For those of you out there in readers-land who simply love living in a big house, there is a single word that can have you curled up in a ball on the floor crying. Downsizing.
I know it’s a scary word, and for good reason. Downsizing means going from a larger house to a smaller house. This was the situation The Wife and I found ourselves in just last month.
A decision had to be made. Would we move or would we stay in a much larger house that we no longer needed?
As we faced our decision, we started to think about what a smaller house might mean. A smaller house means less room for all our stuff. Less room for stuff means some of our stuff has to be gotten rid of. Guess who’s stuff that is?
Here’s a hint: it’s not the wife’s ever-expanding shoe collection.
I’ve been assured the new house will have ample room for the important things. There will be a covered front porch and a dedicated shoe closet. Zappos will indeed know our address, and so will Amazon.
Our new GPS location will be uploaded to all delivery drones flying in the area. Drones will safely leave packages on the covered front porch safely out of the elements.
Yes, delivery of shoes will not be interrupted simply because of moving across town or downsizing to a smaller house.
That important concern taken care of, The Wife and I turned our talents to getting rid of other stuff. After all, going from a large house to a smaller house means that things will have to be gotten rid of. Rest assured, faithful reader, The Wife assures me I’m not one of those things — unless I touch her shoes.
Everything in our basement must go, and not just because most of the stuff is my stuff. The new house will not have a basement. The dedicated room for all of my tools will soon be no more. I think there’s room for them in the new shoe closet.
I asked The Wife if that would be okay and she said they would be fine moved to an out building in the backyard. It was either them or me. I’m not sure, but I think they will miss air conditioning during the summer and heat during the winter.
With the basement cleared out, next up was bedrooms and another lesson. You can’t fit furniture from four bedrooms into two bedrooms. This conundrum had a simple fix.
I just called The Boy. He’s got a big house with extra rooms and a basement. He was happy to take the furniture from one of our bedrooms and all the weight lifting equipment we had in the other.
Yep, there’s no room for a home gym in the new house either. To be honest, all this downsizing is really starting to get me down.
Next up on the purge was the bonus room above the garage that we use as an office. The new house doesn’t have a bonus room above the garage, so more stuff has to go. Our new office will be a chair at the kitchen table, but I don’t mind. Now the office is much closer to the refrigerator and snack cabinet.
A month after we started, our big house now downsized, it was time to start actually walking through the two-bedroom homes for sale. (Note to all those real estate agents out there – I already have one).
That’s when our good idea of downsizing really ran off the rails. Seems the thing we like the most about our big house is that it has lots of space. The new downsized house doesn’t have lots of space.
Facing the cold reality of less space, we agreed not to move. Nothing could make us leave the house we built together 10 years ago. This agreement lasted about three days.
Last week we found the perfect two-bedroom house on one acre of land and it even comes with a view that would make anyone want to move. The only downside to our downsizing is that it may be a little far for The Wife to commute to work each day. The house is located on the north side of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.
It’ll be a couple of years before we can make the move, so I called The Boy. He’s bringing back all the furniture and weightlifting equipment. He mumbled something as he hung up the phone. I think he wanted to know how soon it would be before he could fly down and visit.
[Rick Ryckeley, who lives in Senoia, served as a firefighter for more than two decades and has been a weekly columnist since 2001. His email is storiesbyrick@gmail.com. His books are available at www.RickRyckeley.com.]
