Sizing Down - step one in a long journey

We use to live in a 3300 sqr/ft house.
We traveled the world and collected many things over the years. 
We lived in three different continents through the years, and now we have decided to move to a boat. We knew what (more or less) we will be able to buy - size wise; so we had to do a MAJOR (!!) downsizing.
For those which are collectors like us, and had to downsize, this may sound familiar. The kids, they don't want any of your "old stuff" - we call them antiques, they call it junk.
We had to decide what do, what to take with us, and then what to do with the rest. Oh and I forgot to mention that originally we thought we will take two to three years to sell our "stuff", we change our plans - our countdown has started and it was less than a year.

First - we need to sell our house.
That means - fixing, cleaning, staging (yes we did stage the house after awhile), removing personal items, replacing carpets in the basement, painting our bedroom with what we been told - current colors. Bear in mind that we had fully remodeled our house in 2011 - so everything was relatively new, fresh and current.
Yes, we did have many things to remove (we are collectors). We have over the years, live in 3 different continents and collected many memories and possessions; now it was time to remove them.

So in January 2018 we rented a storage unit. We took there everything we thought we will take to our new boat, and things that right now had to be removed from the house.
And in the mean time, we took photos of what we thought we can sell quickly and posted them on Let-go, Facebook, etc. etc.

We learned very quickly that life don't work according to our plans or timeline, things sold too slowly.
So we start donating, and giving away things.
And giving more things away, and more, and more.
For about two moths, every week this was the regular view in our drive way.
Finally we sold our house, and then we did a garage sale. (over 2 weeks.....)

It was very hard. Our great neighbors helped us so did some of our friends. Without them, we will be still clearing our house.

We started the house selling / downsizing / moving out, in November 2017. We sold and closed on our house in October 2018.
We had many collections, paintings, piano, rugs, dishes, etc. No we have left with very little (still to many things).
Our next blog will be on the process we went through to find our boat.