I would love to downsize, husband says, never. So now I am calling this place the Mausoleum.

I was lucky. When I first started buying nicer furniture, I was living in smaller spaces, so I gravitated toward smaller scaled pieces. If I had to downsize tomorrow, I would be able to use most of my furniture. I only would have to get rid of the furniture for the rooms I wouldn't have in the smaller house.

Downsizingâ¦grrr, I have had more than one rant on this subject on the conversation side. The big problem for us in our downsize search is the closet and bathroom situation in the master area. We do not require one of those mega sized bedrooms or bathrooms but it seems to be one extreme to the other. My husband has more clothes than I have with all the dress shirts, shoes and suits for work. In one very cute small house we viewed my tall husband with big shoulders could not fit in the master shower. Due to those problems we have since changed our criteria to a much smaller yard than we have and âÂÂslightlyâ smaller square footage. The small houses around us for sale that was our original target have small yards and no room for expansion to even make the lack of closets and tiny bathroom work. I donâÂÂt think most of my furniture will be out of place in a slight downsize because the house IâÂÂm in now has narrow rooms, they are not huge but very tall. I can see a problem with using all of my larger wall art and paintings though.

This post was edited by jterrilynn on Sun, Jun 2, 13 at 13:12

Downsizing is definitely a "daunting" task. Over the last 8 years since I retired I've sold/given away a lot of stuff preparatory to moving. I am continually editing my belongings and am now cautious about buying unnecessary things I won't use much. Of course I haven't yet moved and really no plans in sight to do so altho I think about it. The real benefit of downsizing for me would be less house to clean! LOL

Any larger scaled furniture will not be moving with me. My newest upholstered pieces are now 6 years old so in a few years it will be a wonderful opportunity to redecorate. If I buy anything in the meantime I'll keep scale in mind.

I can see having less square footage with a better configuration for aging and definitely less land (I have a large acreage now) but I know I wouldn't want to live in a tiny house. I need space around me. However I do not need 9 rooms, 4 baths, plus storage rooms and could live quite comfortably with 5 rooms and 2 baths. The kids might have to 'rough-it' when they visit and sleep on the floor! ;D Having lived on acreages for 20++ years I'm not sure how I'll like living in the city.

I spend more time than I'd like gardening. It might be nice to only have a few containers on the deck and more time for fun. Altho I do love my garden to look at.

We are in the process of dealing with this. We placed our huge home on the market and it sold. What were we thinking??? I'm embarrassed to admit that I have 7 sets of china, sets of 12 in every barware imaginable, etc. I haven't even started thinking about the furniture yet. We don't have to be out of the house until September so it gives me time to procrastinate and I have never been a procrastinator. It is just too much to think about!

I wish they would build houses that have nice sized rooms and storage with fewer bedrooms and bathrooms. Unfortunately, it seems like new construction always tries to cram the most bedrooms into the least amount of square footage to the detriment of both the bedrooms and the living areas. I understand that the largest segment of the market is probably looking for homes that they can raise their children in, but it makes the house hunt frustrating for those who don't need more than two bedrooms.

Not sure how I'll feel in the future but I just told my husband earlier today that I can't imagine leaving this house. It has taken 20+ years but it's getting close to being just exactly what I want. Some of the intrinsic issues like tiny bathrooms and closets (and not many of those to start with) are becoming less of an issue as my kids get older. I think eventually they will be non-issues.

With only two people we'll each have our own bathroom. With only the two of us we can take over the bedroom closets and toss out everything of the kids' that we no longer use, want or they won't haul away :).

I feel lucky; this house is in a great location for aging in place since it's very close to the city and to transportation hubs including highways, the airport and rapid transit. It's a mature neighborhood that will hold it's value. And it's walking distance to a university from which, once we retire, there are ample retiree programs and cultural offerings to choose from.

So crossing my fingers I never need to downsize.

Ann

I feel it is daunting, as well. DH is itching to downsize and I am dreading it. I have no desire to move whatsoever. If I could move to the beach or on the lake, yes indeed. But alas, not an option. Nowhere else I would like to be.

We've been talking about downsizing, or really re-sizing since our house is already small, but I've looked in town and don't see anywhere I'd want to live. I too wonder how much town noise will bother me after living away from it for the last 15 years. But if I could live closer to my kids, I'd live in an apartment today.

I, for one, don't get or have the downsizing itch.

We're in our 60's, and not retired but have worked from home for more than a decade and plan to continue indefintely - or until we can't. We are lucky to be in good health and very physically active.

We live in middle of a very large property (a farm) and I wouldn't want to live amongst other people, so that may be a lot of my reluctance.

Our house is about 1800-2000 sq ft., so already small by many people's standards.

Are people who are planning to d/s moving from bigger houses, or to be closer to car-less-accessible amenities?

The car thing looms large because we are 25 - 40 miles from civilization here. Until recently we were 20+ miles from the nearest grocery store, for instance.

Is this downsizing thing necessary, or one of those stages we are told we need to do, with all its associated economic activity?.

There is a family cemetery here on the place, so the only downsizing I'm thinking of is really down sizing into the earth, hopefully many years from now.

The one thing I haven't really worked out is how we heat the place when we get old and are really feeble - or dotty. This house has no central heat, so we heat with wood which we harvest, haul, split, stack, haul again and finally carry out as ashes. And woodstoves require close and alert attention in order to burn safely. We are in northern NY, so this is a big deal. We have solar panels - with more planned - so I guess we could just add even more and use electric heat which is safe and steady, though expensive w/o generating your own solar.

Are those of you who are thinking of downsizing older than we are? Maybe it's just too early for us. I don't know.

L.

I'm younger, but I think of downsizing for two reasons, the cost of maintenance including ever increasing property taxes and utilities and the time spent to keep the place clean.

I am 65 and my husband is 70. He has heart disease and is no longer able to do all of the maintenance that he took care of in the past. We have a small condo on the beach in Florida but our primary residence is in AZ. Our house is 3600 sq ft with a 3 car garage. We live on 2 acres of land that is all maintained. The house is expensive to cool, the pool needs constant attention and the grounds are too much for my husband to manage. I still do all of the inside work but can't stand to do the outside work during the summer months. HOA fees and special assessments are something I have never liked. I feel we have too many people on the "payroll" so we have made the decision to simplify our lives and travel more.

We're in our middle sixties and not retired, either.

We downsized six years ago because my DH took a job in another city to which I had no intention of moving. So we sold our 3,000 foot 4 bedroom three level house on an acre, gave mountains of tools and outdoor furniture and extra furniture and rugs to our daughter for her new house; rented a nice one-bed in a good building near his new office, and moved down into town into a 19th-century townhouse with hardly any yard or closets, and a separate apartment in the English basement. So much for storage and thank heaven for good air service between our two cities.

Circumstances forced us to do this, and I get homesick for my house because I did it over cellar to dome to suit us. But not often. I never want to go back to all that upkeep (the work, the time it all takes, and the checks we wrote every five minutes).

So we are lucky to have had our hand forced. Still, we need to do it again. The project is finshed and my DH is back home, so now we are sharing much less space, and both working out of our house again.

The hard thing, as several of you pointed out, is that small quarters are designed most often for people who are just starting out, and whose lives revolve around work and social life.

I have thought often about how to design housing in a community for people like us - settled but not static, financially stable but not close to rich, educated and interested in cultural life but not terribly high brow, healthy but not constantly on the go - who now want to spend our free time and our reduced energy pursuing what we really like to do.

So functional spaces are really important, even though we no longer need as many rooms or as much land or as many things.

We need bookcases and project space and places for cherished collections, and we are done cleaning gutters and patching window glazing and weeding thousands of running feet of garden beds - unless that's what we love to do, in which case we need the option.

And we need to be able to just lock the door and head for Paris or New Orleans or Tuscany or the mountains or our children's houses for more than a few days.

We sort of downsized in our mid 30's with 2 middle school kids. We moved from a 4 finished floors home on 1/2 acre in a typical sort of gated type community. A finished attic with full bath and bedroom, 3 room Master suite, a total of 3 full and 2 half baths. Formal living and dining rooms, etc. It was a beautiful impressive house. When it came time to relo again, we were over the whole thing. We found an open floor plan 22 ft wide home on a 45ft wide lot. It takes DH half an hour to do the yard max. Maintenance is a breeze. No funky gables or 25 windows. It is not a small house. We're almost 3000sf, but it lives cozy. We had to get rid of lots of furniture and stuff in general. We don't have space for extras. I love it. Most of our neighbors are empty nesters or childless couples. We could live here well into our older years if it weren't for the stairs. I already have bad joints at 42 and know it will eventually be an issue. At that point, we'll probably keep it as an investment property and build a live/work in the same neighborhood.

I think to decide whether one wants/could/should downsize is to answer how many rooms of your house you're actually using and how many are just full of stuff you don't really need or enjoy.

Nosoccermom has it exactly right. What are you actually using and what can you do without?

If you haven't used an item in the past year, chances are you don't really need it. Save a few of the things you are emotionally attached to and that have value, but bite the bullet and give, sell, or donate the rest.

We're in our 60's and just downsized and moved to a property in a lakeside community in a different state-love it. We do have a bigger yard, but are still working and pay people to do the yard work for us at this point.

The two things we miss most are the huge basement we had in our previous house which had a lot of unfinished space for storage and the larger garage we had. But we have solved that problem by renting a storage locker close by. Items used very occasionally or that we are unsure of getting rid of are stored in the locker.

We went from five bedrooms to three smaller ones, but purchased two nice rollaway beds and two folding cots for overflow family guests.

No matter how big or how small your house is, you will expand or contract to fit the area.

We are SO glad we bit the bullet and did it at this stage in our lives and on our own terms. It was a daunting and difficult task after 30 years in our previous house. We can't imagine tackling this 10 years down the road when we were in our 70's.

We watched my in-laws move last year from the family home of nearly 40 years into a one-level home with maintenance included. They are mid 70's, and it was a very big chore. Of course it was physically. Their existing home had basement laundry, bedrooms on the 2nd floor, and my MIL had back issues making this arrangement something that no longer worked.

The amount of mental stress, energy, worry, exhaustion, and emotional roller coaster was hard to witness. DH and I decided we didn't want to wait.

We are 48.

We close today on a "lock and leave" home. Reverse ranch 3BR/3 bath. Built in the late 1980s. It actually offers about the same amount of space as our current home of 16 years. But much better layout for aging in place. Our DDs are launched, and are only home for school holidays and breaks. The new place has an HOA that does the mowing and snow removal. These 2 chores had become a pain in the A*% for us in the current home. We know we will be working 20 - 25 more years, and want to be able to relax and travel when we are off work.

We didn't want to wait until the task was too much work. Having seen first hand how much work this is, we decided to do it now.

we downsized 5 years ago and are in the process of downsizing again. It has been so freeing to go through all of the "stuff" and find places for it with others, gifting, selling, donating, and keeping only what I love most dearly. It is going to allow me to retire and live frugally, simply, and give me free time to do creative things I have always wanted to do. Now my stuff doesn't own me,
I have the things I truly love and can enjoy them better without the clutter. Looking forward to being creative to figure out storage soulutions for the new smaller place
and make it look great. I have always told my kids they are smarter than the problem they face. Now I get to prove I am smarter than the problems of living small scale and am looking forward to finding great solutions. hooray for another life adventure!

When we bought this house twenty years ago, I felt it could be a good house for two aging in place people.
We have a 1950's split level, so never more than 6 steps any where.
We raised our daughters and now it's just the two of us. People who moved in when we did, but with much larger homes, are now selling but we don't have to.

Do you think downsizing is necessary if everything we need is on the main floor? The master bedroom, bath, laundry, living area and kitchen are all on the main floor. It is bigger than we need but I love love love the main floor layout. I have looked at houses locally (there aren't many) and downsizing includes tiny closets, master baths, laundry rooms, as others have mentioned here. I don't want to go back to that. But, my finished basement is pretty much unused.

We just moved into a bigger house. We intended on living here 3-5 years after making all of the improvements. Now I am not sure that I really feel it is necessary to downsize.

I am 45 and the empty nest starts in August. I am leaning toward keeping my house minimalist and leaving some things in boxes so that when we make the move it won't as hard on us as this move was. Moving is hard no matter what age you are, how organized you are, or how far you are moving. But, I agree with poster that said that it is harder the older we get. That said, I am leaning toward staying here longer than initially planned. We were just going to flip it--fix it and sell it after enjoying it for a few years.

This post got me thinking. We don't have to make the decision now.

We downsized about 5 years ago. Crazy I know, but with two step sons that visited often we had a huge house. It was a fun project and I loved it! then we decided to have kids and decided to downsize to a house that was less work and in a better location. We went from 5800 sq ft to 2500 (roughly, I am not exactly sure) with a basement. Now we have 2 step kids that visit often, 2 kids that live here all the time and a live in au pair.

We went from an old home with 5 fireplaces and lots of gorgeous molding to a standardish colonial from the late 90's. Not really interesting in any way. But, the lot is lovely, the commute, is far less and it has plenty of space that is all pretty much regularly used.

I still have some things left from that last house that just don't work in this new on. I have been getting rid of them over the last year. I have another batch ready to go to auction soon.

I do wish this house had a bed and bath on the main level, but we looked at so many houses and time was running out. I also wish we could have gotten it a couple years after prices dropped, but what can you do! :)

Edited to add: I do think when the little kids are a bit older and the older ones don't visit as often that it would be nice to downsize again, but I am not sure DH will agree.

This post was edited by boopadaboo on Mon, Jun 3, 13 at 12:07

We "downsized" into our new home...it's actually larger than our old home of 30 years. But the layout is very efficient, it works perfectly for the 2 of us, we built it to be low maintenance and one-floor living so we can age gracefully here. Further, the energy efficiency helps keep it affordable, though the property taxes are killer. And while we did a lot of purging to move here, there's still an attic that looks like a goodwill store full of all the consolidated households that landed in our lap. I know it will be hard to move when it's time, but for now it works, and I've long ago gave up on trying to predict the future.

It is a good time to downsize (if you can find a house after you sell). Interest rates are starting to creep up and larger homes that are just short of McMansions are fetching some good money. We are in a sort of calm before the storm where interest rates will soar as well as inflation to pay our nations dept. It will be even harder for families to upsize in the future to our sized homes. Saying that, many others around my age are aware of this and are along with other groups like investors and first time home buyers my competition in the small house searches. I sold my larger home fairly fast and for decent money but the down sized homes to move to here in my area of Florida are few and far between (in non HOAâÂÂs). Square footage prices are slightly ridicules at the moment for the downsize sizes. We have found that we will get much more of a bang for our buck by only going slightly smaller than we have now in square feet but a much smaller piece of land.

This post was edited by jterrilynn on Mon, Jun 3, 13 at 13:23

We are young, but we would love to downsize one day. The large pieces of furniture are probably not going with us. I think we could have an estate sale when we do sell the current house. The pieces that don't get sold could probably go to a consignment shop. However, I am pretty sure DH will be quite upset when he finds out how low the furniture resale value is.

We are downsizing from a ~4 family, six adult, 5 bedroom home (long story but we wound up with all the stuff from all 4 families.) to a 1300 sf, 3 bedroom with 2 adults and a toddler.

We got lucky in that the home we got is an older streng home that seems to have avoided much of the excesses of cramming most people have been talking about. That said, a fair bit of editing has been going on, and some things are having to be replaced by much smaller versions of themselves.

The nice thing about it is that all the cheap furniture is going away and we are only keeping the well made expensive stuff. We are finding we are making weekly runs to good will, and the amount of trash we tossed is being counted in cubic yards and tons. A truly amazing amount of stuff got pushed to the back of the shelves and closets, with a "Oh we might want that / fix that someday."

I know we will be downsizing in a about 5 years when we retire--most likely in another state. We are 60. When most people think of retiring from the family home where they raised kids to their retirement home...they think of going much smaller, which makes sense--less upkeep, etc...But, when my parents retired from our smallish 4 BR home in So Cal to Las Vegas in 1989, they went to a 2 bedroom...really apartment size...house.. This was such a mistake, especially for my mom....she loved to have people over and the LR/DR were so small...having more than 4-6 people was a nightmare. Also, only 1 spare bedroom...so my siblings and our kids always had to stay in hotels whether we visited alone or not.

So, my goal is to not so much downsize (maybe a little) but to get a layout that makes sense. No more stairs, no basement (full of junk---see that other thread about hoarding)! At least 3 BR's--2 extra for kids and hopefully grandkids one day. But spacious enough to entertain comfortably and have a little breathing room when the house is full. Planned community---Im tired of looking at other people's trashy yards...little to no yard maintenance. I can't wait!

Some retirees are downsizing to larger homes...they want the 1st floor master so they can essentially live on one floor, but they want some bedrooms and baths upstairs to accommodate the visiting children and grandchildren...

Exactly Annie...I've started doing a little research and looking at floor plans...one thing I see a lot which doesn't make sense is the master bedroom is right next to the kitchen and/or FR/LR......so forget about trying to sleep if your spouse (or company) is cooking or watching TV.

We downsized after son #4 left home. It was absolutely liberating to get rid of stuff that we had that we didn't need. We wanted an old house with lots of original features in tact, close in to a small town, high walkability factor, and that is exactly what we found. We couldn't be happier.

One of my close friends was flabbergasted that we wanted to do this; she wanted to build a bigger house. Vive la différence!
Diane

We bought an old 1920's farmhouse(in the NY suburbs!) in the early 80's when we were in our mid 20's. Tons of character, beautiful property. Fixed the whole place up, added a pool, put on an addition in the 90's. The house ended up 3400sf on 3.3 acres.
In 2009, we sold it and moved our family(2 teens) to a 1700sf 1970's split level on 1/2 acre in the same town. Our taxes had gotten ridiculous, everything we had done(kitchen, baths, etc.) in the 80's needed redoing, and the layout didn't work so well for us anymore.
We got an offer over list price with the contingency that we close in 3 weeks. We either sold, gave away or threw out our almost 30 year accumulation of stuff.
Our new house works for us, but we plan on selling in about 5 years. We bought a run down lakefront place in PA where we plan to retire. It's about 2400sf, which I think is just right!

Faux68, it's nice when everything you need for day-to-day living is on one floor, but you still have to maintain the rooms you don't use in daily living. Outside trim has to be painted, wooden windows have to be kept in good repair, second floor gutters have to be cleaned, second floors toilets and sinks have to be used occasionally or the parts disintegrate, second floor rooms need to be vacuumed and dusted, etc. When one is trying to minimize monthly expenses, it's nicer to know that one only has half as much house to support financially.

Double post

This post was edited by Faux68 on Tue, Jun 4, 13 at 0:19

We think about moving closer to suburbia since we live in the country on acreage. Have to mow several acres. That's a problem in our late 60's. But when we drive through neighborhoods, we wonder how close we can stand to live with others. We have been country bumpkins for almost 40 years. Moving near grown children isn't a draw. We are getting rid of some things. It's a project to think about. Meanwhile, I am painting my dining room. :-)

Gumspring, several people of our acquaintance have made the change you are contemplating by getting smallish places in the city center, and cottages in the country that they can escape to when the nearness of others gets to them.

One couple has a modern 8th-floor city-center condominium apartment with a terrace, a view, and a parking space in the building, so they're removed a bit from city street life, but can walk to theatres, restaurants, shops, and the local university.

Then they have a long-term lease on a dependency on a lovely horse farm owned by close friends of theirs in the country - it was a caretaker's cottage that's been modernized and expanded into a little two-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath house with an open plan living, dining, kitchen space, a deep wrap-around porch, a screened porch, and a walled kitchen garden. And the farm employees take care of the grounds and the building.

It's absolutely ideal for them. We would do exactly that if the opportunity arose.