If you’re a regular reader of Meier Paul Real Estate’s blog posts, you may have read our last blog post about Olivia helping her parents downsize. If you found it amusing but thought there was absolutely no way that you could manage downsizing the hardcore way, this blog post might offer you some great ideas about decluttering and downsizing the gentler way, like Max did it…
Max* had finally retired and was very much looking forward to a new stage of life ahead. Spending more time with his wife, Susan*, the grandkids and playing golf. Here’s how they managed their downsizing from a large 4-bedroom home to a cosy retirement unit…
“We’d known for some time that we wanted to move…
But it was all about finding the right place. We’d lived in our neighbourhood for nearly 50 years, and we really didn’t want to move too far away from the wonderful community we had here. Friends, social clubs, our favourite restaurants and coffee shops, our doctor, Susan’s hairdresser… all those seemingly small things that are extremely important, that you don’t want to move away from — they were here.
Luckily, we agreed on all the important things
It took us about 3 or 4 years of looking around at real estate, and a whole lot of discussion between my wife and I. Susan wanted a garden and I still wanted a shed that I could tinker in. Finally, we found the perfect unit in a retirement village that we both agreed upon. It was just a few suburbs away, and still close to family, which we were extremely happy about.
There was one big hitch in proceedings
It was obvious that we couldn’t go from our large 4-bedroom family home to a medium-sized unit without letting go of many of our possessions. Now came the hard part, trying to work out what to take. And no matter how much discussion we had about this (with family members trying to ‘help’ but only making things worse!) we couldn’t come to any sort of agreement.
A storage unit saved us from divorce!
I came up with the idea of working out which main pieces of furniture would be ideal for our new home, taking only them, and putting everything else into a local storage unit. Luckily, Susan thought it was a great idea. Whew! That decision really took the pressure off us both and helped make our move so much easier. Because we didn’t have to make immediate decisions about what to do with every single thing we owned, we could relax and enjoy the adventure of moving into our new home, without anywhere near as much stress.
It did take us approximately eight months to empty the storage unit
Bit by bit, we transferred things. We were able to do it without rushing or stressing, we simply contacted the storage people who organised the delivery of anything we realised we still wanted from the storage unit. Then after a few months, it was easy to let go of the rest. I know that Susan and I were able to make much better decisions than if we’d tried to do it all at once. And, very importantly, it put an immediate stop to any arguments or anxiety. I highly recommend it.”
*Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
