lightening up

We are counting down the days we have left here in Durham, and it is breaking my heart a little bit to look at the calendar and to see that we have mere WEEKS left here. But one of the more enjoyable parts about moving is that we are shedding our unneeded possessions left and right, and I absolutely LOVE de-junking and de-cluttering. Even better, we are having good luck in selling a lot of our stuff and getting actual money for them, instead of just taking them all to the Durham Rescue Mission and donating them. Mostly we've sold some things on Craigslist, but we also sold a few things on Amazon to great success.

• a small bookshelf from Dane's room
• a small armoire/bookshelf
• our TV and TV stand
• Dane's old Exersaucer
• a bunch of Tommy's old textbooks
• our bikes
• Tommy's car!

There is an awesome story to go along with Tommy's car. We bought this car a week or two after we moved here, from some random used car dealership, and it had over 200,000 miles on it but drove really well and worked great. So we paid $2800 for it and just said, "All we need is for this car to last us the four years we are here. Just last us four years!" And it has been an excellent car for while we've been here. We did have to buy new tires for it, and the A/C did die for one summer (but Tommy very cleverly fixed it for $5 by doing something simple to some fluids, obviously I know nothing about cars), but man, it's been a faithful little car. And the very week Tommy defended his thesis, the car started smelling funny when we drove it and it seemed to have lost all of its engine power. We called a few places and figured out it basically needed the clutch to be replaced, which could cost up to $1000, so we decided to cut our losses and sell our friendly little car to Carmax. It lasted us EXACTLY the four years we asked it to, and now we don't have to worry about towing it behind the moving truck and taking it to Texas with us. It is perfect timing and we are feeling really good about it. We're figuring out how to manage with just one car, but we're planning to get ourselves another clunker when we get to Texas for Tommy to use for work while we're there. 

Anyways, we are also participating in a community yard sale in a neighborhood around here, and we are hoping to sell a whole lot more of our smaller stuff there. And we are planning to get rid of basically all the rest of our furniture on Craigslist as our move date gets closer. It is so refreshing and it feels so great to get rid of things that we don't use or need. This is one part of moving I really enjoy! And we've had a lot of time with Tommy being home since he defended, so we've been able to get a lot of stuff done early instead of having to scramble to do everything last-minute. We are lightening up our load and it feels really good!