Monthly Archives: July 2010

moving week

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It’s a busy week.  All of my free time is being spent packing up my stuff and making drop-off runs out to the farm and out to my parent’s place. Despite the purge, I still feel like I have way too much stuff!  I think I’m going to need another dose of downsizing when I try to fit the things I still own into my trailer.  Hmmm… less is more, less is more…

My parent’s and I went out to the farm one afternoon last week to ‘move’ the trailer and to start the renovations.  It didn’t really go as planned – and I’ve got video clips to prove it.  Stay tuned for ‘The trailer that wouldn’t start and the motorhome, manpower, and ingenuity that came to its rescue’.  In the meantime, some photos of my parents helping me clean and prep for renos and a sneak peak shot at the trailer who refused to budge…

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from pots to plots

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First patio tomato of the season (above) and my cabin in the city (below).

Cabin

T minus 7 days until I say goodbye to my little urban cabin and head to the farm!  I can’t believe that ‘the big move’ has almost arrived!  As much as I hate to say goodbye to my seawall bicycle commute and the general awesomeness that Vancouver is in the summer, I’m really excited to start tackling all of my projects out at the farm.  Although first on the list will be renovating the trailer, we’ll of course be doing a lot of thinking about how we want to start the actual farming activities.

When I moved back to Vancouver (from Ottawa) last September, I felt like the luckiest girl in the city to find a little rustic cabin-type dwelling in Mt. Pleasant with a big patio so that I could attempt some serious container gardening. At the time, I had no idea that less than 12 months later, I’d be packing up and moving to a 2.5 acre chunk of land to attempt some much more serious gardening.  I love these kinds of life surprises!

As I work on packing up my cabin and tying up things like address changes on incoming mail, I thought I’d celebrate with a photo of my first patio tomato of the season.  Might have to include it in my last city dinner before I load all my potted plants into a truck and head east.

the great purge

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My mom and my sister and I had a big garage sale this weekend because we all had stuff to get rid of. Even after selling furniture on craigslist, selling clothes through consignment stores, and giving other clothes away, I still had a ton of stuff to purge. Moving into a trailer requires major downsizing of material belongings – which I love!

As a kid, I collected everything, but as I grew up and started gallivanting all over the globe, I quickly adopted a love for less. Despite diving into annual purges with glee, I still always manage to have more stuff than I need – as well as boxes of stuff that never gets opened.  Needless to say, I’ve been happy about my current excuse for more purging.

Economically, purging feels like a bit of a kick in the stomach – it’s rare to make money on anything, let alone break even.  But the sense of freedom purging brings is worth the dollar loss (and the cash it does put in your pocket, even at a ‘loss’, is still a great perk).

So, I’m happy to announce that I’m one bookshelf, one coffee table, one wine rack/ bar, one cat bed, one bicycle, 2/3rds of a closet of clothes, and oodles of household bits and pieces lighter, as well as $500 richer.  Perfect.  Now I can buy that toilet I’m going to need in the trailer with money left over for other trailer renovation costs.  Purging the non-essentials in order to get the essentials!