One week before long-term travel: I own so little!

ONE WEEK AWAY!

I’m finally getting a little less overwhelmed and more excited about my long term travel. I made a huge dent in my to-do list, mostly thanks to my two lovely parents helping me this past weekend. Thanks Mom & Dad! After I bought my one-way flight and called my parents to tell them the plans were actually underway, I knew I wanted to see them before I took off! Then I started to go through my stuff, and I realized that I had quite a lot of sentimental items that I didn’t want to get rid of. Google flights had some good Houston-New York flight deals, so I gave them a ring and asked if they wanted to come up for a weekend to hang out and potentially help me sort things out. They said yes and a few weeks later they landed in New York to hang out with me.

so much stuff

By last Thursday, I still had a LOT of stuff. The only option for the little stuff – a stoop sale! For those of you that aren’t in NYC, a stoop sale is typically held on the steps of a brownstone building like this:

Unfortunately I don’t have a stoop, so it looked more like:

With my dad being the brawn, helping me carry stuff down five flights of stairs and my mom being an energetic saleswoman, I sold A LOT within a few hours. It’s the strangest  feeling seeing your life spread out on a street. Are people judging me based on my books? Are they wondering why I had so many half-done crafty projects? Are they willing to pay what I think they should pay for things that were such a part of my life? Neighbors chatted with me, making me wonder what it would have been like to have met them earlier. We could have hung out at the neighborhood bars or caught up in the line at Mr. Coco’s grocery store. Too late now! They wished me luck and bought a few books from me. We were out on the street from about 10:30am to 2:30pm. My stoop sale flyer also had the furniture listed and I had some bites. So the haul is now:

• Dresser $80
• Desk $50
• Side chair $40 (it was a bit wobbly)
• Oil paints $40
• Couch $300
• Kitchen cart $60
• Bookshelves $70
• Shoe cabinet $50
• Curtains $20
• Street sale (art supplies, purses, shoes, books, kitchen stuff) $400
• Random stuff to a lady in the building $150

Grand total is $1,220 which makes me SO HAPPY! Putting it into perspective, this gets me about 15 days of travel. I’ll have to do a separate post about what I think things will cost and the reality of it. I have no problem sharing the real costs because I want people to know they could do this too! (Assuming I’m able to stay on budget!)

Around 2:30 I threw in the towel – my real goal was to get stuff out of the apartment. check. So what do you do in New York with the leftovers? Do you take it all back up your fifth floor walk-up? Of course not. You leave it on the street with a “free sign” and watch the vultures swoop in. On the left, the “free pile” we started with and on the right, the result less than 30 minutes later. I love New York sometimes. And seeing people around the building carrying my books away to be re-read, love it!

So many mementos

The other thing my parents helped with was taking some stuff home to Texas. I want to become more of a minimalist, but I can’t give up mementos! It’s a bit ridiculous really, but I’ve come to accept it as part of who I am- that I hold onto some things. I keep movie theater tickets (have all my stubs since high school), playbills to shows, concert tickets, boarding passes (these have been racking up), letters I get from my family, photos, and postcards from my travels.  So my goal was to narrow all of my mementos down to a small batch. I was thankfully pretty successful. I put mementos in two suitcases, alongside some books and a bunch of clothes that I don’t want to re-buy (professional clothes mostly).  One of the suitcases I was actually given as a gift from Katy High School at the Project Graduation celebration. Who knew how long it would last and how far it would travel with me!

I treated my parents to a Sunday of adventures around the city including a ‘first for me also’ trip to the Cloisters. Come Monday morning, it was a bit of a teary farewell on my part as I sent my parents off in a Uber. I’ll see them in July, only 3 months away, but this weekend made my travel plans real and irreversible. I’m committed to it! So now I’m writing this while sitting on a lawn chair in my living room. Can I have my couch back?