What We Don’t Miss After Downsizing

What We Don’t Miss After Downsizing

After four years of full-time RV life, we finally made our way back to our old storage unit. We weren’t sure what to expect — but we definitely didn’t expect to find it broken into.

Our tools? Gone.
Workbench? Gone.

We were frustrated at first. But once the shock wore off, we had a strange realization:

We didn’t even remember what most of it was.

And just like that, this whole experience became less about loss… and more about clarity.

What This Experience Taught Us:

1. Most of what we saved, we didn’t need.
We went through bins of old shoes, holiday decor, vendor supplies, kitchen gadgets — and realized they’d been completely out of sight and out of mind for four years. Even the stuffed animals and kid books our girls had outgrown were just taking up space and gathering dust.

2. Temperature control matters.
Many of our “saved” items were damaged beyond use — warped from heat, stained by moisture, or just aged beyond repair.
Even the mattresses we wrapped in protectors? Still not something we’ll ever actually use again.

3. Security is worth paying for.
After the break-in, we moved to a new facility with cameras, a locked gate, and a live-in manager. We also bought a disc lock that can’t be cut easily — a small investment that could’ve saved us a lot of loss.

4. If it’s valuable, document it.
I now make it a habit to take photos of anything we store and track what we have using the Notes app on my phone. I title each note clearly so it’s searchable — it’s become my digital filing cabinet.
I even scanned every important paper and burned the physical copies. No more clutter, and no more digging for things in the dark.

5. That “just in case” item? You probably won’t need it.
Case in point: my beloved Amish furniture.
I held onto it for years, convinced we’d use it someday. But when we moved into our new RV, it didn’t fit — and I had to sell it last-minute for way less than I could’ve years ago. Lesson learned.

6. Downsizing is never done.
Even after moving into an RV, we realized this: you evolve. What mattered when we first hit the road doesn’t always reflect where we are now. And that’s okay. But we don’t need to keep the past in a storage unit to honor it.

Final Thoughts:

This experience could’ve just been a headache — and in some ways, it was.

But it also gave us freedom.

We were forced to let go of things we didn’t realize we’d already outgrown. And in that process, we gained space — not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, too.

We thought we were downsizing four years ago. Turns out, we were just getting started.