The wheels are turning

I was thinking that many of you don't know what we are up to as far as selling the house, moving where we are going and why. This post is to clear some of that up for you.
We live in the house pictured on the top of my blog. Its located on 16 acres in rural Oklahoma.

We moved to Oklahoma from eastern Kansas almost 6 years ago when a head hunter found my husband and he got a job at Seaboard Foods. The company moved us. It was so easy. They packed, loaded and unloaded.

We have enjoyed our country life but feel its time to close this chapter in our lives. We both feel God calling us to simplify and downsize and become more mobile. We also feel the call to get debt free as soon as possible.

Right now we can afford our home but the future is never certain. What is affordable today may not be affordable next year. We both felt the time to sell our home that we love and move was while we could still afford to live here. If things go south we didn't want to be in a position where we were hanging on by a thread with the threat of losing our house hanging over us.

Our house was on the market for two years. It is now sold. A local young lady with a small child is going to be the new owner. She is a recent widow and a school teacher. This house will be wonderful for her. She will have room to have her animals and things around her. I know she is going to love this place. Plus she will be neighbors to some of their family friends.

Anyway, we have been sorting, packing, and purging with a vengeance. Our plan right now is to live in our 5th wheel in an rv park near where Jeff works.

We had run through several options and ideas of what to do with our excess stuff that wont fit in the rv but we need and use and just plain don't want to part with.

One option was to buy a container and place it on my sisters land, use it for as long as we needed to and then give the container to her. When we priced the containers we found that they were twice as expensive as we had thought. Plus we would not have ready access to our belongings.

I love to can. Sew. Make soap, etc. I wanted an alternative that allowed me to have my extra stuff close by in a usable format.

Another option for storage was to rent a storage unit. I don't like the idea of giving my money away each month and not having my stuff close where I can get to it and use it anytime I want.

Finally we hit upon the solution we think will work for us. We are going to purchase a 24 to 26 ft. enclosed trailer. We will build shelves along each side to store our totes of things we want to keep. We thought if we had an aisle down the middle it would keep our things accessible and usable as opposed to piled in like a moving van. We knew if we didn't organize from the start we might as well get rid of everything.

We are in the process of finding an enclosed trailer as well as sorting through all our belongings. We have found that we have an amazing amount of belongings.

My idea is to park the 5th wheel facing one way. Park the enclosed trailer facing towards the rv and then putting one of those tent roof things for shade between the two and tying it down to both trailers.

We have already asked the park owner if we can have both the 5th wheel and the enclosed trailer and he has agreed it will be fine.

We also want to install a small chest deep freeze in the trailer so we can have a small stash of meat on hand. Right now we have two large upright freezers.

I will be chronicling our adventure as we live it. I will also try to take lots of pictures so you can see what we are doing.