Live Aboard - The Move (Part 1 - The Nuts & Bolts)

I think humans have a brilliant way of discounting necessary information if it means we don't have to worry about what lies ahead. I certainly think that this was true for us when we bought Strandbo and decided to move aboard her - we conveniently put to the back of our minds the enormous task of downsizing and decluttering our lives. The excitement of buying our very first yacht and indeed our new home overwhelmed the reality of what lay ahead for us.

We bought the yacht in November and intended to be out of our house and aboard her by the beginning of February the next year. This gave us eight weeks to declutter our lives - divest ourselves of a jointly accumulated ninety five years of lifelong belongings! If you take a moment to look around your own home, in every room, in every cupboard, wardrobe, chest of drawers, under every bed, on the window sills, behind the curtains, in the bathroom, the kitchen, the loft, the garage or shed, the cellar, the porch, the conservatory, the garden, and the car - you may understand why we had not fully comprehended the enormity of the Herculean task that lay before us.

It goes without saying that in making the decision to move aboard a yacht we had spoken at length about what we were going to do with our belongings. We knew that we had to get rid of almost everything because there was no way that we could expect our respective families to accept the burden of looking after the things we were not able to take on board our yacht. Moreover we had come to the conclusion that we did not want to store any of our belongings because this would seem like cheating - you can't downsize and declutter if you're merely going to put stuff into storage. There is no point to the exercise.This meant that we had to find ways and means of emptying our house of everything we owned.

We set ourselves some parameters with regard to divesting ourselves of our belongings. These were:

• We would sell as much as we feasibly could - furniture, paintings, books, electrical items, etc.
• We would give family and friends any special items that we thought they would appreciate.
• We would advertise extensively on our local Freecycle website.
• We would make full use of the plethora of charity outlets in Inverness & Dingwall.
• We would only use the council recycling centres (land fill dumps) as a last resort.

We very briefly talked of hiring a house clearing firm to come and do the job for us - the kind of process that is employed when an aged relative dies and their house needs to be emptied. We did not choose this option because we wanted to take responsibility for our own stuff!

Both of us hoped that we would make quite a bit of money from selling our property because after all, we had quite a bit of good quality stuff to sell. We had some lovely pieces of furniture, we certainly had some lovely paintings and pieces of artwork, and there were useful electrical items that we had in our cupboards. We also believed that we owned some passable quality bric a brac that would sell well at various car boot sales. With the run up to Christmas in full swing we were confident that we would shift a considerable amount.

As things turned out, all our furniture went in a flash. We totally underestimated the demand for second hand bookshelves, wardrobes, beds, and white goods (fridge, dishwasher etc). We could have sold these things three of four times over. What surprised us was how difficult it was to sell our art - the paintings and ornaments that we had accrued through our lives. We actually owned a few valuable pieces and in our minds we believed that these would hold wide appeal. We sold only two of our paintings.

At the car boot sales we found that what we thought was pretty good quality bric a brac was not favoured by the hordes of folks who wandered past our table and who poked and prodded our once treasured possessions. We managed to sell usable kitchen items, crockery, childrens' toys, and flower pots - all our flower pots! We ended up almost giving away our stuff - buy one get five free (please)! We came to the sad realisation that even if we had six months to sell our stuff that very little of it was of value to people - certainly not worth paying for. In the end we decided to give our things away. We set up two tables on the pavement by our front gate and kept them loaded with books, CDs, ornaments, in fact just about anything that we were getting rid of. As it turned out this move became one of the most satisfying experiences of our decluttering process. I took a huge a mount of pleasure of watching friends, acquaintances, and strangers excitedly picking through the items and taking them away. Some folks were obviously unsure about the whole thing - should we pay - should we make a donation - is this for real? Others, who knew what we were doing, would come by on a regular basis to see what we had put out on the tables.

Time passed very quickly. Christmas came and went. The New Year was ushered in with the customary Scottish enthusiasm and with it, a gnawing realisation that we had less than a month to clear our home. Despite our successes in shifting a lot of our stuff, the house did not look any emptier - in fact the situation appeared even more daunting. Stuff filled every room and seemed to be spread across the floors, from wall to wall! It was quite dispiriting. However, the looming deadline spurred our energies and we applied ourselves to ridding ourselves of our accumulated detritus.

All the usable items out of the way, we had to get stuck into the remains. This entailed the physically demanding process of lugging boxes and boxes of items out of the house, into the car, and driving them to Dingwall where I would leave it at the door of the community recycling shop. I have to admit that I never stopped to ask if they wanted our stuff - I just left it there. We didn't leave junk - it was all usable but maybe not marketable. As we began to clear the floors and shift stuff out of the house it became clear that there was a considerable amount of our stuff that we would not find any alternative home for, and sadly this meant that the only place left was the municipal dump.

They are not called dumps anymore - they are now recycling centres. The Highland Council recycling centre at Dingwall was the quietest where you didn't have to queue to get rid of your rubbish. It was a simple task to drive in and empty the car, taking the items to their relevant recycling units - electricals, wood, cardboard, clothing, carpets, and metal. Not everything could be recycled and this stuff very sadly ended up in the machines that squashed the rubbish down for loading into the trucks to be taken to the landfill site. I disliked this part of our decluttering because if the truth be told, a considerable amount of our stuff ended up in these landfill machines. It saddened me to know that in our attempt to live a more simple life we were adding to the landfill problem.

Things took an unpleasant turn when our Landlady came to the house to check it over. She arranged her visit a good week before we were due to formally vacate the property, and as such our packing was far from complete.This for a start put her in a bad mood and she went on to castigate us for the terrible state we were leaving her property in. She proceeded to detail a long list of things she expected us to do before we left including it seemed returning the garden to the condition it was in when we took on the lease. We didn't put up a fight and assured her that we would be returning her keys to her with a house that would be as clean and tidy as when we had taken it on five years earlier. However, this meant that I would have extra work to do in the garden as well as what was needed to be completed in the house. The pressure was on.

The final days of our tenancy saw us working long into the nights, clearing out the rooms, packing boxes for the various charity shops, and making piles of rubbish for the recycling centre. Then each day I would fill the car to the gunwales and make a number of journeys to Inverness and Dingwall with stuff and rubbish. We borrowed a trailer for the last few days to shift the larger items from the garden. I have to admit that I was banjaxed each and every night.

The last two days arrived - the house was empty. What had been our happy and cluttered home was now a shell, ready for its new occupants. We had managed it! Our belongings had been sorted and distributed. All we possessed now were the things we had moved onto the boat and the few precious items we had asked family to look after. Now came the last big push - the steam cleaning of every room, every carpet, every wall - we were determined to leave the house in a better state than when we had moved in. By the evening of the last day we stood at the front door, the floor of the entrance hall gleaming and smelling of fresh pine. Daring not to smudge it with a dirty footprint I closed the door carefully and in so doing brought our house living lifestyle to a close. We walked across the road to our local pub and celebrated, me with a beer and Karen with a glass of wine, before heading back to Inverness Marina and our new home - our wee yacht Strandbo.