We moved this weekend from Acton, MA to Enfield, NH. We have lived in the same house for almost 18 years — and we had the stuff to prove it. Over the last few weeks we have been donating, recycling and throwing out things in an attempt to down-size a bit. The house we are moving into is smaller than the one we left.
In a previous career, my husband (Kent) and I ran a computer game company and created a fun, educational game to teach programming concepts, “MindRover”. Well, we had been storing the 1000 left-over box copies for many years and it was time to get rid of them! Below is a picture taken from this recycling experience.
Recycling a computer game
I actually thought we did a good job of getting rid of things… but, no, when the movers couldn’t even fit all our stuff on their truck, we realized we still have too much stuff. We definitely have more work to do in the down-sizing category.
I’ve been thinking that many people may be joining us in the “live simpler”, smaller is better… some by choice and others by necessity. There is a silver lining from the energy and conservation perspective that with a smaller physical footprint, we can live within a smaller energy budget and decrease our carbon output as well. It’s a great reason to be happy about down-sizing.
But – a word of caution – moving in the winter in New England is just a bad idea. The movers leave every door open and trample all the snow, mud, salt and sand into the house. We turned down the thermostat to almost nothing so we would slow down our heating of the entire neighborhood. After a while I had one of my family members “manning” the door — opening it and closing it for the movers so there was a chance that we could keep a little heat in the house.
That’s behind us now and lots of boxes are in front of us!
In Acton we had forced hot water with an oil burning furnace. In Enfield we have a wood burning stove in the basement and electric baseboard heaters when that isn’t enough. We got the stove going today (move-in day) and it feels great so far.
