We finally exchanged contracts on 21st July and have a completion date of 14th August!
This meant that we had just four weeks just to clear out the house and get ourselves ready.
Kevin has been here since 1988, I've been here since the end of 1992 and that's an awful lot of stuff to go through. We have a suitcase full of photographs - some of which are memorable like the photos of our grandchildren as babies, photos of me with my beloved mum, odd wedding photos that for some reason never made it into the wedding album. I can see us spending winter evenings going through every photo and deciding which to keep and which to throw.
There are enough glasses in boxes in the attic to stock a pub; there are two sets of china, now surplus to requirements. We are moving to a Really Small Cottage - it is highly unlikely that we could accommodate more than six of us in there at any one time, so we hardly need all that tableware.
The local charity shops have done REALLY well! We have been through all of our clothes and donated six big bags to Macmillan Cancer. The Pareto Rule certainly applies to us, we are definitely wearing 20% of our clothes 80% of the time so someone else may benefit from the things that we no longer wear (or in my case, which no longer fit, sadly). We have also cleared a lot of bric-a-brac - vases, pictures, ornaments that we no longer loved or cherished - again, this stuff was taken by the British Heart Foundation.
The attic is finally empty of all but the things that we are keeping,which have been stored to one side of the hatch. Everything else has slowly made its way downstairs and out, either to eBay or to the local Recycling Depot.
We have been through the sheds (garden and tool) and done a lot of "rationalisation" - much of which has gone into the big yellow skip-sized Hippobag. I have tidied up my workshop and store, carefully packed the essential oils and stock and disposed of the soon-to-be past due date base oils at the Recycling Centre.
The interesting thing is how liberating all this feels. We are starting a new life in Devon and it feels good to be taking only those things that we know to be useful or believe to be beautiful (good old William Morris - very wise words).
