Yesterday was another rainy and windy day here in Bozeman so there was no yard work, bicycle ride or taking the Harley out for a spin. Instead, I decided to start going through the garage as part of my ongoing purge.
I have two objectives. Barb and her two dogs will be arriving with her Lexus SUV in three weeks. Given that I currently have my truck, my SUV, my Harley and two bicycles, once Barb gets here, my place will begin to look like a used car lot. I am hopeful that I have found a buyer for my truck and that will help ease the problem, but given all the stuff in the garage currently, I still won’t be able to fit two SUVs and my Harley in there. So, the first objective is to purge the garage of ‘stuff’ in order to try to create enough room to fit both SUVs and my Harley into the garage.
The other objective is just to get rid of ‘stuff’ that has been accumulating over the years. As I was going through things yesterday, I couldn’t help but laugh at the number of things that fell into the ‘I might need this someday’ category. Anyone who has a home and does any work at all themselves probably has the habit of finishing a project and then stashing the leftover material in the garage because ‘I might need that someday’. The fact is, most of the things I came across in that category, I have rarely needed.
I have been wrestling with this whole ‘I might need this someday’ attitude with the decision to sell my truck. The fact is, I have been in Bozeman for 5 years and in that time, I have driven my truck less than 20,000 miles – 4,000 miles a year! It was, at times, very useful to have the truck. When I built my deck, redid my master bathroom and during other large projects, it was useful to be able to jump in my truck and go to Home Depot and/or the dump. And, given that I inherited the truck, and the only cost was for insurance, registration, and maintenance, it was not a huge economic hit to keep it. However, I no longer have any big projects that I’m contemplating so for the majority of the summer, the truck will just sit in the driveway and be an obstacle to moving the other vehicles around.
This decision was also facilitated by the process of thinking about how I was going to get my remaining possessions and motorcycle to Arizona after I sell my house. I went through many different scenarios but finally narrowed all of the various options down to using U-Haul. They have trailers designed to haul motorcycles and they have large pods/boxes that you can pack, and they will ship. It is by far the most cost-effective solution, and it completely eliminates the problem of what to do with trailers when I get I Arizona if I were to purchase one myself. I just drop them off and I’m done.
Given the limited number of times I NEED my truck, it became very apparent that I could sell the truck and if I find I need a pickup this summer, I can easily rent one for a day (or more) to do whatever I need to do. Given what I will sell my truck for, I can rent a lot of U-Haul pickups this summer and the more I thought about it, the more it just made sense.
As I’ve been going through this exercise, it has become very apparent that there is a big difference between what I want and what I NEED! I have certainly suffered from the ‘I might need this someday’ syndrome as I have accumulated things over the years. I guess that’s why the storage business is booming across the country. In any case, the exercise continues – and it’s a learning experience and a bit of a challenge.