Patty, congratulations! What can you tell us about the house (without jinxing the deal)? Property or house size, interesting location? How far will you be from amenities? Good luck negotiating the storage access. I used a storage facility in New Mexico for a couple of years in the late 1990s when I was planning to move there. Nothing high-tech about it. When I went to finally move that stuff out my ID was all I needed to get the guy to use bolt cutters on my lock because I had brought the wrong padlock key.

Family stuff moved down from the northwest was stored in Sedillo in anticipation of the settling there. I had a house lined up, a job offer and plans to pursue a PhD at the university, but my ex's divorce attorney dragged her feet so long that the whole arrangement collapsed (I couldn't buy the house by myself until the divorce was final). There is a coda: two months later I was diagnosed with cancer and I been in the new job, my insurance wouldn't have covered it. I stayed in the Texas job to keep my insurance after cancer. I left everything in NM storage for the time being (versus just moving to another storage locker in Texas.) In addition to that, I had a lot of stuff from the marital home that I put in pods when I moved out, so when I moved into this house I had the locker contents and two pods to move in. Two rooms here were packed full and unusable until I sorted it. Now only the front room is storage (though for quite a while it was in use as the library and watching TV). It is filled with the evidence of the Goodwill habit and family trunks and antiques I'm not planning to keep. That sums up the bulk of my current declutter challenge.

More thunderstorms today. I should dive into the contents of that front room and see what is easy to list next.