Downsizing

Florida housing has minimal storage. Houses in Florida often have high ceilings and lots of fans, to help with the heat. Regardless of air conditioning, high ceilings help, but that also means that there is little attic space. What space there is, is really too hot to store much.

 
Florida is mere feet above sea level, and the water table even inland is high. That means no basements. For unknown reasons, Florida houses don't usually have front closets. It gets chilly enough in the winter in north Florida to need a jacket, and it rains tons so there are raincoats and umbrellas galore, but no handy place to put them. What Florida houses *do* often have is a fireplace. You'd pay a premium for a fireplace up north, but they are scattered everywhere in Florida. There are also screened porches, sometimes with glass or plastic-paned windows which makes it a Florida room. Sadly, they are not air conditioned usually (even the ones with proper windows) so the humidity limits what you can place there. Also, critters manage to get in regardless, so that also affects your furnishing selections.

What all this means is that a move to Florida from the north means downsizing. The square footage of the house in Florida is a good deal larger than the house in Michigan, but the lack of usable attic space and no basement means much less storage. An open floor plan also means fewer walls for bookcases and other storage furniture. A fireplace takes out a nice chunk of wall space also. And you can't just store books and photo albums in the Florida room - too humid.

On the plus side, we may have the only front closet in north Florida, but it is teeny. As in the door is 18 inches. Go measure your own front closet door. The closet rod has a usable length of just over 19 inches, and the closet is barely deep enough for the hangars to not hit the back wall. Not much storage there.

We've given away hundreds of books and probably thousands of other items, thrown out a 20-yard container’s worth of stuff and discarded a huge amount of duplicate furniture. We still have an appalling amount of things coming to Florida, and there simply isn't room. During my time in Wisconsin, dozens of boxes of books, a good deal of furniture (I needed stuff) and a lot of kitchen items made their way to the apartment. So nearly everything I had came from the house, with the notable exceptions of a couch and a new bed when I moved to Florida (the bed I had before, from Michigan, is now in the guest room). So it's mostly still the same stuff. The house in Michigan had enough belongings to pretty much furnish TWO homes.   

When the truck comes, the boxes will go into the garage and the furniture initially into the Florida room, while we decide where things will go and which of the duplicate items we'll keep and which get sent to the resale shop. Boxes that have been packed for months are tagged and will be moved to storage in the first week or two, with the goal of taking them out a few at a time each week and sorted. It's just too much to leave in the garage for that long over a Florida summer. Some items will be sent to the kids, though they shouldn't panic since I'm not paying to ship everything we have. Nobody will be in convenient driving distance. 
 

Downsizing is incredibly hard. We've stumbled across some treasures I'd forgotten about, and some I didn't even remember we had, like my grandparent's bible. It's not one of those big fancy Family Bibles with all the family history in its pages - just a plain vanilla book but it has the Doré illustrations that I remember pouring over as a child. Going through stuff rather than just wholesale discarding is how the treasures get found. Some treasures were lost - damaged beyond hope over the years, but that just makes the others more precious. Hopefully, over the next six months or so, we can weed out the unimportant and worthless possessions and downsize to what is important.