How We Purged to Sell Our House and Move into an Airstream

The day we decided we were really going to pack up everything and full-time travel in an Airstream, I knew I had a big task ahead of me.

I was used to planning trips. From weekend getaways to month-long backpacking trips across Europe, there is almost nothing that I’m more confident in than planning a trip.

But figuring out how to plan and execute everything that came before the biggest trip yet would be a totally different beast.

So here’s what we did before we hit the road.

1. Sold my downtown studio

   My business had operated out of a 6,000 sq. ft. building I owned in the heart of downtown Conway, Arkansas for years. I thought of it as my retirement. It had huge emotional significance to me. But my business had been 100% online for a few years, and good thing, because if we were traveling full-time, a huge studio wasn’t going to do much good! So we started the overwhelming task of packing up the studio and putting it on the market.

2. Got a temperature controlled storage unit

   If we were going to empty the studio, we needed a place to put the stuff we wanted to keep. After selling 98% of my wedding rentals, we moved the items we were saving to a storage facility where we would eventually move all the items from our home that we wanted to save but didn’t want to take with us.

3. We did something everyday

   We decided that we wanted to be on the road by Fall 2020, which meant that we needed to do something each day to work toward that goal, even if it was just taking one bag of stuff to the thrift store, or emptying one kitchen junk drawer.

   You can read more about this process here.

   Essentially, we had four categories for every. single. item in our home. Because at the end of this, our home needed to be empty. The four categories were: sell, store, donate, or keep in Airstream.

   We were downsizing from 3000 square feet to 200, so very few items could make the Airstream cut.

4. We clarified what we really wanted to keep

   We went through several rounds of editing the things we wanted to either take on the airstream or store. We practiced living with our pared-down items. Months in advance, we all switched to capsule wardrobes, a minimalist kitchen, and the kids even started sharing one room.

   If we started missing items, or realizing we had items we just weren’t using, we could make edits or additions before it really mattered.

   We got rid of holiday totes, where I kept all the decor I used for the 4th of July, Christmas, and Thanksgiving. I stored my favorite kitchen items, the Parisian copper pans, or the lasagna pan that will be a Zimmerman family heirloom one day. I knew our Airstream kitchen couldn’t accommodate them, but I also knew they were irreplaceable.

   I wanted anything I kept to be something I was excited to see when I opened the door on our storage room.

5. FB marketplace

   For things that we sold, we sold them on Facebook Marketplace. I’m not kidding when I say we made a few thousand dollars selling items that we didn’t care to store and that wouldn’t fit in the Airstream. I sold an older iMac, a Pottery Barn desk, some artwork prints, kids toys, chairs, etc. It was so freeing to know that I could post something today and it would be gone tomorrow, and we could even make some money back!

   Once we fit an item into one of the four categories, we knew exactly what we were going to do with it. We decided once that selling meant we would sell on Facebook Marketplace, that storing meant going to our storage facility, keeping meant tucking away in the room that we used as our makeshift Airstream until we actually picked up our new home, and donating meant taking to the local thrift store.

6. Sell our vehicles

   The last phase of purging our home was emptying our garage of our cars.

   We knew we would only need one car for the foreseeable future: a truck to haul our Airstream. After a ton of research, I found that a white Chevrolet would retail its value the best, so we swapped my van and Brian’s Fourrunner— both things that wouldn’t hold their value if we stored them for a year or two— for a white diesel Chevy truck.

And that’s how we purged our big house to fit five people in an Airstream!

The biggest takeaway from the process is nothing new to me:

What am willing to give up to get what I really want? You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.

We decided our goal was to live in an Airstream full-time, and that meant doing a lot of un-fun stuff like packing up an entire house, selling some favorite items, and learning to live with less.

But after about a month on the road, I’m here to tell you that I’d rather have these memories than any of the items we sold or gave away.