As we reach the 140-day mark today, we thought it would be a good time to update our readers where we are in the process of relocating our family to Florida.  We contacted Mayflower to begin the moving process; as we are waiting to hear back, we decided it would be a good time to survey our belongings and make a final list of what furniture and electronics we will keep, and what we will donate.  The following items made the final cut:

Ben’s Room:  headboard, bed frame, wall shelf, red toy storage unit, metal shelves & metal cubes, TV and DVD player.

Catie’s Room:  headboard, 2 shelf cabinet, Noah’s Ark stool and shelf, 2 wall shelves, TV/VCR/DVD player

Downstairs Hallway:  corner shelf and wall shelf

Kitchen:  baker’s rack, filing cabinet, Kitchenaid mixer, dining room table, Ben’s chair

Master Bedroom:  headboard, green corner 3-shelf unit, 1 wall shelf, jewelry armoire, TV

Living Room:  2 shelf cabinet, stand fan, slide-under-couch table, stool, round table, 2 end tables, 3 hanging shelves, wall perpetual calendar, Wii, computers

Sunroom:  2 wooden scrapbooking carts, laptop table, black rolling cart, long bookcase, short bookcase, ribbon shelf, bulletin board

We have made the decision to leave most of our furniture behind, for two reasons:  one) they are older pieces, and while still functional, are not worth moving; and two) our son Nick will be moving into an apartment this summer and he can use them.   We have a huge and extremely heavy oak desk that we are going to sell this summer.  It’s a high quality piece of furniture, and in excellent condition, but we just don’t want the burden of it any longer.   We don’t expect that our first apartment or house in Florida will be our permanent residence, and we would be unable to move it ourselves to a new place.

The only unknown as far as furniture right now is our video cabinets.  We have 2 free-standing units, and our original goal was to go through our videos and only keep those that would fit in one unit.  However, we have recently heard of a friend who moved to Florida whose video tapes melted in the moving process; so we are now considering buying a Video/DVD Recorder to put all our videos on DVDs.  It would make it easier to move them, and  it would allow us to sell the video cabinets.

Now that the basement is cleared out, our new goal for March is to declutter as much as possible the downstairs area:  living room, sunroom, kitchen, master bedroom.    IWe expect this goal will carry us into April, and have set April 17th as a completion date for this.  After Easter we intend to step up our packing process.  We have very few boxes packed now, and really have not disrupted our living area, trying to keep it as normal as possible for our kids.

Thanks for following along, and we welcome any advice you have to share.