Tag: getting rid of stuff

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Deciding what’s essential

Moving into this caravan has taught me again how privileged I am and how I had no real idea about the minimum level of basics needed to be comfortable.

As I unpack each box and the tiny kitchen fills up I hold my head in my hands and ask myself why I thought I really needed that item over and over again.

For example, I packed four wooden chopping boards. Four. What on earth did I think I was going to be preparing? There isn’t enough worktop space to lay them out for use let alone enough space to stack them.

I have one drawer in the caravan kitchen which I’ve filled with all our knives, cutlery and utensils. It’s over full. I seem to have thought that several wooden spoons were essential. The list goes on.

Now, of course I can get more creative with ways of storing things, I know. I’d bought some macrami hanging baskets which I’ve hung to hold apples, vegetables that don’t need refrigeration and other bits. They don’t hold much weight so it’s light things only.

I’ve got hooks up for mugs and hanging storage for other things to keep them off the work surface. Walls, however flimsy, I’ve discovered, are my friend.

But the key thing here is less stuff rather than more ways to cram extra in. I will pare this back over the coming weeks to what I really use so that it’s more comfortable.

We’ve discovered that the oven doesn’t work, so my old slow cooker has already proved its weight in gold whilst my ever resourceful husband gets time to work out what’s wrong. I made a lamb and vegetable stew with dumplings in it a few days ago, and a rice pudding. It’s so comforting after a cold day of hard work to come into a caravan warm and fragrant with the smell of dinner cooking.

We still have no water. The pipes in the caravan had been cut when they were removed previously for transportation which we didn’t notice until we came to install them.

This meant that new pipes and connectors had to be ordered, which won’t arrive until next week. So no running water or usable toilet… We are filling containers from the one tap in the house. I won’t go into the mechanics of the toilet arrangements for my more delicate readers, but it’s led to many moments of hilarity and a more intimate knowledge of the croft than we had been expecting..

A camping portaloo should arrive any day now… 😊

PS. we do have a comfortable bed that we managed to crowbar into the tiny bedroom. It’s my bliss at the moment.

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The final few yards

It’s less than a week now until we move, and we’re starting to flag a bit.

Every room is full of boxes, either full or waiting to be filled, lining the rooms like some cardboard termite mound whilst we squeeze through tunnels between them.

It’s tiring. Both the constant decision making process – to store, to the caravan, to the charity box, to trash – and the packing and manhandling of the boxes to safe stacks around the house.

There is nothing that brings home the stark reality of having too much stuff like the process of having to pack it away.

To be fair, the bulk of it is books. I honestly don’t know how many boxes of books we have. It must be in the hundreds.

Husband and I both share an abiding love of books, but combining our collections when we married three years ago has resulted in a veritable tsunami of books. Working in the book industry for major publishers over the last thirteen years has only fed the beast. It’s overwhelming. We’ve never had them all unpacked…

When we get to the island we’re going to have to do further weeding out and disposal. There simply won’t be enough wallspace to build enough book shelves to take them all, I’m sure of it.

However, we’re now on the final stretch. The last few yards.

The day of the move is almost upon us, She says with a big, tired smile.

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Apple and blackberry handpies

Before I put away all the baking stuff I had to make something sweet and seasonal to give us a bit of a lift through all this packing.

Apple and blackberry hand pies. They’re never going to win any beauty contests, but they tasted delicious.

Shortcrust pastry was enriched with egg, sugar and ground almonds to make it crumbly and crispy on the outside, almost like a biscuit. These were filled with lightly poached Coxes Orange Pippin apples and big, juicy blackberries.

We ate these over the last few days whenever we needed a lift. It helped.

Food can be medicine for the spirit, you know.

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Work boots and packing boxes

We ran out of bread yesterday afternoon, so husband offered to pop into the local Tescos to pick some up.

The last thing I was expecting was for him to come back with a bargain pair of steel-toe capped work boots for me.

He returned and presented me with them with a flourish worthy of a man clutching a large bunch of red roses. Who says romance is dead!

I guess this means that I am going to have to pull my weight on the build, then… 🤔

I secretly love them. I may never take them off.

These have been added to the rapidly growing pile of knee pads, work trousers and power tools that are filling every free space in the house at the moment. This is the reality of a household getting ready to move in just a few weeks time.

Bertie, our ancient but lovely spaniel, has been reduced to sleeping in odd corners wedged between the boxes wherever he can.

I can see that he is perplexed by the erosion of his space, with boxes forming cardboard labyrinths around the house.

Poor dog. At his age he deserves peace and quiet, and a degree of constancy, and all we give him is change..

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Darkest before the Dawn

The saying goes that the darkness is deepest just before the dawn.

As I sit here in our bedroom in the half light of morning listening to the birds on the nearby lake beating their wings against the water and the sounds of London slowly waking up, I understand that feeling.

We have this amazing dream that after two years of nurture, focus and hard work is now within inches of becoming reality. We are within just a few weeks of packing up our old house, getting in the car and driving with the dog to our new life on the island.We are weighed down with lists and arrangements, with disposing of things, and with decisions.

Although I have now finished work, husband still has three weeks to go and so doesn’t have the luxury of daily headspace to process things. I’m limited by what I can do to help. It’s a huge weight.

Covid 19 is on the rise again with the prospect of further lockdowns and travel restrictions which is adding another spoonful of stress and uncertainty to an already pretty potent mix.

I know that this will pass. I know that everything will get done, and that if it doesn’t get done the world won’t stop turning.I know this. We both know this.

We will find the space to hang on to the excitement of these new beginnings. Even when these feelings of excitement are heavily entwined with the decoupling from our old lives and all that this entails. Even when sleep is dominated with dreams of all the things we haven’t yet done. Even when our bedtime reading is all plumbing manuals and spreadsheets.

It’s important not to allow the “to-do” list to consume every waking moment and to reconnect with feelings of joy at what we are about to do.

Because of course it will all be worth it.New beginnings, a new way of life.The dawn is lightening the sky already.

We will be ready.

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Decompressing

I’m slowly decompressing from work life.

I feel a bit like a balloon that was filled to capacity and at maximum tension. I bobbed along but was always conscious that everything was taut and there wasn’t much stretch left.

Not much capacity for squeezing in the good stuff, like realising dreams.

In the last week since finishing work I’ve been sleeping a lot. It feels as if someone has undone the knot at the neck of the balloon and is letting the air escape very slowly. I’m feeling as if there’s a bit of room now, with the balloon deflating a little more with each day that passes.

That’s a good thing. It’s freeing up some mental capacity for the lists that we’re building of things that have to be done before the move. Things that will help us realise the dream. Financial planning, changes of address, tools to buy for the build, sequencing the build plans, packing, clearing out things we no longer need. The list is a long one and continually being added to.

Those that know me will smile when they hear that the first thing I’ve bought for the static to keep us on track with the build tasks is a whiteboard…

I can see it now. Cold, frosty morning starts, piled-on old jumpers and big socks, mugs of coffee and bowls of porridge, and a morning stand-up to go through the priority tasks of each day.

Maybe retirement isn’t going to be that different to corporate life after all. Except so much more fun. Agile team leads, eat your heart out 😊

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Urban Life Pruning

Husband and I have what I think of as a typical, complicated, overloaded modern existence, made worse by the coalition of our previous lives into one when we married three years ago.

With the relationship came lots and lots of stuff accumulated over many years from previous houses, studios and flats. Far too much stuff, to be honest.

We have multiples of everything and many thousands of books. It became clear when we started planning the move to our croft that we had to start pruning our possessions before we moved. Because what we’re building is a small house on Skye which hasn’t got a hope in hell of holding it all.

So it began this week.

To be honest, after a long, hard day at work the last thing that either of us want to do is carry boxes up from the garage and sort through them, but we’ve set ourselves the goal of five boxes a week.

Every week for the rest of this year.

We’re already looking at bulk loads of bin bags and the local charity shops are going to love us 😂…..

It’s like a penance….

If this doesn’t cure us of a tendency to buy too much or hang onto things that we don’t need, I don’t know what will!