Only two days until our big move, where all of our belonging are being packed up and going into storage for the next year. It’s being packed up here in Barcelona and taken to a storage space in Denmark, where we plan to settle when we come back from our year of full-time traveling.

For the last 5 days we have been in the middle of a complete go through of everything we have, and I mean absolutely everything. Cleaning out is a much bigger job than anticipated. I can’t believe how much “stuff” we have collected in the 4 years of living in Spain. We did, however, find a way to do it fairly easy, but keep in mind, it takes time.

We knew that we would be donating many things, but when we got in touch with a great guy who offered to take everything we won’t be using anymore to shelters and organisations for people in need, it made the clean out so much easier. Every time there was an item that we kind of wanted to hold on to, thinking about a family who could give that item a second life was a true pleasure. Lots of these things might be something these families usually wouldn’t be able to buy, so donating everything from toys, clothes, electronics to car seats, bikes and furniture was all of a sudden pure joy. And oh, the joy, one feels after 5 days of cleaning out the entire apartment incl. 2 storage rooms.

How to make clean out easy:

1. Find local organizations who take or maybe even pick-up used items/furniture for people in need, so you can donate as much as possible.

2. Ask yourself the following questions, when wondering whether to keep or get rid of:

Will I be happy to find this item in a year from now or will I probably have forgotten about it – if it’s the latter, donate it.

and

Will someone be really happy to have this, whereas you might just have it laying around it for… just in case – if it’s the latter, donate it.

3. When packing, use see through plastic boxes, makes locating your things much easier.

4. Organize things that go together in one box – e.g. if you have more children, collect all of their games in one box – not in several boxes, or if you have personal papers in several rooms, gather them all in one box, so when looking for certain papers, you will only have to look for one box.

5. Do it together, as a family, makes it more fun and everyone feels they have taken part in the big job it is to clean out.

We highly recommend this way of sorting through things. Now we only have what we actually use and things that are of sentimental value to us… more or less, of course we are not perfect, but I don’t feel we could have done it any better now. I’m sure we’ll find stuff in a year’s time where we wonder why we didn’t get rid of that as well… time will show.

“All” there is left now, with two days to go before our move, is to pack our backpacks for one year… I’ll be reading blogs on how to pack backpacks tonight.