A surprising truth I learned from selling my stuff

Who knew a Facebook Marketplace transaction would be so revelatory?

This is a continuation of last week’s post, 3 new ways to think about consumption.

Btw, the comment section is a goldmine of great ideas, so I suggest taking a moment to click through to those even if you’ve already read the post. There’s a great tip mentioned by multiple people that I’m going to start following stat.

What follows is an elaboration of item 3, about giving your stuff a good life.

Ok. Bear with me on this. We’re in for a bit of an ideas journey here. I had a revelation last month as we started packing for our annual 4 hour roadtrip to my husband’s family reunion. With a growing family, we started worrying a couple years ago that we would need extra cargo space for the 5-ish day trip.

I found this Thule cargo box for a steal in early 2022, and we’ve used it twice since then. In between its annual trip, it sits in our basement, covered with off-season shoes and jackets.

Now that we’re converting our basement from a storage space to a people space (aka a guest suite and workout area), we had to clear out the entire basement and solve for where and how to store this cargo box going forward.

Upon reflection, I realized we are not very active owners of this thing. We could truthfully fit everything in the trunk of our SUV if need be. And we only use it once a year.

There were two competing perspectives in my house: