We started purging seriously a couple of years ago, and finally made the move seven months ago. Our experience was a bit different - it worked for us - we refer to it as ‘simplifying’ as opposed to ‘downsizing’ because we really didn’t change the amount of living space we have; we moved from a single-family home to a condo. But we no longer have a basement or garage for storage (of course the stuff we had in the garage is mostly stuff we no longer need anymore since we don’t have a yard or pool). We do have an attic, but have tried to minimize stuff we keep up there. When we moved, my first focus was to get our living area organized and decorated; during the summer months it was too hot to go up in the attic to work on organizing it, so now that it has cooled down, that will be my next project.
Even though we got rid of a lot of stuff prior to moving, I still got rid of a lot of stuff after we moved, and still have stuff to get rid of. How did I do it? Combination of things - a designer I work with had resources for me that she’d dealt with - several community closed Facebook garage sale groups and a consignment shop. And lots of donations. I maybe put a few things up on Craigslist - mostly things we were giving away, but the donation places wouldn’t take them.
While getting settled took much longer than we anticipated (we had a major cosmetic redo project go bad and had to be redone by the contractor), we have so much more free time to do things we want to do. A few weeks ago I mentioned to H that I’d never known him to play so much golf in a summer and he told me, “It’s because I don’t have a yard or pool to take care of.” We moved into an interesting community. It was once an army base that was decommissioned in 1994 and all the buildings were retrofitted and converted into either condos, townhouses, or single-family homes. So our building is actually 135 years old, and is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places, so nothing along the lines of boring ‘builder grade’ designs. Throughout the community, there are no two condos, single-family homes, or townhouses that have the same floor plan; we have fun going through other properties when they have open houses to see how different they all are. We are also surrounded by open lands due to forest preserve and an open lands preserve abutting our community. The area is marketed toward active empty nesters, although some of the single-family homes (which had been officer’s quarters) have some children, but not a lot. I’ve got about four miles of hiking/walking trails right out my front door (I may give cross-country skiing a try this winter!).
Two things we had to make sacrifices on were: our garage is not attached - you have to go outside to get to the garage, but we do have a two-car garage. Also, there are no elevators in the buildings - we are on the second floor and it’s 20 steps from lobby common area to our floor (and another 8 or so from front lawn to door to building). But once we are inside our unit, the only stairs we have are up to the loft, where we have our office, and several days can go by without my going up there. Otherwise all living space is on one level. Despite these two sacrifices, we are very happy with our decision to move - it’s about 25-30 minutes from where we did live, and H is now also a few miles closer to work, with a traffic flow that has little back up. We have also discovered a lot of people from the company he works for live here.
And as for the pooch in my avatar picture, we have found, I kid you not, at least 14 other Cavaliers back in this community - it’s VERY dog friendly, and a lot of people we’ve met have come about when we’ve been out walking him. That was a concern of mine, that we were taking away his fenced-in backyard, but he probably gets more exercise in the 4-5 times a day he gets walked now.
). And my silver is under there on top of one of the boxes.