Downsizing - How We Moved Into a Van
Part I: Downsizing
If you’re moving into a van full-time, you'll need to downsize your belongings from your fancy room-to-lift-your-arms lifestyle into something that will fit into your new build. Trust us, this will be a bigger, longer, and more emotionally taxing project than you think. You never realize how much one cabinet can hold, until it’s time to pilfer through everything in it and decide what’s coming and going. Now multiply this times every cubby, closet, and crevice in your home. Yikes!
We decided that we didn't want to pay for longterm storage and wanted everything we were keeping to fit in the van. The exception was a single box each of keepsakes that we stored in our parent's attic. Everything else we sold or donated. It was important to us that our stuff go to new homes and not be sent to the landfill. We used various selling apps to completely clear our home of belongings. Jess made a 12 month downsizing plan and needed every month of it!
The final cleaning on our last day at our home in Brooklyn
Our Strategy
Schedule it out.
Are there students moving in/out at certain times of the year? Do I have 4 seasons worth of clothes that may sell better at certain times of the year? Do I have plans that will make some months busier than others?
Jess used the Downsizing Schedule Tracker to plan out how we would go through each area of the apartment to inventory, sort, and remove items. We did our best to go through seasonal clothes when they would be most desirable. We also had a wedding attend, family reunion, and house guests to plan around. Every month we reviewed one area of the house and sorted items to sell or donate.
InventoryAllTheThings!
How many rooms do I have? Do some rooms have more storage containers/bins/closets than others? What do I know I have a lot of?
The kitchen and the bookshelves were some obvious areas of our home where we had a high “stuff volume”. Until you start opening cabinets and realizing how much they hold vs how much you actually use on a regular basis, it’s really hard to say how much stuff you have in your home. Go through these areas and inventory all the things sorting as you go into what you could sell, donate, recycle, or should discard.
Research your removal options.
What apps, sites, local resources are going to move more stuff faster and with the best value for my time and money?
Below are the tools we used to downsize, how much of our total sales they represent, and how we felt about them.
What We Sold
eBay - 4% of total sales - A lot of work without a lot of sales. If your items expire then you have to repost them. If we had more niche items, maybe this would have been a better market for us.
Poshmark - 8% of total sales - A good deal of work to take photos and list items, but then you can kind of set and forget. Jess kept the account active by sharing and following other sellers.
An old fashioned apartment sale - 18% of total sales - We put up flyers in our apartment building and had a few weekend open-house style sales where people came by and purchased items. Also the folks moving into our apartment loved some of our furniture and custom pieces John built for the space and purchased those. Win/win!
Facebook Marketplace - 70% of total sales - Also a good deal of work to take photos and list items. Then you get the joy of talking to the interesting people who message you about your items. We had a lot more communications management to do with Marketplace, but found several marketplace groups that helped us move most of our inventory.
Everything Else - Donations and Gifts
Decluttr is a selling platform for books and electronics. They make it really easy to scan book ASIN codes and make a “cart”. Decluttr will tell you if that book is something they’re buying and how much they’ll pay you. Print a label and put your box of books in the mail. Done! We didn’t make very much money on the books sold here - less than $100 for books that cost far more when we bought them. The win was not having to haul several 100lbs of books to a used book store not knowing if they’d take any of them.
Facebook Marketplace was also a great way to move items that weren’t really sell-able but were still good to use. We found new homes for items by sharing photos and by having a “free” section in the apartment when people came by for our open house.
ThredUp is a place to buy and sell used clothes. While a few of our items did sell, this wasn’t really a money maker for us. What ThredUp did provide that we loved was the ability to donate clothing that didn’t have resale value. It was as easy as printing a label and putting it on a box. Big thanks to the USPS folks who lugged several pounds of clothes out of our mail room each month!
Family heirlooms or items we knew friends or family would enjoy we boxed up into care packages and mailed out. Ceramic pans from Jess’ great grandmother, Star Wars memorabilia, old postcards from China each went to folks we knew would enjoy them.
Medic Mobile safely recycles used phones and tablets to fund healthcare programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Best Buy has a recycling programs for electronics and appliances.
So, all that sounds nice and organized, but the truth is that downsizing all at once is really time-consuming. We had things that meant a lot to us and that we’d chosen with care to be a part of our sticks-n-bricks home. Getting rid of those items was emotionally challenging.
Jess managed the bulk of downsizing while John focused on the design and construction of the van. This meant while John was working on the dream for the future, Jess was digging through boxes and bins of the past. We found it hard to do it any other way because of the timeline we set for ourselves, but if we could have shared more of the load of the past we would have (if John had to).
In the end, we moved into the van and all our belongings fit! We were able to downsize in a guilt-free way - but it took a lot of time and organization. We’re still finding things to sell and donate, as we learn how to navigate life in our new world. If nothing else, each day is teaching us what has value in our lives and what doesn’t.
Part II: What to take with you
While you’re doing all that downsizing you won’t want to neglect putting aside the things you want to take! We did a combination of purchasing new things and re purposing items we already had in our apartment.
Read more about each section of our home and what we brought.
