books, etc that are packed away and inaccessible.

More Downsizing, Too Many Photos, More Lessons Learned

Empty Nester Downsizing: Are you doing this?

Four things I’ve learned from living in Seattle for one month.

1. I can live with much less “stuff”.