About this time last year, my husband and I set a plan in motion to downsize and simplify our life. It seemed simple in theory – just get rid of everything we don’t want or need, list the house, move somewhere new, and live happily ever after in our new, neat-as-a-pin, cozy digs.

I suppose life works that way to get us moving – a sort of unintended blinder like most of us have when we decide to have kids. If someone told us the whole truth and nothing but the truth of how it’s really going to be, we might just hit the NO button and stay snug in our comfort zone or move on to the next bright idea. One thing’s for sure, change is seldom what we think it’s going to be – at least in the beginning.

Let me paint you a picture. For eight years, we lived in a 3,100 square foot home with two young sons, a dog, and all of the stuff that comes with that. Believing the boys needed more space, we moved up in the world to a 6,000 square foot home. I had so much storage space that about half of it was empty, and I had good intentions of keeping it that way. It was nice to have a little wiggle room and space for entertaining our large family at the holidays. I never imagined we could actually fill it up. After all, I prided myself on being neat and free of hoarding tendencies. Eight years later, we were full up!

What’s that they say about about pride? Oh yeah – it comes before a fall (Proverbs 16:18). And fall I did!

Once the decision to downsize was etched in stone, it became clear that strangers would now be browsing through our home while we weren’t looking. They would be opening closets, drawers, attics and garages in an attempt to decide if our place was the answer to their prayers. I was horrified to see that we were indeed occupying a large territory of our home with STUFF. Even worse, the stuff was stuffed anywhere it would fit. I had even gone so far as to neatly organize all the stuff in pretty boxes, but I’d long ago forgetten what was even in them.

And so the process of clearing the cobwebs and uncluttering began. From April until August, I dived headfirst into the task of letting go so that my house would be suitable for showing once it debuted on the MLS. I greeted each day in workout clothes and flip flops, no makeup, and with lots of determination. With the exception of the friends that would drop in to make sure I was still alive and eating, I was for all intents and purposes AWOL from the world.

I tossed trash, donated clothes and household goods, and sold a lot of items to bank for the new things I would need in the next home. I felt great about my work and was all set to make a smooth, painless move when the time came. I felt gloriously unfettered, but I would soon learn that the freedom I felt was only temporary.

Lacking a place to go when your house sells earlier than expected introduces all kinds of new panic. We weren’t ready. Our new dream home had yet to materialize. It was a bit of a shock after so many years of home ownership to finally conclude that our best choice was to lease rather than to rush into a purchase of something we didn’t love. We firmly established that we would not store anything except for holiday decorations and the contents of our garage, so we sold our large-scale furniture and filled the bed of a large junk removal truck before finally moving into our new 2,500 square foot townhouse bungalow with our boxes of keeper stuff and a U-Haul truck containing our remaining furniture.

I seriously felt like we’d come over with little more than the clothes on our back, so it was another shock when the boxes piled in and filled up more than two-thirds of new place. Clearly, all of this stuff that we couldn’t live without was not going to fit in the dozen or so cabinets and handful of drawers that the new place offered. There was no attic, two less spaces in the garage, two less bedrooms, no office. I’m pretty sure I wanted to sit in the floor and have a good cry. How could I have so significantly missed the mark?

Round three of divesting began with a renewed commitment to succeed…