The Things That Move Us to Action

Last year in July, after living in Donovan's house for over a year, I finally got my butt in gear and rented out my house.  Which meant that I needed to get all my crap out of my house.  Which meant a whole lot of Craigslist ads, and ultimately, renting a storage unit.  I didn't actually have *that* much stuff to store, so I got a small 5'x10' space that cost about $60/month.

While we were on our honeymoon in August, as a surprise for me, Donovan had some movers come to his house and move a whole bunch of *his* crap into a storage unit so that we could start to remodel the house when we got back.  He did have a lot of stuff, so he got a 10'x20' space that cost about $200/month.

Doing the quick math (approximately), we've spent close to $3,000 on our combined storage units over the past year.

The big storage unit has been a point of contention between us, with me wanting us to just give away or get rid of a bunch of the things we're storing, and Donovan wanting to sell a lot of it through Craigslist or EBay.  I'll admit, I got on his ass about it quite a bit in the first few months.  Then, at some point, I pretty much just gave up and figured he'd deal with it in his own time.

A few weeks ago my good friend Roz told me about a garage sale that she was going to put on with her mom.  What a perfect opportunity to get rid of some of the bigger things in our big storage unit!  Maybe some of the furniture, etc.  I hesitated to bring it up to Donovan, since it had become a bit of a sensitive topic for us.  But then a few days ago I suggested the idea, and he liked it!  Woohoo!

So our plan for today was to go to the storage unit and clear out a path to the one piece of furniture we were pretty sure we wanted to take up to the garage sale.  And here's where it got interesting for us.  This morning we started talking about it, and decided that it was silly for us to haul around this large piece of furniture, when we could just give it away for free on Craigslist and someone would come pick it up.  This led to a general discussion about the storage units, in a very civilized manner.  And what we came up with was a concrete goal to get rid of a bunch of stuff mostly out of the big storage unit this weekend, and then by next weekend consolidate both of our storage units into one 10'x10' unit.  We figure that we'll probably have some sort of outside-the-house storage solution until we get a bigger place, but having one unit that costs about $100/month is better than the almost $300/month we're paying for our two units now!

We spent about five hours today working at the storage units (it's Donovan's day off), and we *filled* the van with all sorts of odds and ends for the garage sale!  We went through SO many boxes and got rid of SO much stuff!  We took it all up to Roz's mom's house in Escondido, and then this weekend we will post some of the bigger items on Craigslist for free.  We already have a 10'x10' unit reserved at the storage facility, so we're completely on track to successfully reaching our goal by next weekend!

What had been a totally stagnant situation, a point of contention in our relationship moved HUGELY today, all because Roz suggested that we participate in her garage sale.  Isn't it interesting the things that move us to action sometimes??

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