It has been about two months since I started on my project to change my lifestyle. After years of thinking it would be nice to have less stuff cluttering my life (or, as I’m coming to view it “garbage”) but feeling I couldn’t do anything about it, I was inspired to make the changes. I started off with all the enthusiasm of a new convert. It was new and inspiring and great. It got tough at points but I persevered. Then life started happening. Work hours changed and while I still worked the same number of hours the schedule messed up my sleeping patterns. But I soldiered on, albeit with less energy and less adherence to the rigid challenges I had set myself.

In the last week and a half – starting the day after my last post – things got rather hectic. It started on a Thursday. Jules had found an apartment that sounded good – decent price, allowed dogs, decent neighborhood. I had a feeling about the apartment so I skipped practice to view it with Jules on Thursday night. It looked good. Not great, not the answer to all my prayers, but good. So we filled out an application immediately and settled ourselves to wait. We figured we could get the place and negotiate to move in a couple of weeks.

On Friday the building owner called us. He had spent part of the day verifying our information but had been unable to verify my employment. The joys of working in a huge corporation. We figured out how to do that but I would have to do it from work. Since I had already gone home it would wait until Monday. Once we had that we figured we could negotiate a good move in date.

Saturday was going through stuff with a little more urgency than usual.

Sunday I found this in the bedroom closet:

Black mold. Our situation just went from “Let’s do this right” to “Let’s do this right NOW”.

Monday, we were approved and signed the lease. On Tuesday we took bedding, some clothing, toiletries, dog supplies, and enough food to get by for a bit. We have spent the rest of week moving as much as we can each night. It is now Saturday and we are not yet done but all that remains is bits and pieces.

This is our living room now:

And this isn’t everything. We have unpacked some stuff in the bedroom and office. We moved almost all of our stuff – leaving only the things we had already decided to donate. There is a lot more to go through. But time was of the essence. We could not follow our plan of “Move only what we want; donate or sell the rest”. This is a consequence of our obsessive need to accumulate stuff, to buy more to fill that emotional hole.

However, we had already started our winnowing process. We spent two month working on it. This could have been much worse.