“Real Life” Stories about Downsizing
August 19th, 2010Downsizing is an important issue facing our clients, friends and indeed us, personally. In the case of my wife and me, we need to downsize from the house that we have lived in since 1984. I was therefore struck when I saw Gary May’s article “The Downsizer’s Dilemma” in the July 23rd edition of the Globe and Mail.
It describes the experiences of two couples, “fifty something baby boomers”, that downsized. The first couple moved from a 2,300 square foot home in Ottawa to a 1,165 square foot condo “on a charming small-town harbour an hour east of Toronto”. The second couple moved from a 3,200 square foot home in Toronto to a 1,200 square foot condo.
Both couples appeared to have done what I thought was a good job of preparing for the move.
- They decluttered their homes.
- They cordoned off an area in their homes to see if they could live in that amount of space.
- They replaced their furniture with condo sized designs.
The problems that they ran into were also interesting.
- They found the lack of privacy jarring.
- Both couples were planning to work from home and a two bedroom apartment did not provide sufficient space to do this.
- Buying a condo “off plan” proved harder than anticipated.
In the end, they did exactly what my wife and I are discussing: they added an intermediate step. One couple moved to small home on Lake Erie. The other bought a 1,600 square foot home in Port Hope. My wife and I are looking at townhouses in our neighbourhood as our intermediate step.
William Jack
Tags: downsizing, life style
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