Donations | Wishes And Pixie Dust

June 18, 2011
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Relocating Your Furniture. Or Not.

As you contemplate a long-distance move (or perhaps you have already made the decision to move), one of the early questions that arises deals with the moving of furniture. If you are using professional movers, you will want to think about this prior to the appointment, as the contents of your house will be inventoried, and you will generally need to know if you plan to move an item to your new home.

There are a few questions you need to consider as you think about this. How old is my furniture? Is it worth moving hundreds of miles? For us, the answer is no, it’s not worth it. The majority of our furniture are older pieces, and realistically, the cost it would add to our invoice is more than its value. We are only keeping a select few pieces of furniture, and most of it is being discarded on Freecycle.

We will state, however, that it is kind of stressful to dispose of your furniture and not move it. We made the decision early on that we were not going to move our desk; it is solid oak and extremely heavy. It has been the thorn in our side for every move, and we’ve simply had enough with it. We made arrangements with a local person to come and pick up the desk. In order for this to happen, the desktop computer and work laptop needed to be disconnected, which is not a small feat given the massive piles of cords and modems involved! They were temporarily placed on the kitchen table, while we moved the desk out to the middle of the room. Unfortunately, this person never showed up, and we were faced with an enormous desk in the middle of the dining room, and computers disconnected and sitting on the table.

Thankfully we have a large foyer by the front door, and we were able to drag the desk out there and reassemble the dining room into some semblance of order. We used four smaller tables/bookcases to replace the desk, and while not an ideal situation, it should be okay for the next five weeks. We have someone new scheduled to come tomorrow, so if all goes well, the desk should be gone by tomorrow afternoon.

We have been slowly giving away our furniture; this week alone we have parted with 2 bookcases, a rocker & ottoman, three chairs, and (hopefully) a desk. We prefer Craigslist and Freecycle as means to dispose of our furniture because you can set the time frames when you want people to come buy to pick up your stuff. Another option you have available is to hold a rummage sale, but then you are responsible for hauling your furniture outside, sitting outside with it all day while hoping it sells, because if it doesn’t, you will have to bring it back inside (or place it in a garage if you have one available to you).

There are a few furniture stores that we are considering in Florida, recommendations given to us by friends:

Clermont Furniture on Hwy 50
Ashley Furniture
Rooms to Go Outlet in Altamonte Springs
American Freight
Sears (for mattresses)
Original Mattress Factory
IKEA

We’re putting them in our blog mainly so we have a reference point to go back to later. If any locals have some other great furniture or mattress stores to add to the list, we’d love to hear about them! Our plan is not to replace everything immediately, but only buy the essentials first and then add pieces as we can. One of the reasons we chose the apartment complex we did is that is comes furnished with a full size washer and dryer. This is a huge expense that we did not have to assume and are thankful for that!

Thanks for following along!

June 14, 2011
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The Eye Before The Storm

There comes a point in every move where you are lulled into a false sense of security. You think there’s no need to alter your daily schedule too much, there’s still plenty of time to pack boxes and make arrangements. You go on with your routines, only to discover two weeks have passed, and you realize you really are behind schedule, and thus the “storm” begins. We feel right now that we are in that “eye before the storm”, the calm period when everything feels okay. Our goal, however, is to make sure the hurricane storms dissipate to sunny skies, and we never see the storm clouds on our horizon.

We wanted to share just what our daily life looks like lately. The kids are now out of school for the summer, and we’re just enjoying the laziness and schedule-free qualities of not needing to set alarm clocks or rushing dinner times. During the day we are packing boxes or sorting through items; today we made a run to get more paper rolls for packing, and we were graced with free shorter rolls today. Apparently an individual had come in about an hour ahead of us and bought all the large rolls, but we were given the shorter rolls, and to be honest, we probably received just as much paper and saved twelve dollars in the process!

As we reflect on first making the decision to move in January to it now being almost the middle of June, things have gone pretty much according to plan. We had anticipated saving a little more money than we have, but we’re still in the comfortable zone, and well, it is what it is. We made the decision to hire professional movers and we stand behind that decision one hundred percent. Yes, it may seem like an extravagant cost, but we have items that have sentimental value, and other things that just would prove to be too much of a hardship to replace. We have disposed of a lot of our possessions, which we know has probably halved our cost of the move, but we choose to keep the items that matter to us, to provide security to our family. Let’s face it, moving across several states is a huge life decision that will require many months of adjustment. By choosing to transport some of our items with us, we are helping to ease that transition, and our apartment will seem more like a home.

We are keeping our storm clouds at bay by making sure we accomplish a few things each day in regards to the move, whether it be packing boxes, taking care of items on Craigslist, or just simply making lists. By not procrastinating, and doing the move in little chunks here and there, it really has become not that painful. We are grateful that we do not have the worries of needing massive amounts of energy and strength to move boxes and furniture, nor the stress of driving a moving truck across several states. For more times than we care to remember, we have been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and are simply not doing it again.

We anticipate that our lives in Florida will basically be the same as our lives here in Wisconsin, only with much better weather and lots more to do in our free time. We know it’s not going to be an easy process, but with the promise of being able to visit Walt Disney World at a whim’s notice, and meeting our Floridian (and non-Floridian) Disney friends who have been cheering us on for several months, we know it will be well worth the effort.

June 9, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 1 Comment

Farewell to Rosenow

Today was another series of “lasts”: the last time I will drive to and from the schools, which surprisingly feels very weird, but more importantly, it is the last time Catie and Ben will see the inside of their respective schools. Catie will miss her friends more than the school, but poor Ben has been having a rough adjustment with transitioning on. At fifth grade graduation yesterday, the principal gave a small talk about the “Rosenow Way” (Rosenow is the name of the elementary school): the school environment is a close-knit community, where teachers treat the students as their own children, and the students are always welcome back to the school to visit. He said, “you can always come back home”. Ben has been attending Rosenow since 2003–eight years is a long time in a young child’s life, and especially with a child who has autism: it’s so very hard to walk away from what is familiar.

We reached an important milestone in the Vitek household today: we brought up the few remaining items that were left in the basement. It may not seem too monumental to some, but this is the first time ever that we have been living in a house that does not have piles and piles of boxes in the basement. This is what was left in the basement:

So we have added to our Goodwill/Freecycle pile 🙂 We have been trying to pack at least a box a day, if not more. We have started to organize our photos/videos/candles into the bags they will go in our car trunk. With our pictures we are throwing away the duplicates and those stored on the computer. We can always order more prints. When we first decided to move in July, we were totally unaware that certain items could melt while in transit, notably crayons, videotapes, candles, and potentially cassette tapes and photographs. Well, we knew about crayons, having previous experience during a family vacation trip to St. Louis, but didn’t think about the rest. 🙂 The framed pictures are being packed, but we will be bringing all the non-digital photographs with us, as they are totally irreplaceable. Life before digital cameras: the horror of it all! :=) Looking back, I don’t think we would have altered our decision, as it is important to us that the kids finish out their school year in Wisconsin, which they have. We also wanted to make sure that we move in the summer months, as moving in the dead of winter, which we have done, is certainly not an ideal situation, and one to be avoided if at all possible due to the potential for delays and detours due to the weather conditions.

We wish everyone a magical and happy weekend!

June 6, 2011
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Checklists

As we pass the seven-week mark life seems to be a whirlwind of not only daily activity, but also everything that we need to remember to do in preparation for our move. Up to this point we have set tentative goals that we have met at times; at others not, but as we move into the home stretch we realize that it needs to be on paper.

For those of you who are wishing to follow in our footsteps and plan a long-distance move, we thought we would share our paper organization and checklist methodology. Feel free to tweak it to fit your own needs.

Inventory: Every box that is packed is given a unique letter combination. We started with A, worked our way to Z, and now are advancing to the double letters (AA, BB, etc). For example, Living Room A. On the laptop we have an Excel file with several worksheets that lists the contents of all the boxes. This can be a little tedious when packing and does take extra time, but it will prove invaluable when we find ourselves in Florida with an apartment full of moving boxes, and wondering where we put something. We’ll just need to pull up the Excel file on the laptop and will be able to pinpoint which box it is we need to locate.

Blue File: This is where we keep all our documents that we will need on our journey: school papers for the kids, automobile documents for the DMV, hotel information for our stays along the way.

File Box: This is what we use to keep the papers we need to move with us but don’t necessarily want to put in a moving truck, such as banking information or credit card statements. As we sort through the filing cabinet, most of it is getting shredded or scanned.

Notebook: This is our checklist. Each room has its own page, where we list what we are moving with us, what will get donated, what will get sold, what will be given to Nick, and last but not least what we still need to do in that particular room, in terms of cleaning or purchasing replacement products, such as new blinds. The notebook will also be where we keep notes on what we need to do yet before our move, what documents we need to acquire yet, and what phone calls need to be made. We find that as our departure date gets closer, we are more distracted and likely to forget things, and this helps to keep us on track. It also helps to make it seem less stressful–by focusing on an item or two on the list, we are not feeing overwhelmed by thinking it all has to be done right now.

The key to a successful move is organization and planning, and we share this information not to overwhelm you with ideas, but to help you plan out your move. Have we moved without doing all this? Absolutely, usually our moves end up in throwing stuff in garbage bags the morning of the move, because we run out of time (and boxes), but it usually results in a lot more chaos than is necessary. Our current goal is to be fully packed and living out of suitcases by Tuesday, July 19. Thursday, July 21st our son will take away the furniture and mattresses that he wants. We will spend the night in a hotel, and then Friday, July 22, of course is moving day.

Thanks for following along,

Mark and Jen

May 11, 2011
by wishesandpixiedust 2 Comments

Say Goodbye to “Stuff”

One recurring theme that we reflect on in our blog is the accumulation of and eventual removal of “stuff”. We live in a very materialistic society, and we are as guilty as the next person of acquiring things. In the past we have wanted to reduce the amount of clutter that we own, but simply have not been motivated to do it on a large scale.

We do not have a picture of what our basement looked like two years ago; it is too bad that we didn’t snap a photo because we know it would provide inspiration to those of you who think there is no way you could possibly downsize enough because you have too much stuff. We were so there. Our basement was ceiling to floor boxes, as well as assorted items tucked in between gaps. We have progressed from a packed basement to an empty basement; a fair “guesstimate” would be to say we have donated/thrown away/sold approximately 60% of our belongings to date. It is interesting, because many of the things we have kept from year to year are easily tossed into the Goodwill box, without a moment’s hesitation. They were worth keeping as we moved from house to house within the city, but they are not worth keeping when our move is measured in terms of weight, and we must reduce as much as possible.

We have put together some ideas which have helped us as we sort through our stuff. We hope that it helps to inspire you to downsize what you own. If you are planning a move in the next one to three years, trust us. It is never too early to start.

As you contemplate an item, ask yourself: “Have I used this in the past two years?” If the answer is no, ditch it. It is said that you use 20% of your stuff 80% percent of the time. Chances are this item falls into the 80% of your items that you never use. We recommend finding a place in your home where you can keep an empty cardboard box. For us it was in the closet in the front entrance foyer. This is your Goodwill box. Any item you don’t want, place in the box. When the box is full, take it to Goodwill. This eliminates the problem of putting items in the basement (or other place) to deal with ‘later’. Again, trust us, you do not want to sort through an entire basement-full of items that could have been dealt with right away. We have so been there, done that, and it’s not fun to spend hours and hours doing this.

“But I paid good money for it”, and “I might need it someday” are two common rationalizations that we use to hold on to our belongings. If it’s not an item that you love or use on a regular basis, it’s time to let go of the item. Consider whether the item is costing you money, in terms of storage space and/or maintenance. Would you be able to sell it on Ebay or Craigslist and recoup some of the original purchase price? If you hold on to every single item that you might need someday, can you reasonably organize it so that you know exactly where it is when you need it? Probably not. You’ll not only be storing an item, you’ll also be buying a replacement for it because you’ll have no idea where it is at the time that you need it. Just ditch it now and give yourself the added space.

For items that hold a special place in your heart, utilize your digital camera and take pictures. When you find it difficult to part with an item, it’s usually not because you want the item in question; you want the memory that is associating with seeing the item. Do not save every single paper that your child brings home from school; save a couple. Take pictures of the projects, then dispose of the projects. You can place the photos in an album; this will allow your children to see his/her projects more often than if they were stored away collecting dust, and will often last longer than the actual project itself. The key is to keep only a few favorite items, and photograph the rest.

We recommend writing goals that you want to accomplish, and break it down into baby steps. We look at it in pieces, because if we looked at everything that needed to be packed at once, it would be way too overwhelming. Concentrate on one area, and when completed, check it off your list. You will feel a sense of accomplishment as you progress down your list, and this will keep you motivated to continue on.

Please feel free to comment on ways that you declutter around your home, and what has helped you. Thanks for following us, and feel free to friend us on Facebook to follow our journey!