Six Tips & Tricks for Downsizing

The process of downsizing can be daunting and overwhelming. You may be asking yourself: How do I even get started? What do I keep and what do I give away or donate? What happens to my keepsakes and personal items?
This blog is how my husband Jacob and I downsized from our 3,000 square foot home to a 25 foot travel trailer...

At the start of COVID in April 2020 we stopped doing travel contracts and moved across the country back home to be closer to family. We bought a house and quickly discovered we did not have enough furniture, decorations, outdoor supplies and miscellaneous odds and ends for our new house. After two years, we had styled every room with the perfect furniture, cozied up the sun room with a carefree vibe (it even had a chair swing), filled the garage with essential tools and then some, accumulated enough kitchen supplies to cook for a large restaurant, stuffed our closets with excess clothes and shoes, and filled our basement storage closets to the maximum capacity. 
We then decided we needed to downsize. Simply put: we had way too much stuff. After much consideration, we decided to sell our house to live fulltime in a camper and return to travel therapy. The new challenge we faced was selecting less than a quarter of our belongings to move with us. 

The following Six Tips & Tricks are what we utilized that helped us during the downsizing process:

1. Start Downsizing Now 
We started by making separate groups/lists for deciding what would be thrown away, donated, sold or kept. After that have a yard sale, estate sale, or online auction. We did not have time to go through all of our household items prior to moving, so we posted an estate sale event on a multitude of facebook pages. We kept the majority of items in their original place with a price sticker. We had people walk through our house and pick the items they wanted. We found that people bought most of our items inside/staged rather than outside in our driveway or garage. After we finished selling everything we thought we could, we did another round of donations and let friends come by and take whatever they wanted. 


2. Clothes & Shoes
Going through your whole closet can seem like a stressful task. It may be cliche, but I used Marie Kondo's technique from the Netflix show Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. 

• First, take all your clothes and put them in one big pile to sort from. Make three piles: yes pile, no pile, maybe pile. Pick up each piece of clothing individually and ask yourself: Does this item spark joy? If not, put in the no pile
• Let your “maybe” pile sit there for a week or two, then go through it again. If you did not need that item during the last couple weeks, it is time to get rid of.
• Throw away items that have holes, rips, tears, and leggings that have thinned out
• For items you want to keep, try on each item to ensure it fits and you still like it.
• Follow the 6 month rule: if you have not worn a clothing item in the last 6 months, then it is time to get rid of it.
• Exception to this rule is an item being out of season (summer vs winter), therefore not wearing it in the last 6 months
• Shop quality, not quantities 

​3. Sentimental Items

• Ask family or friends if you are able to keep sentimental items with them. 
• My mom is wonderful and allowed us to use her attic for storage. If this is not possible, consider getting a small storage unit. The issue we were running into was that storage units are not cheap. 
• Really consider the value of your belongings. We took the time to add up the cost of value for each item we wanted to put in storage and how much the unit would cost for the amount of time we planned to be living the travel life. We found that it was more expensive to keep our furniture, extra clothes/shoes, etc in storage compared to the cost of a storage unit

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4. Declutter & Digitalize
Go through your important documents.

• You will be surprised how many papers you may no longer need or are out of the 7 year window.

Take pictures or scan important documents onto your computer.

• This is helpful with organization and getting rid of clutter while keeping everything that you need. 
• For the things you can’t scan or throw away (passports, social security cards, etc.), consider using a portable waterproof/fireproof document bag with a lock. Attached is the link to the one we have: DocSafe Bag with Lock.

​5. Consider the Size and Storage of Your New Space
Think about the space you are moving to. Your change may not be as dramatic as ours but this will play a large factor on which items make the cut. 

• Measure or estimate the size of your future space and start planning where things will go. 

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​6. Kitchen Utensils  

• Look for things that serve multiple purposes, no single use items. 
• What we kept: outdoor griddle, air fryer, instant pot, and nesting set of pots (the nesting pots have one handle that connects to all the pots to save space). 

At the end of the day, downsizing is a mindset. It is important to remember that stuff is just that…stuff.

Written By: Natalie Azzarito
Travel Occupational Therapist & MedVenturist
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/donttriproadtrip/