Tuesday, 7 February 2017

Sailing Around Australia; Stuff



Stuff

I am sitting here surrounded by stuff. In fact I had to shove it out of the way to be able to sit and type on my mac book. Normally having all this in my personal space would really annoy me.

Today though, the stuff that is strewn about the saloon of Easy Tiger is ok. That’s because it is all our stuff.

For the past 8 months we have lived with other peoples stuff that we were very careful and respectful of. Now that we are back on board Easy Tiger with our own stuff we don’t have to give a “stuff” about it.

Have you noticed how strange stuff is? People have garages, spare rooms and storage units full of stuff. Even after our huge downsizing, going from a family of four to two people living on a boat, we have a sea container full of stuff that we just can’t seem to part with.

This stuff seems to be able to breed, grow and multiply better than rabbits.

When we left for the trip home to WA, we flew out with one bag of luggage each. A month later we moved into a house sit, with those two bags and a couple of boxes of stuff.

Three months later we moved out of that house to another with four bags and three quite big boxes of stuff, to the second house sit job.

Three months later we had two car-loads of stuff.

We needed to cull our stuff before it took over and smothered us. What to do with all this stuff?

There was no other alternative. We would have to go through our sea container load of stuff and do some culling.

We were dreading having to do it, but on the last day we had available, we finally got round to opening up our time capsule. We spent a day unloading, then reloading and restacking our sea container. By the end of it we were well satisfied we had sorted our stuff.  We had a car-load for the rubbish tip and some bags for the charity bins.  We had made a bit more space in the sea container. Unfortunately we had the car half loaded with stuff we wanted to take back to the boat.

We had decided to drive our car back to the Gold Coast, where Easy Tiger has been stored, while we have been back in Western Australia. The advantage of taking our car was we would have wheels to get around in while we were on the East Coast of Australia. We didn’t dream that we would be using it as a storage unit!

The day before our departure, I stacked, packed and squashed the huge pile of stuff we wanted to take with us into the car. Several times I got down to two or three items left and had to start over again, as they just didn’t seem to fit.

After another five days driving, we arrived at Boatworks in Coomera at a bit over 8pm. Exhausted after spending 16 hours driving.

Since then two and a half days have gone by. What have we been doing? Sorting stuff. Every cupboard on Easy Tiger had to be emptied cleaned out and the repacked with new (or just different) stuff. So the stuff brought with us in the car had to fnd a home on Easy Tiger. The stuff on Easy Tiger had to find a place. Where was the best place for that stuff? In the car.

Our 5 seater car is now merely a mobile storage unit.


It does finally feel good that we have our stuff together and sorted.  I am not sure when next the motivation will strike. I hope it’s not soon though, because I am stuffed.

Our mobile storage unit packed and ready

Leanne at the wheel on our road trip

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