How to downsize when you’re ready to RV full-time
Getting ready to RV full-time requires a lot of thought and planning, and some really tough decisions. Many of the most difficult decisions you’ll have to make are dealing with what you want to keep and what you think you can live without. Once you make the transition you’ll look back and wonder why you thought you needed all that stuff and why it was so difficult to let things go.
Stephanie Henkel wrote a very detailed article with great tips and instructions on how best to downsize. Here’s a snippet from her post:
Once you have made the decision to be a full time RVer, you are faced with the major project of downsizing from your “sticks and bricks” home to an RV. Even if you live in a modest, three bedroom, 1500 square foot home, downsizing to an RV might be overwhelming. In our case, we have a 33′ motor home which gives us about 240 square feet of living space with additional storage space in the “basement” compartments.
The tips I’ve given here will be useful if you are downsizing from a house to an RV or from a house to much smaller living quarters. You will still need to make careful selections of what to keep, what to store and what to toss.
The first thing Stephanie recommends is organization, she says “Organization is the key ingredient if you want to keep your sanity during this process”; I completely agree, if you’re not organized it’ll be 10 times the hell you thought it would be.
When we downsized we were not very organized but we somehow survived. Our plan from the start was to only keep what we could carry with us, we didn’t want anything left in storage or with family, if it didn’t fit in the RV we didn’t keep it.
These are the steps Stephanie outlines in detail:
- Downsizing Clothes and Shoes -Be Realistic!
- Downsizing Kitchen and Household Items
- Downsizing Files, Papers and Office Items
- Downsizing Tools and Garage Items
Check out this great article by Stephanie Henkel on Hub Pages
Photo credit: r. nial bradshaw
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