Getting close, out of our house and on to the final countdown.

The past few months had flown by and we were suddenly coming up on Christmas.  In addition to scanning photos and documents in our every spare minute we were fielding calls and emails about our belongings listed on Ebay or Craigslist and selling books as fast as we could.  All our music had been “burned” to our computers; we subscribed to a very strong anti-virus program and made the decision to back up all of our data in the cloud.  Now we had an offer on the house.

It was all becoming very real, very quickly.  We sold all of our yard maintenance equipment and tools realizing that we would never need them again.  This would be the last holiday celebrated in the house in which we had lived for eighteen years.  The date for our retirement had been selected and we had been carefully managing the process of winding down or transferring our client loads.  We started making arrangements for a place to stay after the sale of the house and it seemed very strange to evaluate the rental market after owning our home for so long.

We were beginning to doubt that we would be able to dispose of everything in the four months we had left and we knew we didn’t want to move more things than absolutely necessary.  There were companies to wind up, boards to resign from and taxes to be calculated and paid.  Sometimes it felt like we couldn’t catch our breath but we had become very good at setting it all aside and going out to lunch or dinner for a couple of hours and our “date night” had expanded into an everyday necessity.

We accepted an offer on our house before Christmas with an estimated closing date at the end of January.  We’re not sure our family and friends realized and understood that this Christmas would be the last one we celebrated with them in our Gilbert, Arizona home.  It was a little like being in the twilight zone.  We were now selling things we used every day like our home theater system, extra utensils and patio furniture.  We had already cut several swathes through our wardrobes and still needed to reduce them further.  It was time to practice pack, oh joy!  Worse, it was time to have a series of garage sales.

We had to hunt for and buy the best kind of luggage to carry a lot of stuff but be easy to manage and not exceed size or weight limitations imposed by the airlines.  Even though we did not plan to fly any more than necessary we knew that we would have to get on airplanes from time to time.  We found some great rolling duffles on Ebags.com and bought 2 of them in the largest conforming size.

One interesting strategy we incorporated at this time concerned our books and music.  We needed to find the remainder of our library a good home and we initiated a strategy using the local second hand bookstore called Bookman’s. We would take boxes of our books and all of our music CD’s into Bookman’s and they would issue store credit for all items that they wished to add to their used book and music inventory.  Any remaining books we would take next door to the Goodwill store and donate them.  I know this sounds counterintuitive but we used the Bookman’s store credit to buy additional music.  This additional music we burned to our computers and returned to Bookman’s on a subsequent visit.  What a circle life was becoming.

An interesting thing developed as we really started to get rid of our stuff.  We realized that there was really very little that we wanted to keep, that would not be traveling with us.  Our girls picked up the stuff that they had claimed and we found homes for almost everything else.  A few special family heirlooms went to other family members to keep or use while we got ready to head off, planning to live in apartments (flats) with only what we can carry.

Mike’s brother came to visit prior to the closing on the house and helped us during a couple of garage sales but was there primarily to play golf at our club, Encanterra for the last few times.  Moving day arrived and our girls helped us move the needed furniture and the few small items of value that we still needed to sell or donate.  Mike finally moved away from his desktop computer to a his laptop and had our local computer expert wipe the hard drive and set it up for a new user so it could be donated.  We donated all our office supplies, and there was quite a bit since we both had worked from home for years, to the public school where one of our friends worked.  The teachers were amazed and grateful for all of the things they could find use for.

Suddenly it was real.  We were out of our home of eighteen years.  We had sold or given away almost everything we had spent more than thirty years acquiring.  We changed our address for the few items we couldn’t obtain electronically and filed final tax returns for our small, now defunct, companies.  We moved into a lovely condo in the university district of Tempe, Arizona.  We were happy to be out of the suburbs and enjoyed the ability to walk to restaurants and bars rather than driving.  All we had left to sell were a few valuable items from our home, some small pieces of furniture and our remaining vehicle.

We decided that we did not need a storage unit, but that meant that we truly were going to be packing almost everything we owned.  We could take two duffle bags each and a backpack.  That was our limit and we were sticking to it.  Neither duffle could exceed airplane size or weight restrictions so we knew that we really had to make wise choices.  What we were taking with us needed to be enough, and we planned to simply replace things as they wore out.  Evening gowns and suits were given away or sold, a mountain of shoes found new homes. Our daughter found a great rolling duffle on sale at Big 5 Sporting Goods and we found that we liked hers even better than the ones we already had so we bought two of them as our second bags at half the price we paid for the first two.

The thrift stores in our area found themselves with a sudden surplus of nice clothes, shoes, accessories and computer equipment as we finally realized how little we were going to have room for in our “new life”.  There were a few things that we knew would not make the trip but that we still needed for the last few weeks in Arizona so at least one more load was still on the horizon.

 Our flight to San Juan was just a few weeks away.  We were almost there.