A weekend to celebrate- amazing initial progress!

First I thought it would be easy to do the clearing out. Then I thought how hard other people find it and revised my opinion.

Now I'm pleased to say I may be right about how easy it is! If you ever want to make things easy for yourself, think that you're going abroad and living in a motorhome for 12 months and everything has to be stored (which you'd pay for) or got rid of, and you have a recipe for success in terms of being able to easily sort out your belongings!

So I started off the weekend on Saturday with one of my favourite programmes Sort Your Life out In 7 Days. That's the programme I watched in January 2023 prior to doing a pretty thorough clearing out through the whole house (with the help of the kids!) and thank goodness that pre-work was done 2 years ago as it's made my life a lot easier now!

With some motivation and Stacey Soloman in my head, I made a start on my task to clear all surfaces, decluttering and taking it down to what I was happy to leave with the renters (i.e. no personal items, minimal out on furniture). To my surprise, I managed all the downstairs surfaces in a few hours and moved on to do internals in some of the downstairs rooms and by the end of the day, I'd gone through and sorted the bar, the lounge, the dining room and the hallway (all furniture cleared out, and all items sorted into boxes for: store, take with us, ask the kids, or give to charity). Most things are in the charity boxes so hopefully soon we can re-home them with a charity and someone else can start loving and using the things that I'm not.

Today (Sunday) I've done a mini clear-out of the kitchen but realised that I can't really make very many decisions until I know whether we are renting furnished or unfurnished (going on the basis that it will be furnished and will adjust closer to the time if not) and what motorhome we have and what storage space we having in the kitchen there to decide what to take with us. Also, with 3+ more months to be here, no food can really be cleared out, but I did get rid of a few things, and also do a stocktake of both freezers so we can try to use as much of what's in there as possible before we go.

I'm sorting through paperwork (and going to scan it for reference in case I need access to anything recent while travelling) and went through all manuals so I'm only leaving manuals for things that are actually staying in the house, and I did the porch today too.

So I've done the downstairs as much as it can be done (apart from the garage and boiler room) in one weekend, all by myself! I can't believe it!

I've now re-allocated the rest of my weekends, giving more time to the areas that will be a lot harder like the garage and loft... and I'm feeling great! Now to sit down to a glass of something with fizz to celebrate a productive weekend... and hope the productivity continues on the weekends coming up too!