When Josh left his previous job and we had to move out of our park ranger house, we had 60 days to go from a 2 story, 2 bedroom house with garage to a 30 foot travel trailer. Which meant a LOT of downsizing for starting RV life. We had been in our ranger house for 7 years. Even if we had been moving into another house we were ready to declutter. Luckily, we had the safety net of nearby family, so we could move stuff there while deciding. The actual work of packing and moving wasn’t too hard, but the mental challenge of making decisions about keeping/storing/selling/donating every single thing we owned was rough. We learned a ton though and want to share out tips with anyone else going through a large declutter- whether it’s into an RV or not.
Developing a Decluttering Strategy
One of the most basic tips for decluttering is to have multiple boxes labeled- keep, donate, trash, recycle, sell, etc. and then sort right into them. This helps streamline the process, but it can still be overwhelming to decide which bin things should go in. For deciding what to keep in the RV, we thought about items that we use every day and couldn’t live without, would use while travelling, and what items are multipurpose. If you’ve ever watched Alton Brown’s Good Eats, you know he hates unitaskers, and we adopted the same mindset when deciding what to pack in the RV.
Another thing we kept in mind when deciding what to declutter and what to keep was thinking about how well items would travel in the RV. This meant almost anything glass was a no-go. We also had to think about storage and having limited space- so my beloved stainless steel pans stayed behind because the long handles would make them hard to store. We had already had our RV for a few years and had a decent amount of stuff that lived in for weekend camping trips. This meant we had direct comparisons on some stuff, like kitchen gear. Did we want to keep the colander from the RV or the one from the house? Do we want to swap out some of our camping yard games for ones from the garage? Those decisions were a little easier. Even though downsizing for RV life can be hard, it’s well worth the reward.
How to Sell All Your Stuff
Our move came at the same time as a major job change, so we wanted to try to recoup money wherever we could. We had SO MUCH STUFF in our park house, and honestly there was also a lot we had never used- selling a lot of it helped us feel less guilty about being wasteful. We sold a lot of stuff (and helped Josh’s dad sell his old stuff too) through garage sales, Facebook marketplace, and eBay.
Garage Sale Tips
- Do research into what days are popular for garage sales in your area
- Enlist extra help. Since we held the sale at Josh’s dad’s (because we couldn’t do it in the park) we had an extra person to trade off watching the sale while we worked on other things
- Have two colors of price stickers- one for prices that can be negotiated and one for non-negotiable prices
- Post your sale in local community Facebook groups
- Mix up your physical signs- we had signs in two different styles on some corners and it drew more attention
Facebook Marketplace Tips
- Besides the general Marketplace, looks for Garage Sale groups specific to your town
- For large items like furniture make sure you have good measurements
- If someone asks you to text or call them, it’s a scam
- Make sure you reply to comments and messages, it helps the algorithm know you’re active
- For small items we switched to doing porch pick up. We left the items out for the person to pick up whenever and leave money in the door. We never had any issues with theft (and we both agree if someone’s going to scam us out of ten bucks they probably need it more than we do)
eBay Tips
- Learn how to research sold comps- search for the item you want to sell and filter by sold
- Also pay attention to how many are listed vs. how many sold. If 300 of the same item are listed and only 5 have sold, yours probably isn’t going to sell
- Take good photos and take lots of them- make sure to show and flaws or damage
- I almost always have buyers pay shipping- just make sure to adjust your price accordingly
- Avoid paying for shipping boxes- ask friends & family to save their old boxes for you. Not only is it cheaper, it’s more sustainable. My friend was able to get me dozens and dozens of boxes from his work
- For more rare or unusual collectibles, auctions are good, but otherwise I use Buy it Now
- If you’re trying to move stuff fast, send offers to interested buyers
Because we were able to keep things at Josh’s dad’s while working on selling stuff (which also took longer since he kept adding stuff to the pile to sell for him), we developed a system for pricing. At the beginning, we tried to get top dollar for items, and then over the next couple weeks would drop prices if it still hadn’t sold. Eventually we’d get to the point where any offer is better than just donating it, so took very small offers knowing that little bits still add up. Once we needed to get stuff out a room, it was time to give away and donate whatever was left.
What about the rest of the stuff? Let’s talk storage
We don’t know how long we’ll be full-time RVers for, so we didn’t want to get rid of all our stuff and have to start over from scratch again in a year or two. We did have a fair amount of stuff, especially furniture, that we had gotten free or cheap when we first moved into our old house that we were ready to downsize whether we started RV life or not. For special furniture, a lot of our kitchen stuff, holiday decorations, sentimental items, books, clothes, etc. we needed to store them. Many full-time RVers rent storage units, but we’re lucky that Josh’s dad has a large basement with room for us to store a lot of our stuff.
Since we’re not sure how long we’ll be on the road for, we decided it was worth it to invest in good storage containers. We had already used the Hefty Hi-Rise bins in our basement, so we bought a boatload more of them in various size. We like that these are clear bins, so you can see what’s stored in them. Our favorite part of this bins is probably the lids. The previous bins we had used in our basement had lids that sunk in a little, so you couldn’t actually fill them to the top. The Hi-Rise lids allow you to actually overflow the bin a little, which is amazing! They stack really well too, and you can stack different sizes in different configurations.
Our decluttering stretched over a few months in the end, so there were days when we were more in the mood to get rid of everything, and days when we had a hard time getting rid of anything. Overall, though, I think we found a good balance of keeping, storing, and getting rid of everything.
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Nice job Jen & Josh!!💕