Get ready! We are carrying you across the threshold! We moved into our home – hopefully for the duration of our expat journey in the UK! To have something to call home after a couple of months of transient living feels grounding. You know you age like a fine wine when you get joy out of cooking with your pots and pans. Past editions of our family’s Better Homes & Gardens focused on DIY extremes like redoing every floor in our house. I know, questionable choice. If you’re close in our life…thanks for never making us feel ridiculous about it to our faces 😉. Now, we moved on to a new edition: tiny home living!
Only Bringing A Knapsack of Sea Freight
Getting ready for life abroad, we expected smaller spaces and sizes of living than we are used to (this might vary depending on where you live). Therefore, we downsized a lot in anticipation. The space thing played a motivating factor. Also, as we talked about expatriating, we realized we move around every few years, and would that continue to hold? Not having the answer to that question, we decided to avoid leaving anything in storage. Paying extra money only to hold onto material items seemed silly. Plus, figuring out the logistics of getting it to us if we end up somewhere different did not sound appealing. It probably would be cheaper to buy new things by that point! Flying untethered, living life on the wild side. Swashbuckling. Although, I do miss my Snuggie in the damp UK climate.
Spoiler alert! We downsized, but imperfectly. However, I am pretty sure the term downsizing represents itself as an iterative dynamic process anyways. So, I need to give us more credit for going from a 2800 sq. ft. to 1200 sq ft. place. We missed a few drawers (or realistically just ran out of time). Plus, not knowing where we would be living when our sea freight shipped out required best judgment calls on the floor plan, room sizes, etc. During this process, I expected to find something for us that would be closer to 1400-1500 sq ft. When reading our other posts, you will see I really need to stop setting premature expectations on things!
Stages of Downsizing Grief
Because I did that, it has taken me a while to adjust to living in a smaller home. Probably more than anyone else in our family. Going through the stages of unpacking rage and grief contributed to this. I do not mind the invitation to live in a smaller house. It is an exciting adventure to learn to utilize space creatively! When I was younger, interior decorating interested me. That decorating bug never really left. My younger self decided it could not be a profession for me if I had to design for others’ style, LOL!
With that said, I struggle with dealing with surplus stuff that made it over in our sea freight. We have a lot we still need to figure out how to dispose of, store, or find new homes for. It can feel like the 12 days of Christmas unpacking as we realize we brought 1000 index cards (thanks college flashcards obsession), 10 chopsticks, seven empty three-ring binders, five extra nail clippers, four years of tax forms past the keep date, and a partridge in a pear tree.
In some ways, for our snow-weathered friends, this process feels like the stages you go through when shoveling a driveway after a huge snowstorm. You have the pump-up, and beginner motivation, the frustration, the exhaustion, the anger, the despair, the denial, the pep talk, the second-wind (and third and fourth), and the euphoric feeling of finishing. Then the snowplow comes by and you start again 😉
We’re getting closer to the light of the tunnel. We still have a way to go. The process requires a combo of downsizing and resizing – because bedrooms do not always have closets here. Bathrooms do not always have storage cabinets or closets either. We do need someplace to put things!
Once we get it all sorted, it will be a lovely and cozy home. It feels good to experiment with living on a trim diet of things. It is easy to get caught up in accumulating things, especially with kids. Regardless of whether you live in a more spacious home, plan to downsize, or move, we invite you to go through your 14 nail clippers (or even riskier your filing cabinet). Pick what you need and maybe add a smaller factor of safety than what you have. See how it makes you feel 😊 If you have done that already, don’t you agree that it feels SO amazing (only when you completed the task though)! Good for you for being on top of it!
Moving During the Holidays
If you’ve moved during the holidays you know it feels like a whirlwind of trying to enjoy the season and also plow out getting settled in. It’s been a bit of a juggle doing both right now, but we’ve been able to do some new, fun Christmas activities to balance out the mundane world of unpacking! We also bought some Prosecco and ingredients to make some mince pie (a UK tradition). We’ll let you know how it turns out.
Walking through Tinsel & Tweed at Angelsey Abbey
We visited Angelsey Abbey estate to walk through the home decorated for the holidays (called Tinsel & Tweed). We visited the grounds previously, but this allowed us to visit inside the Abbey to see it decorated for Christmas (how it was decorated back in the day). Highlights include seeing a tall Christmas tree decorated and explaining to Lil Fox and Hedgehog if all the food was real or fake.
Seeing Enchanted Audley
The lights were beautiful and a new experience for us. The trail started with a talking tree to help narrate what we can expect. Over the mile of walking through Christmas lights, they had bonfires to roast marshmallows plus our version of carnival rides that we mentioned before. The tickets weren’t cheap! However, we enjoyed it. The music throughout the trail made us feel like we were in some type of Disney movie (no singing, but think more intense end credit type of songs).
Dig Your Own Christmas Tree
We dug our own Christmas tree – it seems to be a more common practice than a cut your own. So we have it sitting in a pot in our house! Easier to replant hopefully 🙂 And if you’re wondering how we got it in a pot, the Christmas trees are smaller. The common Christmas tree species we see is the Norway Spruce. I’ve never felt much like a city slicker, but this probably came as close to that feeling for me in a while. We all took a turn digging and enjoyed it! It was a cute non-commercial place and the gentlemen were super nice and accommodating to all our questions (never having done the full experience before). There was even a broken shovel that was the perfect size for Hedgehog.
