One of the questions that people first ask when they find out about my nomadic adventure is, “Are you crazy?”: The second question is “What are you doing with all of your stuff?”
This always reminds me of George Carlin’s bit on stuff (warning NSFW language):
The Stuff I Own
To determine how much stuff I had, and what to donate / give away / put in storage / take with me,: I created an: Excel spreadsheet that represented pretty much everything that I owned.
The total number of items: 197.: The breakdown went:
- Put in Storage: 30% (59 items)
- Given Away on Craigslist: 29% (57 items)
- Dumped in the Trash: 19% (37 items)
- Donated to Goodwill: 16% (31 items)
- Taken with Me in Travel: 6% (13 items)
It’s somewhat liberating and moreso terrifying that I boiled the necessities of life down to 6% of what I owned, but then again I am only taking two bags with me.
Donations and Giveaways
Nearly half: of my belongings were given away or donated (29% + 16% = 45%). These were: mostly things I either wanted to get rid of anyway or were cheap enough that it didn’t: make sense for me to hang onto (e.g. IKEA: furniture). It was either donated to Goodwill or: given: away on Craigslist for free (where “free” means come and get it out of my apartment before my lease is up).
Had I planned better and not procrastinated I probably could have sold many of the things on Craigslist. In particular, I gave away a $1,000+ leather recliner sofa that I got from a friend of mine when she moved to London.
I will say that I had fun: writing the descriptions of my belongings, which you can find below: (you can see that I had prices on the items which was before I got desperate and just gave things away):
Putting Things in Storage
The next largest bucket of stuff was put in: “storage” and by: “storage” I mean my Mom’s spare: room in her condo in Ohio.
For that stuff, I rented a large van, packed up the items, and made the 10-hour drive (one way). I did this twice over the course of 2 weeks, though the main reason for multiple trips was an event I was leading in Ohio in late February.
Because of the two trips, I was ecstatic to learn I could keep my leather recliner chair (sadly not the sofa, but more on that in a moment). The leather chair was one that me and my first roommate got when we graduated college. We got a matching set like Joey and Chandler on Friends because we were, in fact, friends.
The leather couch still hurts a little bit, mostly because when the nice family came to pick it up, they asked if it could be taken apart. I told them, unfortunately, it could not. They disagreed… and were correct. On the underside of the couch was a long beam and a couple of screws–screws that when removed allowed you take the couch in three easier-to-carry sections that would have fit in the van I had rented…
Oh well, a nice Latino family in the Bronx is now enjoying a couch that would have been sitting at my brother’s place.
And that is what I did with my stuff.
