Camilla Ransom
There are many things to be considered when moving onto a boat, and perhaps the most blindingly obvious is the fact that the contents of your two bedroom apartment won’t all fit.
One night we set about making an inventory and deciding what to do with it all. We didn’t think it’d take too long since compared to some of our friends and family (who shall remain nameless – they know who they are 😉 ) we seem to have relatively little stuff. We’ve moved quite a bit in the last 10 years, from the UK and Germany to Amsterdam, then to Barcelona so naturally things have been culled, or broken along the way. Alongside the clothes, electronics, kitchen stuff and furniture in my collection are quite a few boxes of things with emotional value.
In 2005 when I was 26, my Mum died suddenly from a brain tumour and at that time she was living in a big, fully furnished 4 bedroom 19th century house in South East England. Sorting through it all was really traumatic, but many of the things I found brought back happy childhood memories so I kept hold of them. Now this is all fine until you come to move and realise many of them are glass and china (she loved a good dinner party)…so they’re bulky and breakable. This however didn’t stop me carting boxes (and boxes!) to Amsterdam, where 90% of them remained tucked away in the attic for years. When I moved to Barcelona I shipped a few boxes home, but still brought a bunch with me.
Sitting on the sofa one evening we made a start on the inventory. The list got longer and longer, and these were just the things in the living room and the things which we could see! It’s pretty impressive how quickly (and unconsciously) things accumulate. It’s entirely understandable too since (unless you’re a practicing minimalist) we all want to fill and furnish the spaces we live in to make our homes feel cozy.
Three hours later we had over 550 items on list, then rest of the process went something like this…
- Deciding what to do with each item: Take, sell, store, bin or give away.
- Creating a website to promote everything, which we’re keeping alive for posterity. 🙂
- Figuring out how much to sell the things for, conscious that if we asked too much it’d never sell. But if we asked too little, we could be denying ourselves a profit.
- Piling everything up to get a better idea of what we had, and what we were planning on doing with it.
- Posting things on Facebook Marketplaces (sorry Schibsted, it’s my crappy Spanish), meeting some very interesting people with weird and wonderful stories, and being stood up by countless more.
- Having less and less furniture to sit on.
- Realising we still had way too much stuff.
- Being brave and deciding to part with some of my Mum’s things. Better to be loved by someone else than kept in a box for the next decade. Gulp.
- With piles of things remaining deciding to sacrifice profit for hassle and just give everything away for free.
- Tom coming home to find 20 people in our living room with armfuls of our things.
- Having someone come and collect 6 champagne glasses and me managing to smash 4 as I handed them over 🙁
- Shipping the ‘keeps’ to our flat in the UK, flying over to meet them, then doing yet another massive clear out.
- I forgot to mention the plants. When I moved into my first flat about 15 years ago my Mum gave me a plant, which is still going despite having been in the UK, Amsterdam and now Barcelona. Unsure of how long it’d last on the boat I separated it into three, kept the smallest and took the other two to friends in Amsterdam.
- Moving what we had left to the boat. One of our friends kindly helped us shift the bulky things in his car, then 5 cycle trips later we’d loaded the last bag onto the boat. This also involved carrying the little plant in Tom’s sailing boot, which ended up full of soil.
- The relief of having just a few final bags to move!
- Having an empty apartment!
…and the final puzzle, where to store it all?
