I’m going through a senior rite of passage: downsizing to a smaller house.
This has required a lot of thought and soul-searching because I’ve always been a big-house guy. I grew up in a tiny apartment while my parents saved their money and my mother yearned for a house. The modest house they eventually bought was a milestone of upward mobility. I continued the quest for gracious living with a three-story vintage home, a sprawling ranch house in the suburbs and my current faux-Spanish casa in Albuquerque.
I really love my house. It’s in a convenient location and has ample room for entertaining, a big patio and yard, a hot tub and a nice view of the city and mountains. But at this point I’m not using much of it. I no longer need four bedrooms and two living areas, and I’m getting tired of maintaining a third of an acre of landscaping.
So I’m building a new house in an over-55 community in Los Lunas, 20 minutes south of Albuquerque. My new digs will have two bedrooms, an open kitchen and living area, a den and an intimate patio. It’s also a lifestyle change because a close-knit community with resort-like amenities will expand my social life.
I pulled the trigger on this decision last month, signing the contract for the new house and putting the old house on the market. I worried that the new house would be finished before the old house sold, saddling me with two houses.
I soon found myself with the opposite dilemma: I got an offer on the old house after less than a week on the market and will close at the end of March. Because my new house will not be complete until June, I will move temporarily to a rental house in the Los Lunas community. So instead of the methodical transition I had planned I’m suddenly in frantic-moving mode. And downsizing.
I’ve always marveled at the Parkinson’s Law of possessions: Your worldly goods expand to fill whatever dwelling you’re living in. Years ago we moved from a two-bedroom house to a four-bedroom house and seemed to fill the place in about a week.
Over the decades Kathy and I acquired a mostly inherited treasure trove of awkward utensils that were rarely used but too nice to throw out: silver pitchers, serving dishes, candlesticks, embroidery and an incredible number of knickknacks. There’s an elaborate silver candelabra that we dubbed Liberace’s Revenge. Not to mention boxes and boxes of family photos and albums. In past moves this stuff was transported from one spacious house to another and socked away unseen in closets and cabinets. Downsizing to a house a third smaller forces a reckoning.
The imperative to empty the house in a few weeks has made me more ruthless, less sentimental and, at times, downright joyful as I dispose of things. I am filling my trash and recycling dumpsters every week. Boxes of books were donated to the library. I’m making weekly donations to the thrift shop at the local Air Force base. Unneeded clothing is going to another charity. I donated a few items to Goodwill (and they accepted my collection of old VHS tapes, bless their hearts).
I got a head start on this process when my daughter, Wendy, got interested in family history a few years ago. She spent several holiday visits going through old family albums and scanning photos into the computer. Still, I’m finding an incredible number of boxes of framed family photos going back several generations.
I am not tossing everything. Some items that look valuable are going into storage, to be disposed of after the move when I have time to make the rounds of antique dealers. I’ve rented a self-storage unit for things I won’t need for months such as Christmas decorations, fancy china, etc. I have identified the furniture that definitely will not fit in the new house and am posting it for sale online.
Three weeks from now the movers will load everything destined for the new house into a couple of shipping containers for storage until I’m ready to move in. And I’m arranging for a junk disposal service to pick up whatever’s left.
In the meantime I’m going through the house and garage packing, discarding and… downsizing.