“A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.” ― George Carlin
When we realized we would be moving from a 1,600 square foot/150 square meter, 4 bedroom, full basement home, the question became: How? Clearly we CAN’T take everything with us. Well, we guess we could, but it would be prohibitively expensive, and, as we’ve talked about before we are nothing if not frugal cheap.
How Much Stuff
We were moving into a small apartment. How small? 600 square feet/56 square meters. Frankly, it wouldn’t all fit.
Plus, we were enamored of the idea of shedding stuff. Not much, other than art, ok and cooking stuff, in our home was carefully chosen. Most of it was from Craigslist - and not the “ooo look at this find” kind of Craigslist but the “eh it’s a bedside table who cares?” kind of Craigslist. We had done purges before and each time we felt lighter.
Our options this time were to select a relatively small amount of stuff and ship it, using UPakWeShip or similar or fly over with extra luggage.
We looked primarily at UPakWeShip because they were the least expensive.1 They bring you a container and you fill it up and they ship it. The main one we’d read about, and the one we were considering is the UCrate 100. That gets you a crate that’s 100 cubic feet. Well, almost - the size includes your container. Is it cheap? Gosh, no.
The other option - and the one we chose - was to take extra baggage. Yes, that includes the extra baggage fees, and picking an airline based on how many bags they allow, but the benefits are feeling less encumbered by stuff - and having it right away when you arrive.2
How To Get Rid Of Stuff
Way back in 2007, we had our first purge. A few relatives had passed and left us with many things. Things we didn’t need, and honestly didn’t particularly like. Gradually we started culling them and placing them in the second bedroom. We called it Dead People’s Stuff. Then we had a tag sale.3
It felt great. We sold a lot of things. We didn’t sell everything, though, and had to bring a lot of it back in. It felt so good to be living in a space that was less cluttered that we started the same thing - setting aside more things in our home (our stuff this time) that we didn’t want or need or like. We created a "tag sale pile.”
A year later, we had a lot of stuff set aside, and we had our second tag sale. This time, we made sure to price everything so it wouldn’t have to come back in the house again. And, we made a rule: nothing could come in the house unless something got moved to the tag sale pile. We did this for a few years running, and our house was feeling better and better. We were feeling lighter and lighter, not weighted down by stuff.
Then came the big move. To St. Louis! (You were thinking to Lisbon, weren’t you?) We got space on a big moving truck, and started selling things on Craigslist.4 You name it we sold it - antique dining room table? Check. CRT TV5 Check. Bags of lime? Check.
About 5 years after the Big Move, we realized we had collected enough junk for a … garage sale. We did that every couple of years and it kept the house from getting too cluttered.
So when it came time to do the Biggest Move, we were already starting pretty lean. Or, so we thought.
As we prepared the house for staging, we found more and more stuff. Those extra fancy dishes used only for holidays (saved from the Dead People’s Stuff)? Yup. The reams of paper - everything from tax returns to cards from Mom? Scanned. Camping gear? Donated. Boxes of stuff from our childhoods? Tossed. And a bunch of stuff that 1 year and 5 months later we can’t remember.
Since we had decided to have 6 large pieces of luggage with 50 pound weight limit,6 we had A LOT of stuff to move. What could we bring?
2 vacuum sealed bag of clothes, one for each of us.
Vacuum sealed bag of coats.
Vacuum sealed bag of blankets, sheets, towels.
One bag of board games and puzzles (priorities, people!)
2 bags for the rest: toiletries, kitchen stuff, Josie stuff, memories
By the way, what do you think fits in two of these duffel bags?
For both the “empty your house for staging” and the “get rid of EVERYTHING because the closing is tomorrow” we used:
More Goodwill drops than you can shake a stick at (we were blessed to have one close by!)
Freecycle and any variant thereof
A friend’s trailer made multiple trips to a charity that helps to settle immigrants
An auction house for the art
A house clean-out service that donates as much as it can - and then passes the savings on to you
Did Packing Small Save $$
Was this actually the savings we thought it would be?
When we were planning to move, it seemed we had two main options. UpakWeShip or ditching as much stuff as possible and flying with bags.
Here’s how those measured up:
Our Method
Extra Baggage Fees $375
Stuff We Bought to Replace $3,0007
UPakWeShip
Cost of Container: $3,000
It was certainly much more work replacing all the items when we first arrived than we expected. (Where’s the Walmart? The Target? The equivalent? Where the heck do we go to shop? What do they call a thingamajig here? None of the brands we use are here - what is the best of all these brands we’ve never hear of? What size am I? And then the garden variety: You just plain can’t get that here.) Honestly, that long, difficult, and drawn out work definitely increased the amount of stress we felt for a few months after arrival. It’s hard to be wowed by your neighborhood when you’re just wanting to find a pillow to sleep on tonight.
Yes, if we had gone the UPakWeShip method, we would still have needed needed to buy a few things upon arrival. But, given that the two methods ended up being about equivalent, hindsight says we should have gone with the one that was less work.
That’s all for now,
Love from Lisbon,
Amy & Scott
In 2021. We don’t know if there might be someone cheaper out there now.
Assuming yours aren’t delayed 10 days like ours.
At least, that’s what it’s called in Connecticut. In St. Louis people often hadn’t heard that term. For reals they would say, selling tags? It’s not like the phrase they use - garage sale - implied that we were selling garages. Language differences in different areas are fascinating.
Remember Craigslist? You probably use Facebook marketplace now.
We were stunned. Someone happily paid us $10 for it.
Our airline allowed us to get one piece of luggage free. We had to pay $75 for Scott’s second bag and Amy’s second bag. For each of our third bags, we paid $100.
Expenses for two months after arrival. Given that a spatula to replace the one Amy missed has walked into our home this month, it’s a good chance likelier that this number is higher.
Don't worry! We did a combo of the two methods and, when our crate arrived, after weeks and weeks of our worrying what their "curbside pickup" would look like when our curbside was on a busy city street (it all worked out fine), we realized that we'd brought things we wouldn't have brought had we known, and hadn't packed things we wished we had (like guitars). Still, it was a good choice. Now, we've bought a new place and all of those things we scrambled to buy when we first got here are all there, included in the price of the house, and 10X nicer than what we'd purchased on Facebook Marketplace or at the Continente. :-) Time for a garage sale!!!!! Come on down!
PS - For all of your readers who are getting ready to move, we spent 3 years "NOT in acquisition mode." No buying anything new that wasn't critical to survival on the planet.