leaving all the furniture behind

Do you ever get tired of your belongings? I sure do. It's not that I want new versions of everything that I own - some of it I simply want gone. I don't want to clean it, and I don't want to pack it or move it when we relocate again. We routinely go through all of the boxes that we have in storage, and try to clean out anything that we no longer need and that has no sentimental value. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to just abandon all of our furniture when we sell the house. There are lots of old Victorians in town that are sold fully furnished. Primarily, this is because the streets downtown are extremely steep, and trying to get moving trucks in there is difficult and dangerous.

I've been thinking of doing lots of built-in furniture in our next home. This will allow us to get rid of lots of what we have now, and it will allow me to creatively use built-in furnishings in the overall house plan, to be strategically placed as dividing kneewalls and visual points of interest throughout the home. We have already come up with a plan to build a full wall of drawers and closet-like armoirs between the two kids' loft areas. The built-in will actually be the dividing wall between their space.

I've been toying with the idea of building some of these items out of rustic logs. We lost about a half dozen trees in the recent hurricane aftermath, and the trunks and branches are just begging to be cut-up, debarked, and reborn as something new. I've never been much of a carpenter in the past, but I never had the right tools, either. At least if I leave it with a rustic finish, I don't have to worry about making it look pristine and perfect. I can allow the character of the wood to dictate the design and final finish.