Month: May 2017

Why we’re getting rid of our stuff and simplifying our life

We both come from families who like to collect things. That’s great when we need 100 mason jars, dozens of string lights, or enough scrap lumber to build a second house, but it’s not good for keeping an organized home. Seriously, who needs this many mason jars??

Mason Jars and String Lights

This was the most organized area of our home.

Not only that, but add two young kids and toys into a house filled with stuff, and before long they’ve figured out how to cover every square inch with stuff in about 15 minutes. The living room ends up looking like this:

Messy living room

We’ve often wondered just how many hours our lives are spent on “stuff management” such as:

  • Doing the dishes
  • Cleaning the house
  • Putting away toys
  • Doing the laundry
  • Organizing the basement/closet/bedroom/etc.

I guess these are normal “adulting” things to do – but the hours add up!

So we’ve spent the past few months getting rid of most of our stuff. Goodbye mason jars. Goodbye baskets of toys. Goodbye boxes of junk that have sat in the basement for years. Goodbye to needing a month’s worth of clothing and a lifetime of shoes. Goodbye stuff!

We’ll still need to do the dishes, wash our clothes, and organize the toys. But 90 square feet of living space only allows for so much stuff and will force us to have way less. Hopefully we won’t have to spend so much time managing it all.

That, or we could always buy a bigger trailer 🙂

(Okay – so we can’t get rid of EVERYTHING. Big thanks to our parents for storing some of the irreplaceable items during our year of travel)

And so we begin…

In a few months, our family (Kimberlee, Nick, Quintin, and Eliza) will be loading up what’s left of our belongings, and heading off on a year-long adventure living in a tiny vintage travel trailer.

We don’t know what life will be like on the road – we suspect it will be challenging, amazing, tiring, stinky (literally), rewarding, and everything in between.

As we explore the highs and lows of this journey, we will be sharing reflections, frustrations, photos, videos, trailer renovation and travel tips, and more here on this site.

We’re also excited to see many family and friends along the way. If you’d like us to visit you, or if you’d like to join us for part of the journey, let us know here!

Also, be sure to like us on Facebook or follow us on Instagram to receive updates when we post new things here (we’re aiming to have a new blog post at least once a week starting now, and daily photos on Instagram once the journey begins).