16  Celebrating and downsizing

November 2024

It’s November, and that means it’s time to go back out to Indiana and celebrate Carolyn’s Dad’s birthday again. He’s 101 this year and still doing amazingly well, as you can see above. But the fact that we are making that pilgrimage again reminds us that time is flying by, and it’s time to get this renovation party started.

Last year, we had just gotten our parts list for the renovation from our architect. We had hoped we would have started construction by now, but clearly that hasn’t happened. The good news, though, is that we have an appointment to review and sign our detailed construction plan (referred to as attachment B) next week. It includes the following schedule estimate.

The February start date is largely due to other projects that Gilmore has to finish up as well as our own need to nail down a rental property. Assuming we can get our rental set up for early January, we can then arrange to move some of our possessions ourselves before bringing in the moving company.

This schedule of course assumes everything will go according to plan, and we know that never happens.

Meanwhile, the time has come to think about thinning out all the things we’ve collected over the last 22 years in our house. Because of its staggered architecture, the house has a two-level basement and that basement is much more full than we’d like. And if we’re going to move into an apartment, much of that stuff has to go … somewhere.

Rather than just having everything hauled off to the dump, Carolyn and I are spending most of our weekends donating many of our possessions. One organization that we’ve been pleased to donate to is the Fresh Start Furniture Bank in Hudson, MA. Fresh Start collects donations of furniture and home goods from the public and distributes them for free to people in need. Because all the donations they take are intended to be used again by people who are starting their lives over, they require that donations be in good condition for that purpose. Given that most of the items we’ve donated to them have until recently been in use by us, we haven’t found this constraint to be a problem.

One of the items we donated to Fresh Start was a Brio wooden train set that we’d built up over many years when our boys were small. Normally, Fresh Start doesn’t accept toys, but we thought that given how large our collection was (and how expensive Brio train sets are), they might find someone with children who might enjoy it. We asked one of the managers about it, and she said that Fresh Start couldn’t accept it, but that she could probably place it with the day care facility at her church. When we brought it in for donation, her eyes went wide, and she said, “I think we can split this up among 3 different churches, and they’ll all be thrilled.” That was as nice moment.

I had thought about using Freecycle, but I didn’t want to devote blocks of time to communicating with folks who wanted to pick up stuff. Instead, we brought lots of the useful items to our local Savers Thrift Store. As the time of our move approaches, trips to Savers have started rivaling trips to the grocery. Yet we still have piles of stuff in our basement and garage that we’d be embarrassed to donate because, well, some of it is just junk as you can see below:

At this point, being ready for our move date at the beginning of January trumps pretty much everything else. And while I hate to encourage modern TV advertising, I did what it told me: I called 1-800-GOT-JUNK, pointed, and the stuff disappeared. Even better, the men who took the junk away swept and cleaned our basement and garage before they left, as you can see.

Opting for expediency and convenience did carry a price, though. Carrying away 3 truckloads of our junk cost about three times the estimate for moving the rest of our belongings to our new rental. That said, both Carolyn and I say it’s been worth every penny.

And all we had to do was point.¹

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1. For those who don’t see a lot of TV commercials, the phrase “All you have to do is point” is 1-800-GOT-JUNK’s tag line.