@MotherOfDragons So you can add the Spreadsheet of Stuff to the Spreadsheet of Serendipity!
Our house is 1960s era, 1800 square feet, kids’ bedroom’s are pretty small (D17’s about the size of a dorm room), no basement, one car garage, a bit of over the garage attic space if you don’t stand upright. I think that it will be more than big enough when the kids leave home. However, I’ve never liked the layout, so I could see getting something a bit smaller with more intelligent storage space when the kids leave home. We have lots of books, so built in shelves are a must.
Decluttering happens in fits and starts. Maybe when the college apps are in…
Our house (4000 sq ft) is on the market, so we’ve spent the entire summer decluttering. We have a long way to go. Fortunately, we’re moving into a house of similar size (but in a much less expensive area, so there is some good financial downsizing!). This allows us to postpone the real work of downsizing for a bit longer, although that wasn’t the reason we bought a similarly-sized house.
What we hope to do is pass some of our furniture to our kids when they get their first apartments, then sell the rest. Our daughter is a senior in college, but is likely headed to grad school next fall, and our son is a sophomore, so it will be at least two years before they are in a position to take their bedroom furniture.
The hard part of downsizing is that much of our furniture consists of family pieces that have sentimental value. We’ll have to decide what is still really useful, then let the rest go.
You may not like under the bed storage – but when you don’t have a basement or garage any more, every inch of space counts. But no one has to give up their basement and garage…
We have a larger 4 bedroom/4 bath/3 stall garage house. Thinking of downsizing but financial planner said it will cost us more in our market to get what we want so it would not reduce overhead. We have continually been cleaning and clearing out. Two of our bedrooms are empty except for furniture, one is a scrapbook room and the fourth is where we sleep. We are not storage unit people. I love to figure out creative storage! Take a look at Iheart organizing blog. Fun and informative.
I’d rather not be a storage unit person myself. But given rents & condo costs in a lot of desirable places to live, I’d rather pay the lower storage unit cost per square foot than rent a bigger place. Stuff like camping gear, skis, paperwork from an estate that I legally need to keep for a few more years, my cartop pod, and D2’s bedroom furniture that she wants when she gets her own place are in mine. Again… no one has to give up their garage or basement. But if you do, you may have some stuff you genuinely need to keep, and scaled down housing has a lot of storage limitations.
We do have a small storage space in the basement of our condo building. I’m not even sure if we have anything down there other than our luggage. It’s probably a 5’x5’ room with a lock on the door.
Our condo is not upscale, but it also has a small storage unit. It is 32" X 50" and eight feet tall. However, we are on the beach (well, actually on the intracoastal - we have to walk across a two lane road to get to the beach), so that space is likely only going to hold beach gear. It is not climate controlled.
I went from a 3 story, 5 BR, 2.5 bath ~2600 sq ft cape cod home (no garage) to a 1500 sq ft condo - 2 BR, 2.5 bath and den. Didn’t really decrease expenses, but I wanted less maintenance, lock and leave ability. I do have a 7ft x 4ft storage cage, and I use the huge walk in closet in my ‘guest room’ as my ‘basement’ - it has my stand up freezer.
Today was the picture frame day. I like the idea of scanning and making the black and white collage. We are just taking all the pictures out and sending the frames to Goodwill. I feel like I must have bought one picture frame per month for 27 years.
Regarding under the bed, my big bed has no room underneath for storage. The remaining twin is a platform bed, and all the violins and violas are stored under there. My string playing offspring are not actively playing these days, but not ready to give up the instruments, and they need to be in a climate controlled area, not the basement. Two of mine are in grad school and I am still the repository for many, many stacks of bins.
One of the things I have struggled with is that in that retirement time to come, I will supposedly have time for playing music, sewing, knitting, etc. So the instruments have stayed, as well as the tools and materials for creativity. in the last few years, it seems all I do is plan to downsize, pack and sort, actively move, and then this year, settle in and complete the rehab projects on this house as well as set up the yard. There are many plans for that more time relaxed future.
BerneseMtn, I realized that I was tired of those endless photos in frames when I was moving. Albums are sufficient. Heck, a box might be sufficient. I do value the paper copies. I see my kids photos online most days, so having the many photos sitting around seems less crucial.
The storage units in my apartment building have water leaks into them sometimes. :o So I have not paid for one. The cost of storage units vary a lot by location. It is a trade off – closer to an urban center costs more, but if you live in the city & your unit is in the suburbs (cheaper), it takes longer to get there when you want something. Right now I have one for $200 for a 10x10, about 15 minutes from my apartment. But I hope to downsize to a cheaper one after D2 gets her bedroom furniture.
Don’t pay monthly storage fees! We spent money to redesign our garage space, adding cabinets, slat wall, and overhead storage racks. Get rid of extra holiday decorations and things that filled your larger home that are not essential to your new lifestyle. Handling things more than once more can be very costly. I feel so much more liberated now that we got rid of stuff…
My mother solved her storage unit problem by shipping its contents to us. Yup, lots of Victorian furniture we don’t particularly love, but felt obligated to find a place for in our house. And somehow she got us to pay the shipping!
If Trump is elected (though I hope not!), he could borrow her to persuade Mexico to pay for that wall.
We are another couple who “simplified” rather than downsizing per se. When we sold our family home, we did a huge amount of decluttering. Our new house has fewer bedrooms, is zero lot line (with a small yard big enough for a medium size dog to run around in and do his business), but is still large in terms of square feet. It doesn’t “feel” large to me, though. Ceilings are fairly high, so I don’t feel closed in. The three bedrooms are all spacious, our master bedroom has two full baths (hallelujah), and there is a huge room intended to be a theater room that now serves as DH’s office (he downsized by ditching the high rent office in a high rise to work from home), which accounts for the square feet. But big clunky furniture is gone in favor of clean lined, transitional furniture. We have fewer built-ins filled with crud. Drapes are simple straight panels. We have privacy with Silhouette shades, but these stay up or at least open during the day to let light in. So our house “feels” more streamlined and simple.
We also sold our lake house recently, so we have simplified our lives in that sense.
I know I’m in a tiny minority, but I don’t want to do uber small. I like having a light-filled and spacious environment.
D1 has some friends who bought a “tiny house” last year. They just found out they are pregnant with twins! I’m thinking the tiny house will have to go (or be used as a playhouse for the kiddos, lol).
I’m a year into decluttering, donating, clearing out mode. Whenever the eventual move takes place I want to be streamlined when it happens. When the eventual move takes place I hope my kids will have taken ALL of their belongings out of our house. (A girl can dream… ) I’m not emotionally attached to most of our furniture, but there are some pieces I love and would be hard pressed to get rid of.
I don’t know that we’ll downsize so much as rightsize. Our house now is 2400 square feet, with a (full 'o stuff) two car garage and a (full’o stuff) storage area in the unfinished part of the basement. Our lot is small, and our views are of neighbor’s houses.
I’d like a view of something and a feeling of privacy. Honestly, even a city high rise condo would give us more of that feeling than our cul de sac with houses on three sides where we all see into each other’s windows if the blinds are open. I’d like to have the ability to live on one level, so that if the need arises we could do that. When I look at how much of our house actually gets used regularly, I know we could downsize our living space. But I also want room for visitors to stay with us.
I can’t imagine not having a storage area of some kind. I know us well enough to understand that we can’t go THAT minimal.
We clearly aren’t ready to make a move yet, but we are drifting in that direction.
