I live in South Africa, so it would be way too expensive to move with stuff. Especially with Ikea everywhere but here, where I could buy replacements (and Ikea-hack them).

Maybe our wine collection (but that would be better drunk at multiple intimate goodbye parties with close friends).

That’s the reason I love the concept behind Carole’s ideas – take the time when you’re in the dreaming stages to start to make that reality your own, and when it actually comes to logistics and moving you’ve already psychologically prepared yourself for the transition.

My husband and I are just about to relocate, and I found this post and the comments helpful. Thanks to all!

I sometimes play a little decluttering game that I call “Moving in with the boyfriend”, with different parameters like square footage or number of rooms, or fifth floor and no elevator I’m surprised at what things I don’t love enough to want to carry them during my next move, what things I would readily sacrifice if he didn’t like them, and I’m also surprised at how little furniture I would LOVE to keep when merging two households together to a “best of” in a small apartment. This usually gets me to declutter stuff, but of course I’m realistic and don’t throw out anything necessary like my washing machine. (Yet.)

I think there was another blog post here or at another website about things with sentimental value.

What I do is if it is borderline sentimental, I take pictures of it with my digital camera and upload/backup to my flickr account so that I can remember fond memories of that item whenever!

Ofcourse if there is something that is really priceless than that is one of the few things I would hold onto

A funny thing about this game is that you can also make money. How you may ask? Well, there is a lot of stuff that many people don’t realize is actually cluttering up their life that is a goldmine! I made about 4K in about 2 weeks getting rid of things I didn’t need to keep around. Things like Ebay, Craiglist, Myspace, and Facebook have been incredible marketing tools to get rid of my things.

The hard part about this game is that when you are doing it for real, there are many tough decisions you have to make about value and what an item represents to you. It was easy to make the decision to sell my dirtbike, trailer, and gear because I knew I couldn’t relocate that and I had a bad back to boast from riding it. But, the trophies I won as a child and even some of my knick-nacks were hard to get rid of because of the value they had in my heart. So I’d say that’s the single hardest thing.

Another difficult position is when people find out that you are getting rid of things that they may have given you which have sentimental value to them. Your parents may have passed down to you some things which meant something to them but not to you. The funny thing is, if it meant so much to them then why did they get rid of it in the first place. I think many people have a hard time letting go of things and this pseudo way of passing it on is their justification for it.

Anyways… a bunch of rambling, but I like this post!

Currently I’m in the planning stage, so part of what I’m doing is taking time to go systematically through all my possessions and asking the hard questions:

– Do I really, really love it/need it?
– Given the above answer is yes, is it a big enough yes to justify shlepping it to another country? (from which I don’t intend to return)

It’s my goal to move as little as possible — there is a big part of me that would like to go with only what I can check onto a plane with me. Then there’s that other part of me that wants to keep family heirlooms and such.

This also has interesting ramifications for shopping for anything beyond food. Why buy it if I’m not willing to move it?

This is similar to what I do when clearing out my wardrobe I say “would I buy it now if it cost …” if the answer is no it’s out.