Traveling light

The house is under contract! If you haven´t sold a house before, that´s what you say when you and a buyer have agreed on a price and a date to hand over the house. You can´t say that you have sold it yet, because the bank could decide not to give the buyer all the money or the inspection could show a lot or problems that the buyer doesn´t want to deal with.

Nonetheless, the means that I can move on from my daily showing routine: every morning I´d make the house immaculate, including removing everything from the kitchen counters, and wiping down all the sinks, turning on all the lights. Then I´d leave for however long people were looking at the house. Sometimes that would be one or two half-hour periods in the day, and sometime it was for eight hour as a stretch. I had almost fifty showings, plus an open house, which is about three times as many as my realtor expected. I spent a lot of time sitting in the car at a park, taking walks, or drinking coffee, waiting for time to pass. 

Now it´s time for me to shed possessions as fast as I reasonably can. I have seen so many people downsize and almost every time they are overwhelmed and frantic by the end. Almost all of us underestimate how many belongings we have. My goal is to throw as little in the trash as possible, which involves a combination of selling, donating, and sharing with willing friends. Hopefully, in three weeks, I will have a single carload left, which will come with me to my next destination - Florida. For various boring reasons, it makes sense to live there a while, and then apply for my visa from there. The adventure continues!