How to fit a whole house's worth of stuff into two rooms

Our permits are almost here. So now we need to pack up everything and move everything from our living room, dining room, family room, office and downstairs guest room and bonus room into a small little space. Mike (our contractor) told us we could use the garage (yay!), which means we don't have to rent a storage space, saving us about $300/month. Now that we're 2x over budget, every little bit helps.

I have been selling stuff that we don't need all year. Stuff that's smaller than a breadbox gets sold through eBay. Stuff that's bigger than a breadbox gets sold through Craigslist. As we get closer to D-Day, I am giving stuff away.

Last week, we had piano movers come to move the piano. I really wish I had taken pictures. They were either going to move it from the LR into one of the two rooms we'll be living in, or, if they couldn't fit it in the doorway, they were going to move it to storage. The piano movers came, and they masterfully managed to wedge it through the doorway, without scratching it, and with relatively little fuss. We were both amazed! So now the upstairs guest bedroom is partially taken up by a grand piano. (This will also be Kurt's office... that's part of the deal.)

However, now we are so close to having our permits, that it's completely scary and we're not packed. So this weekend, we started to figure out how we were going to pack everything up and fit it into the garage. To start with, the garage was a mess. We could barely fit one car in there. There was a ton of old computer equipment, lots of bike stuff, boxes, you name it. We somehow had to make a dent.

Saturday we worked around the edges. During the remodel, the double doors from our master bedroom out to the front lawn will serve as our front door. So we had to put a keyed lock on it. We found one at our local hardware/lumber store, and I installed it with no difficulty. I cleaned out the kitchen cabinets that will be taken down as part of the remodel. Fortunately we have plenty of space in the rest of the kitchen in which to store stuff. So we had no problems finding other places to put the displaced objects.

We made lots of progress on Saturday, but really, we were only working around the edges. We took a gratuitous trip to the Container Store, and dropped some stuff off at Green Citizen and at Goodwill, but really, we were only buying time before the hard work began.

Sunday morning we decided we were going to tackle the garage. Our godson, Max, who is 14, came over to help. Later in the day, our friend Phil and our friend Helen came to help. They were all invaluable. It's quite daunting to try to tackle a project of this size by yourselves, and just having a few friends over to lend a hand helps immensely!

First, we took everything out of the garage and put it in our driveway. We then swept and hosed down the garage. It was amazingly clean. Never-before-seen clean. I had separate piles on the driveway: stuff to throw away, stuff to give away, stuff to recycle, stuff to sell (not much of that at this point!). And of course stuff to put back in the garage. I decided it was time to get rid of all my car-fixin' stuff. I don't think I'll ever use a timing light in my life again. Wicker baskets that I've collected over the years? Gone. A gazillion binders, accumulated from various jobs and school? They're outta here. I mean c'mon!

We had the garage all cleaned out, and it was time to figure out how to arrange things. We hung the golf clubs up against the wall, neat as could be. We moved a big shelving unit from the kitchen into the garage, protected by some rubber matting we'd gotten to teach our dog to walk on matting during her show career (who knew it would come in handy later?). We moved the bikes back in, and left the rest of the stuff on the driveway, hoping someone would steal it so we wouldn't have to deal with it or make any more decisions!

In the meantime, Helen and Max were dutifully packing up boxes. Although it's tempting to sell all the books on half.com, it's just not that practical at this point, so they'll go into boxes.

Phil and Max tried to figure out how to dismantle the TV so it can go to Kurt's folks' house... but were unable to do so. So it remains downstairs awaiting the next attempt.

All in all, we made terrific progress! Having been counting steps for the past few months (well, my pedometer is counting them), I was amazed that I had over 15000 steps, just bustling about the house.

We made a tremendous amount of progress, but still have so much to go.