This is a confession post. I had stuff in a storage unit. For 12 years.
In 2006 when I moved to Seattle, I relocated from the Ottawa (Ontario) area where I was living with xBF. Since we were moving from a house to an apartment and we planned to be out west only 2-3 years, we put stuff in a storage unit.
The relationship with xBF ended after the first year out west and I stayed on another 10 years. The Unit was now in an inconvenient location, 4000 km (2500 mi) away from Seattle and 1300 km (800 mi) away from Nova Scotia where I visited twice-yearly. In July 2013, I stopped in Ottawa for a few days before flying to Nova Scotia and, after a large purge, I put my remaining stuff in a much smaller and cheaper unit.
Since moving home to Nova Scotia last year, The Unit has been a big item on the Master Procrastinator List. It’s difficult to sell a friend or family member on joining a road trip to Ontario to empty a storage unit. One of the tornados that touched down in the Ottawa/Gatineau area on September 21st caused destruction close to the storage facility. I decided* rather quickly (for me) just to go deal with The Unit on my own in October and to finally cut the monthly cost.
It took me three days to empty The Unit. The first morning I dragged my feet to the facility and had a brief feeling of overwhelm when I opened the door, but I immediately started in. Having already downsized my stuff out west and then the stuff from my parents’ house last year with my brother and sister-in-law, it was surprisingly easy. I no longer felt sentimental about things I may have five years ago.
My requirements for what I saved were that 1) I could take it home in my hatchback and 2) I did NOT leave anything with family members in Ottawa to pick up next time I visited. I met those requirements and could easily see out the little car’s back window for the drive home. The furniture was all left behind. I returned with mostly books, toys for my niece, sewing machine, journals, novel I wrote in my 20’s, gardening tools—after 12 years, that’s all I kept.
One of the surprises was finding music cassettes I used for teaching aerobics in the 1990’s—why didn’t I throw those out five years ago? The Dostoevsky and Tolstoy novels I read at university in my 20’s got donated in the large cut of books—I had to admit to myself I was never going to reread them before I move on. On Thursday October 25, after 12 years and 4 months, The Unit was vacated. I’m back in Nova Scotia now and, along with the satisfaction of more minimizing, I have a sense of stuff coming together. A lot less of it now and all in one place.
*Part of the delay was lack of confidence in doing a 1300 km (800 mi) road trip on my own and I will write about that experience in a separate post.
References:
- xBF: ex-boyfriend.
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