Downsizing: Moving "Zero" Waste

Somewhere along this journey it came to our attention that the house where we have been renting in Louisville, Colorado, has more space than we really need. In addition, it seems that the places and people we visit most frequently are centered around a part of Boulder which is ten miles from where we live. Top this off with our desire to save more money so that in the next four years we could put a down payment on a home that we can "green" to our hearts content and the solution seems like a no brainer.
At the end of May, we are moving out of our 1600 square foot, three bedroom, 2 bath, 2 living room house into a 600 square foot one bedroom, one bath, condo in Boulder. This not only puts us in biking distance to the majority of places we frequent including Melissa's job, the rent is less than 2/3s what we are currently paying. Did someone say down payment? We are very excited for all of the reasons previously mentioned and because ti comes with access to a community clubhouse and soon to be community garden.
For me, this is part of sustainable living. In the more popular model, everyone has everything they could ever need in their own home and they go to work for 40+ hours a week to pay for it and its upkeep. I like the model where Melissa and I have what we essentially need in our one bedroom condo and the things that are not essential are shared and spread out among the community such as the indoor pool, outdoor hot tub, exercise room, vegetable garden, office center with fax machine and scanner and a clubhouse with a kitchen, big screen TV, pool table, tennis and basket ball courts and a nice patio by the lake with BBQs and WiFi. Yep. It make much more sense to me to share these things at a bare fraction of the cost. Not to mention the eco footprint.
We also we this a an opportunity to experiment with downsizing. Just to paint a more detailed picture of what this means for Melissa, Xani (our feline little sister) and I in terms of space, imagine this: The bedroom will be my office/music studio where I give guitar lessons, the dinning room will be Melissa's office and the Living room will double as our bedroom thanks to a fold up futon couch. Talk about downsizing. Fortunately, the walk in closet is outside of the bedroom off the hall way so Melissa wont need to interrupt my lessons to change clothes. My closet, the smaller one, is off the dining room which gives me more wall space in my studio as there is no closet in there. I like it! The space distribution seems like it was intelligently designed for our needs. That is sustainable.
In my experience, moving can create a lot of unnecessary waste. Our intention is to make the move in the most eco friendly, non wasteful manner and share our discoveries in this blog.

So far, I have been selling our unnecessary, unwanted and unused possessions on craigslist. This Saturday we will hopefully sell the rest of it at our moving sale. We will let you know how the rest goes.

Robb