Chapter 4: The First Major Move: The First Major Lesson

We lived in Iowa for eighteen years and gained two kids, two dogs and one cat along the way. In 2005 we moved to Washington, Illinois. Packing up our entire life in that 3-bedroom, 2-story home was exhausting. Did I mention the two-car garage? It took months of working after I got home from work to sort through and box up all the clothes, toys, paper, and books. So many books! My husband had an affinity for books, and it was reflected in our huge collection of books for our kids. We mostly boxed things up and didn't throw things away or donate them. It was exhausting.

The last room we packed was our "office/mudroom". This room was so FULL of boxes, it was difficult to walk through. It was a mudroom that also had two filing cabinets, some built in cabinets full of “stuff”, and a computer with those office “in” boxes that were stuffed full of, I’m sure, what was incredibly important documents that needed to be kept.

The room itself held years of paid invoices, bank statements, cancelled checks, and multiple times of "fluff and stuff" boxes--when company is coming over, you clean off the dining room table and end tables and just throw everything in a box. If you don't sort through the items later, however, you collect boxes and boxes of "junk", much of which is just junk mail, school papers and newspapers.

There was also a coat rack with four hooks holding multiple coats and jackets and a crate with a mixture of hats, gloves, and scarves. There was also a crate full of various shoes and boots in a wide range of sizes and seasons.

This room was so stuffed, my sister threatened to submit my name to that hoarding show where they come in and help you empty your house!

We were working on that last day on that last room, and we had 4 people still at the house helping. (As a side note, we are SO thankful to the tons of people who came during that time to help us pack! I don't think I thanked people enough for the time they spent helping us!) We were sorting through boxes of mostly paperwork and junk mail, most of which we were throwing away. The bags of paperwork trash were piling up outside. I think stating we had at least 10 bags of trash from that room could be an understatement. We had to make a “run” to get more trash bags that night!

At the end of the day, literally, our friends had to leave--around 10:00 pm. We were supposed to travel with the full U-Haul and my car to Illinois. The U-Haul was packed to the ceiling, and my car barely had room for our Australian Shepherd.

However, we had not touched a single thing in our 2-car garage.

A garage where we could still park our two cars, but the walls were definitely lined with boxes and bags with unknown contents. The overhead light in the garage had burnt out months before, but due to the impending house sale, we had not been concerned with replacing the bulb.

Exhausted and faced with many more boxes to sort through in the dark and a 3-hour drive to Illinois, we made the decision under extreme exhaustion to abandon the stuff in the garage and go ahead and leave.

My husband regretted the decision years later, every time he reminisced about the things he thought were in the garage. Many of his model airplanes were in there, and some spaceships he designed as a kid. I think I had bags of clothes that I wasn't currently wearing--whether they were too small, or too big, or the wrong season--I don't know. And I'm sure we had things of the kids--toys, sleds, maybe some clothing they had outgrown.

We heard the new owners hauled everything out and had a yard sale with our stuff. It was humiliating to know that our coveted "stuff" had just been sold for cheap spread out and on display in our former driveway. It was embarrassing that we had so much stuff, and that we had abandoned it. We regretted the decision not to sort through the items in the garage, but in our extreme exhaustion, it felt like the best decision for us at the time.

In hindsight, you can see where the frustration in keeping too many things, saving too many things, first started to bubble up with this first major move. We had an enormous number of unopened boxes for years. The unknown contents of these boxes caused months of exhaustion sorting through them, many bags of trash, and abandoning stuff in our garage. Our moving had become a MAJOR undertaking due to our tendency to keep things.

DISCLAIMER: I share this embarrassing story to show what I experienced, and what I learned from it. This is part of my journey toward realizing the true worth of “stuff”.