Considering A Move?
July 19th, 2010
My wife and I live in a house that has 25 steps from street level to the first floor and 15 steps from the first floor to the second where the master bed room is located. We are very aware that the time will come when we will no longer be willing to, or in fact, able to negotiate these stairs.
We have a strong preference for proactive planning and we have started to explore our alternatives for downsizing. We enjoy our community a great deal and have limited our search, to date, to the neighbourhood.
Recently, friends moved into a condominium building that we had placed on our shortlist. They invited us over for a visit and a glass of champagne. Their building was in a good location and the apartment itself, was very attractive. As we looked into the various rooms, the kitchen and the balcony, we had a number of startling revelations. To move into a condo like this one, the reduction in floor space was going to be more significant than we had expected.
In order to move into an apartment of this size, we would be facing:
- Replacing our bedroom and living room furniture. The alternatives are smaller sofas, for example, or very cramped rooms.
- Reducing the volume of dishes, glasses, pots and pans and cookbooks that are stored in our current kitchen.
- Getting rid of closets full of stuff that we would not have room to store. Everything stored in the garden shed and the garage will have to go.
- Disposing of roughly a third of our clothes and over half of our books. And this after the bookshelves had been, we thought, severely culled.
- Doing without a wood burning, or for that matter, a gas burning fireplace for the first time since 1978.
Clearly, a change of this magnitude was going to take a lot of thought, a lot of planning and a lot of time to get through with a minimum amount of stress. To help us get over this long list of surprises, we started to discuss the advantages of decluttering and moving into a condo. As our discussions come to conclusions, we will share them with you.
William Jack
Tags: decluttering, Housing, life style
Email This Post