This Month’s Featured Article

In September last year, my husband and I made a bold and, to many, perhaps even ourselves, shocking decision. We decided to sell our house.

We had been lucky enough to find our old house in 2011. A beautiful, historic wreck on Main Street in Salisbury, CT, which, through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, we had brought back to its former glory. We had raised our children there. Along with the husband’s long-suffering help, I had also created from scratch quite the garden. It was the kind of garden people come from afar to visit and it had also become the base for my thriving cut flower and floristry business. Everyone – including us for the longest time – assumed we would be full-term lifers. What had always been known as the Macdonald House after its previous 50-year owners, would one day be known as the Shillingford House.

Biting the bullet

Our decision to suddenly sell did not come entirely out of the blue. For the last few years with our children away at school and university, along with the husband’s travel schedule, I had grown weary of the ridiculousness and expense of myself and the dogs rattling around in one small corner of an enormous house. We had started to say to our children, “one day, the day will come for us to move.”

What precipitated our overnight decision last September was a perfect storm of events that themselves coincided with the house emptying overnight of children, who had been home all summer. I was suddenly back to rattling around in a corner on my own for the next nine months. Just like that, the mythical far-in-the-future day we had been talking about was here. Not even giving ourselves time to formulate any kind of a plan, I called Elyse Harney Morris.

Selling is the easy bit

Three weeks later, photos taken, marketing plan in place, the house was listed. Ten days later we were at final bids with three asking-price offers. How fantastic everyone cooed! Yes, indeed! But MY GOD! a) we had nowhere to go – and with four dogs, a cat, a cooler full of thousands of forcing winter bulbs, and 10,000 tulips needing somewhere to be planted, we were no landlord’s dream tenants, and b) worse, I had spent the last 14 years filling every inch of a 5,000-square-foot house plus a barn to the brim! Now, horror of horrors, it was time to move it!

Nothing like a deadline

There is lots of advice out there about how to downsize, Swedish Death Clean, declutter, etc., etc. Call it what you want, all I now know is that unless there’s a gun against your head, it’s near on impossible to be as ruthless and unsentimental as you need to be. We had tried in the past, but with the luxury of always being able to present some reason to keep everything, we had failed. But now, we (who am I kidding, I) had no such get-out. Things – and lots of them – needed to go.

How do we have SO MUCH stuff?

Our attic – a place I rarely ventured into but had no qualms sending the husband with something, anything, everything that I just had to keep, was a hoarder’s warehouse. Every child’s game, book, puzzle, and piece of artwork; my 45-year-old school uniform; my grandmother’s 1915-1985 daily diaries – you get the drift. The basement was no better. Aside from being my winter work studio, it was awash with the less emotional but more useful detritus of life – old paint pots, puppy crates, party and craft project supplies, and Christmas decorations. It was also home to the entire contents of a previous beach house’s kitchen, along with all kinds of pieces of furniture that I was certain the kids would be beyond grateful to receive for their first apartment.

Our barn was stacked to the rafters with my husband’s epically large wood collection and just-in-case handy bits of pipe, hose, and wire. There was a mountain of garden tools, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, seed trays, vases, buckets, and flower frogs plus 120 individual boxes of different varieties of painstakingly dug, washed, and divided dahlia tubers sitting next to the forcing bulbs in the cooler. Just mountains and mountains of things. I wasn’t joking when I said we were doing this now while the husband was still alive because I was never doing this alone.

Nothing like a challenge!

We had ten weeks to clear out. Ten weeks that included Thanksgiving, Christmas, long-planned visits from family in England, college applications for our youngest, and, counterintuitively to what most people think of florists and gardeners, one of my busiest times of the year. (Oh, and that small matter of finding somewhere else to live.)

Dear Readers, did we do it? Yes, we did. Was it pretty? No, it was not. Would I do it again? I will never have to, because once we started and I realized just what this entailed, I was making damn sure this was a once-in-a-lifetime job.

Here’s what I learned in the process.

Let go of the emotional

98% of things we are hanging on to for our children’s sake, they will not want. They don’t want our leftover furniture or spare bed linens. They are not interested in the artwork you thought was cool in your 20s, photo albums of ancient relatives from the 1970s, or the receipts for who gave you what from your wedding registry. And, if you can’t remember the pre-school friend who sent them a third birthday card, chances are they can’t remember them either. Out it all needs to go.

Don’t feel bad that you are not the person to turn your great, great, great grandparents’ beautifully calligraphed letters into wallpaper. Neither are most people, and while there is that one person out there who would happily do this, alas it’s not you, and you don’t have the time or bandwidth to find the person who does it is right now. Should you choose to quietly dispose of these items, the world will keep turning.

Sharing is caring

Freeing yourself of all the things you keep just in case one day you will need them? Heaven. Getting them into the hands of people who can use them right now? Priceless.

Ridding yourself of all the things you keep because you think you should for some emotionally dubious attachment even though you don’t really like let alone love them, is seriously good for your mental health. When we finally finished emptying the attic, it felt like the house might actually float away without all that weight holding it down.

Even better, as the husband, now on first name terms with everyone at the Salisbury/Sharon Transfer Station, discovered at the Swap Shop, you might actually make someone cry with joy when the person who really would love it, gets their hands on it.

That is of course if they get a chance to before certain dealers and resellers get to it first, whisk it to their shop, and slap a price tag on it. While some may donate the proceeds of these finds to charitable organizations, others definitely do not. Don’t want to feel disgruntled about this? Then don’t try to move in a matter of weeks at the wrong time of year to have a yard sale. Otherwise, prepare to feel extremely gripey about that carry-on.

Temper your expectations on how much money you can make selling your possessions. Dealers were already awash with the good stuff we thought we’d make our money back on. Sites like Facebook Marketplace and Next Door are not for the pressed for time. In the end we sold just one item to the friends who came for Christmas Day … and left with our dining room table!

Getting down and dirty

Accept early on that this is not a glamorous job. Know that for weeks your nails are going to be trashed, your clothes filthy, your back screaming, and that your knees callused from kneeling on the floor for hours on end going through boxes.

You need to be in purge or pack mode. Not both together. Emotions build as moving day approaches, and you need to be as clear headed and cold hearted as you’ve ever been. Clear out everything first. Pack it later. It will all go much faster.

You will come to strongly believe clear trash bags are the most useful thing anyone ever invented. Being able to instantly see the contents assures you don’t accidentally bin a family heirloom in your hurry. Likewise, banker boxes allow you to easily lift the lid off and require no packing tape.

Avoid packing tape at all costs. The noise is bad enough, but the deep frustration of the temper-inducing lost end one more time might be the thing that tips you over the edge.

There will be times when you think you are making progress and times when it feels you are actually just making a mess and going nowhere. There will be times when your husband will think longingly of a premature death – yours or his, doesn’t matter which. There will be times when you despair if THIS WILL EVER END!

Silver linings

Should your children annoy you during this process, you will deeply regret not leaving this task to them as part of their inheritance. The plus side to still being here though is you get to hear how much people were going to miss you when they thought you were moving away and how happy they are that you are actually hanging around the neighborhood. It’s like being at your wake while still alive!

You may not be as ready on moving day as you were determined to be, but it turns out that doesn’t matter.

Most importantly I learned that all of that stuff was not my identity. The sky did not fall in when I let it go. While physically hard and emotionally draining, the process was liberating. I wish I had done it earlier. (But I also know that was never going to happen without a moving truck in the driveway.)

Good luck! •