I’ve been reflecting a lot these last two weeks on the New Year. I’m not a New Year’s person. I don’t do resolutions or word of the year or ‘new year, new me’ or anything like that. That said, last year, we were at our friends’ place, and there was this random lady there – our friend’s cousin, or friend of his cousin or something, I don’t remember, if I ever even knew 😆. Anyway, at one point I was in the kitchen with this woman, who was very drunk, and maybe three or four other people, none of whom I’d met before that night. Drunk lady decides we’re going to go around the room and say what we want for the new year.

At that point, I was not in a good place, and the last thing I wanted was to engage with a bunch of strangers. I contemplated just leaving the room, but imagined drunk lady might make a thing of it if I did. I tried to come up with some cute, quippy thing, but when it was my turn, I said the only thing I could think of, “A whole new life.” Immediately, drunk lady contradicts me “oh, you don’t mean that!” she says. I honestly don’t remember what, if anything I said – I think I just encouraged her to move on to her next victim and quietly excused myself.

The thing was, I did mean it. I knew that I could not keep going like I was at that point. And here we are a year later, living a whole new life 🤷🏻‍♀️. Well, new-ish… I was going to say a re-run life, but that’s not it. This place is the same place, but it is so different from the place that I grew up in. And I grew up. I am not the person I was when this house played such a big role in my life before. So, it’s like, retro life 🤔 what’s old is new again 🙃.

It is far from perfect, this retro-life of ours. We’re all lonely, missing friends and routines back in NH. As I’ve said before, living in and around all the stuff is a unique kind of stress itself. And we’re spending more money than we’re bringing in, which is okay for a little while, but definitely stressful. I have been feeling all of that acutely these couple of weeks; the post-holiday come down and nasty weather accentuating the melancholia. And yet, when I reflect on that night a year ago, I do feel like we’re in a better place. I feel more hopeful, excited for what the future might bring.

Of course, the ultimate goal is to move things out, and not just around. We are making some progress on that front as well, though of course it’s never as fast as we would like. Our thought is that we should sell as much as possible – by which I mean both that which people will buy, and that which my aunt will allow us to part with – we have a big pile of clothes, and a couple of boxes of books and other random things, that we’ve so far earmarked for sale.

The reasoning behind selling as much as possible is sound – there is real money here. There are things that are valuable collectables. And even the things that aren’t worth a lot of money, there are just so many. If we got a dollar for every book in this house, we could retire to a villa in Barbados. 🙃

However, (you knew there was a ‘but’ in there, right?) There are a few issues with trying to sell everything… my current struggle is getting good photographs of the clothes I have 😒, but that’s only one small part of it. James has prior experience with eBay, which is helpful, but there are several new platforms to research, there’s auctions and live auctions and buy it now. You have to research every item, look up ‘comps,’ figure out which platform is the best for each item… or should you just cross-post everything 🤔? and then there’s inventory… which brings me to the biggest issue with try to sell everything.

Selling takes time. We have the time. We’re not planning on going anywhere anytime soon. We want to make taking care of the house, dealing with the stuff, and documenting it on social media our job. The issue is that taking the time to sell the stuff means we have to keep it here until we actually sell it, which means storing bins and sending off a piece now and again, rather than dropping whole bins off at the thrift…and so we move our tiles. Things are stressful and chaotic…yet…increasingly hopeful, and that’s enough. 💗

I realized I didn’t have many images in this post, so enjoy this very random sampling of photos!