Thursday, January 13, 2011

Mark talked with work today, so it’s all confirmed and we are set to go!

We are going to try to be as active and detailed with this blog as possible.  One, it helps to keep us accountable, and see what we have yet to do.  Two, we hope that it provides inspiration and guidance to those who may want to follow in our footsteps and follow their dream of moving to Florida.   We are currently exploring the possibility of moving away from Blogger as our template, so you may in the next month or so see our website under construction at times.

Goal #1:  Go Paperless

We have a lot of paper that comes into this house on a regular basis.   Our goal is to have very little mail come into our house.  At this point we don’t know where we will live, and it’s possible that we still won’t know on moving day.  This, of course, presents a problem in forwarding mail.   We can rent a PO Box online, but it’s not active until we pick up the keys in person.

I went to Walmart today and picked up a file box and an expanding file.  The goal is to move a 2 drawer file cabinet contents into the file box.  I am not sure yet what will be done with the file cabinet.  It is an oak file cabinet that was received as a Christmas present 3 years ago, and it is still in excellent shape.  It may move with us, it may not.  We have time to decide.

The expanding file will serve as our “information” file– all papers that we need with us, such as car titles, housing information, maps, etc.  It should solve the question of:  “Now where did we put that information”.

No new magazine subscriptions will be ordered or single magazines purchased.  It saves money, though we only order free or cheap subs, but more importantly it saves us from having to be concerned with forwarding them on (and moving individual copies).  Any new magazines that we wish to read can be obtained from the library for free. Note:  It might be hard for me not to pick up Scrapbooks Etc!

A second issue with paper clutter comes with the kids’ school papers.   I am not a hoarder except when it comes to my kids’ school papers.  As of November of last year, I had every single paper and art project that came into the house. We’re talking years and years of papers!  Thankfully, yes, I have seen the light and realize that it does not all need to be kept. A lot was recycled last year, but it will need to be gone through again.  I’m thinking maybe a file box for each? And pictures taken of the projects.  I can foresee the pictures of the projects as being a scrapbook album project once we are moved!

Thank you all for following us on our journey, and feel free to invite your friends to follow us as well!  We appreciate the support and any advice that you may give!

Jen