There’s a couple in Plai Laem, mid-seventies now, who came to me in March two years ago about downsizing from a four-bedroom villa to a one-bedroom condo down in Bangrak. They’d been on the island eighteen years, raised their kids partly here, kept the place going through three rounds of renovations. The trigger was the wife’s hip replacement. Her surgeon back in the UK had been clear: no more stairs, not if she could help it.

So they’d found a condo with a lift in Bangrak, sold the villa to a Russian buyer in February, and now had eight weeks to deal with eighteen years of accumulated life. The condo was 65 square metres. The villa contents, when we walked through, included a dining table that seated ten, three rattan armchairs the husband had had made in Hua Hin in 2008 and considered the best chairs he’d ever owned, a teak Buddha statue they’d bought on their first holiday here in 2003, his complete dive kit, her sewing room, four full bookshelves, and a garage of Christmas decorations and toys for grandchildren who’d stopped visiting.

She cried the first time we did the walkthrough. Not over the move itself, she was relieved to be moving out, the stairs really were getting dangerous, but over the realisation that almost none of it was going to fit in the new place. He was more practical, kept saying “we’ll just sell most of it, easy money,” but you could see he was stalling on the dive gear especially, and on the rattan chairs.

What I told them is what I tell most people in their situation. Take a unit for a year. Don’t decide anything in February that you haven’t slept on by August. Move what you definitely want to the condo, send what you definitely don’t want to an auction house I know off Sukhumvit, and put everything in between into storage and walk away from it for six months. They booked a medium unit that afternoon and we did the move two weeks later as a single job.

I’ve had this same conversation with maybe twenty other customers over the years. A widower in Lamai who downsized after his wife died because eight bedrooms felt wrong for one man and a labrador. A Swedish couple in Maenam whose kids had stopped visiting after the pandemic and who’d realised the house was empty most of the year anyway. A British divorcee who’d lost the villa in the settlement and didn’t know yet whether she was staying on the island. None of them made the right decision in the first month. All of them said afterwards that the storage time was what saved them.

The Plai Laem couple came back in November to start sorting through the unit. They kept maybe a quarter of what was in there. The dining table went to their son who lives in Bristol. The rattan chairs the husband actually couldn’t part with, so two of them are in the condo now and the third one their daughter took to Edinburgh. The dive kit he sold to a shop in Chaweng for less than half what he paid for it and didn’t seem to mind. They’d spent about 18,000 baht on the storage that year. Two years on, both of them say it was the best decision they made in the whole process.

What I’d Tell You If You Were Making This Decision

First thing: don’t try to decide what to keep before you’ve actually been in the new place for a few months. The relationship between your stuff and your space changes when the space itself changes. Things you thought you couldn’t live without often turn out fine to let go of, and small things you didn’t think about become surprisingly important. You can’t predict any of that in advance, no matter how organised a person you are.

Second thing, and this is where I disagree with most of the standard advice on downsizing: storage in this context isn’t permanent. It’s a six-to-twelve-month decision tool. A medium unit on Samui runs around 4,000 to 6,000 baht a month. Six months of that is cheap as the price of not making a wrong call. That said, you don’t need storage if you’re already certain about what you want to keep. Some people are. They walked through the villa in February, made the calls, sold what was selling, donated the rest, and moved into the condo with exactly what they wanted. If that’s you, save your money. The unit’s for the people who haven’t got there yet, which is most people.

Third: do it as one job. Coordinating different movers from three places at once is how things get lost or broken. We do removals alongside the storage, which means whatever’s not going to the new place comes straight to us in the same trip and goes wherever you decide it’s going six months later. People try to save money by hiring a separate cheaper mover and end up with damaged furniture and missing boxes.

I’ve been doing this on the island since 2009 and the pattern with downsizers is consistent. The ones who gave themselves time ended up at peace with what they kept. The ones who tried to do it in three weeks always have something they wish they’d held onto. Our Samui storage is set up to be the breathing room, not a permanent home. The Plai Laem couple still pop in occasionally. He’s started saying he should have got rid of the dive kit ten years earlier. She doesn’t agree.