Purge::Paaji & Organize::Soshiki shimasu

184 days, 10 hours, 41 minutes and x,y,z number of seconds until we will be in Okinawa...I know this because my facebook page tells me so.  Two and a half months ago we received word that we were headed for the island life.  In that time, a massive household purging has commenced and we are preparing for closet-sized accommodations on the other side of the globe. 

With approximately 6 months to arrival on the island and roughly 6 rooms in our home the original mission was to tackle and purge one room a month.  Then, with 3 days notice I found out about a post-wide yard sale.  So in one fell swoop (a seriously late Friday night, a whole lot of caffeine and one awesome husband) we had the entire house purged of all major no-go's, including the attic.

28 items have been taken to the consignment shop on post here at Fort Monroe and hopefully I will be picking up the first of many checks to come on June 1.  The laughable post-wide (ha!) yard sale was held last weekend and of the 6, yes, S-I-X participating families we sold all of our major items before the sale ever commenced.  We had several large furniture items that didn't make the cut for the solo-trans-Pacific-voyage (couple of bookcases, a desk, a file cabinet, table and chairs, aerogarden...) and thanks to the wonders of facebook...all but one of the items was sold before sale day!  The table and chairs was the last item sold on sale day to my friend Umiko and her family.  Also on the axe-list was my Pampered Chef overstock, a 20x20x20 box filled to the hilt with all things PC-love.  Selling PC for the past 1.5 years has been a blast, but my oh my how the bonuses and excess add up!  Between my personal cluster contacts and facebook, more than half of those items were gone before sale day as well.

This long holiday weekend before Memorial Day finds me purging paper files, my knitting needle collection and my enormous yarn stash.  Did I say yarn stash?!  My  bad...the stash stays, definitely stays. 

What has amazed me the most thus far in our downsizing endeavors is that no matter how much stuff we've unloaded, I seem to keep finding more items to fill their void (all without buying more stuff).  A year ago, we had two functioning dining tables, one in the kitchen and one in the dining room.  The dining room table was on loan (why did we NEED a loaner in the first place?) and the kitchen table was an inherited piece from another friend.  The dining room table made it back to it's rightful owner and when we unloaded the kitchen table last weekend I discovered how big our kitchen really is.  But that didn't last...hiding under a tablecloth in our second bedroom upstairs (which serves a dual-purpose as my craft space and our workout space) was yet ANOTHER table.  So out it came from hiding and straight to the kitchen with two inherited chairs I received from my grandmother, which were also hiding upstairs.  The two chairs are now out on the front lawn awaiting a full refurbishing (which means I'm going to paint them).

Yard sale remnants have found a temporary and I do mean temp.o.rary home in the middle of our dining room floor.  They will be moved in 14-item stages to the on-post consignment shop over the next several weeks.  Once we have paper orders in hand, remaining articles will move in 28-item increments.  Slowly, but surely, the downsizing is occurring...and simplicity is beginning to reign - it feels great! Kanpai!