Organized Chaos

If there's one thing that an impending household move will do, it will create chaos. Physical chaos; emotional chaos; financial chaos; career chaos; family chaos; friend chaos, and even furry animal family member chaos. From the moment just a few weeks ago when we found the perfect farmhouse, our life has been turned upside down in ways that we had forgotten happen when you purchase a house and try to sell your current home simultaneously. Chaos, however, isn't necessarily a bad thing. An initial state of chaos can instigate responses and reactions which can then produce some pretty terrific outcomes. Sometimes you just have to welcome chaos in order to just get beyond it and to keep moving forward. 

Chaos 
When the present determines the future, 
but the approximate present does not 
approximately determine the future.   
                               Edward Lorenz

With three dormers, our house has loads of cute and convenient storage cubbies under the eaves. This cubby is large enough to be called a walk in closet.

"Bring it on," we said, and it came. The fast moving nature of our house purchase brought on a flurry of confusion about where we should even start to get our home ready for sale. We blended our houses 6 years ago and both of us still have things in boxes and totes and bags that haven't been touched since. And of course we've accumulated more stuff, more junk, more items that we couldn't part with. And then just two months ago when our daughter moved to Washington, DC and to an uber small room in an uber small shared apartment, we inherited at least 12 large totes filled with her items that we've packed into the convenient cubby spaces in the dormer areas of our cottage style home. We're filled to the brim in this house and the prospect of moving all that stuff became paralyzing last week. This is the first time that we will both move together and we realize that each of us approaches moving in very different ways.  Do we pack things now? Do we declutter now? What stays? What goes? Do we panic now? 

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So while we will be upsizing in living space in our new home, we are drastically downsizing in our current home, both to have it show better to prospective buyers and also so that we don't have to move all the unnecessary junk.  In just one week, we have done a deep clean of each room and have been pretty ruthless determining what stays and what goes. We've made countless trips to the dump, to the thrift store, to the clothing drop off kiosks, and have filled the curb high on our garbage pickup days - all this before having our realtor go through the house and draw up the listing paperwork. And you know what??? It feels liberating!!! 

Handmade clothing and baby toys will move to our new house as keepsakes for our daughter.

From within the sense of panic and overwhelming pressure, we have come through the initial chaos to find a sense of positive reinforcement, freedom, and even sense of adventure. We've made it a competition between the two of us to see who can get rid of the most stuff...and we are both winning. We've found things that we thought we'd lost forever. We've found things that we didn't know we had. We've found things that we had borrowed from other people (years and years ago borrowed) and forgotten to return...until last week. We've found things that represented happy times in each of our lives, and of course, we've found things that triggered the whole range of emotions known on the spectrum.  

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100 children's books were rehomed this weekend and we wish the new readers many years of joy from these treasures

Red palazzo pants that never should have been worn in public in the first place! Not moving to the new house!

As we are coming out of the initial chaos of getting our home ready for sale we find that not only do we feel lighter and freer from decluttering, but that we have a renewed sense of happiness that this house has provided for us. It is the home where we started our life together, the home we transformed in many wonderful ways. The home where we planted our annual garden that produced food that filled our freezer through the winter. The home where we welcomed new furry animal critters into our family and the home where we mourned the passing of beloved ones. It is the home where we learned so many homesteading values and started our Kumbha Moon Soap Company. It is the home where we celebrated our marriage with family and friends. 

One of the Kumbha girlz has a real problem collecting tour guides and pamphlets and brochures at just about every rest stop or tourist kiosk she finds. It's all been recycled and she vows that she will refrain from filling the new house with similar clutter!

But as the Lorenz quote notes, "the approximate present does not approximately determine the future." While Duke Street is our current home, home will always be defined where the two of us live together. At this moment in time right now, our home is oddly organized, orderly, clean, and suspended in time until its new family decides it should be their home. Right now at this moment, the chaos has subsided but we know that there will be repeated waves of it, much of it out of our control. And we know that we have to go through it, just get through it, to get to the other side where the reality and the adventure and the life we share wait for us in our new home. 

Peace and love - Kimberly and Kellie