Nick Russel's Gypsy Journal Blog has been a long favorite of mine. He has a lot of insight and very useful perspective about many diverse things besides just full time Rving.
When He and Terry finally bought a new motor home they had to move everything from their MCI bus conversion into the new vehicle and that meant discovering a lot of things that had been there but forgotten for years. He chronicled this multi-day effort in his blog. He also has a "bad side" that is ruled by Bad Nick. Bad Nick seems to be the one that has more mouth than brain, a shorter fuse than an older cherry bomb and despite strong social fences and tethers, does manage to get out, occasionally and impress his needs on the world around him. You can follow the misadventures of Bad Nick on his own website… But I digress.
The follow is an excerpt from my comments which I posted on the regular Nick's blog when he was grousing about all the stuff that had to be relocated or disposed of to move into the new Winnebago.
Believe me, just because one is living in less than 400 sq ft does not mean that the usual FSF (Flat Surface Fungus) does not thrive just as well as in a 4000 sq ft Stix and Brix home.
It sounds like maybe Bad Nick gets a lot of that stuff and then puts it in unrelated places just to gently hide it from you and Terry. He probably knows exactly where it is and maybe even gets it out to play with it sometimes when you guys are not paying attention.
Personal experience:
We still have the advantage of living in DakotR in the back yard. All of our "stuff" is still in the basement of the house. Every few months, I take a 90 gallon city trash can and drag it into the basement, empty. The goal is to fill it before the next trash pickup on Tuesday. The "left-overs" that I gleaned out of the boxes, drawers and other "high density" hideouts, are left sitting out to be sorted and restored in new places. This adds an urgency factor to dealing with them because whatever flat spaces they now occupy are probably places that I will need to be able to use in a few weeks or months. Places like the table saw bed, workbench, flip top tool box, slack space on the hand tools storage shelves.
That last one is a really good technique because as tools are discovered in various random boxes, bags, buckets, etc. They have to be put on those shelves sooner or later so the boxes, bags, etc. can be pitched into the 90 gallon "liberator!". When that happens there will rarely be anything that is as important as the tool.. Any tool, used or unused for decades will still trump 4 Aces of any other sort of content.
I will admit that this cannot be done in a few weeks. Some lagging content will be able to hold out longer in this competition than John Ratzenberger on Dancing with the Stars. The key is the presence of the 90 gallon mawr that must be fed to full by Tuesday. That insures that every week the liberator is brought into the basement, 90 gallons of volume is released to the natural environment and eventually, you will see the difference.
There is just one rule, If its in the basement I must not be there past monday evening and it must never be put on the curb less than full. Its amazing how well this works for us that are organizationally challenged and sometimes can't seem to make a simple decision between STAY, GO, DONATE. I have found that by the time things have survived the liberator a few times (or many) and have not had their destinies firmly decided, the sheer trouble of having to face them again wears down their staying power and their ability to cling to the edge of my indecision, weakens and starts to slip.
By the time I reach the "Oh crap! I have to handle this again!" point,... it has become translated into crap and that is a no-brainer.
I promise that it only takes a few weeks of gritting your teeth when facing the unfilled Liberator 90 gallon container before that becomes a passion more powerful than all the collected "I am sure I can/will/might use that item someday".
And above all, don't let the ebb-tide side of this catch you by surprise. It is guaranteed that with a week or even a few days after the Tuesday an item left with the liberator, you will see an immediate need for it. That is the way of nature.... ignore it and just ask yourself if you would have recognized this need if you had not just handled that item for the first time in 14 years? The answer must always be NO! because if you had even thought of it you would not have had a clue where it was and would not have been willing to spent the hours of lost time it would have taken to discover that it was not in any of the places that you could have thought of to look in for it.
For those items that are still potentially too useful, valuable or warm and fuzzy to give to the liberator, you can store them on eBay or Craigslist until you need them (never).
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