The Problem of Moving to a Smaller Home
The house I grew up in had a rather limited area, which I notice every time I visit my parents. Basically, this is a two-bedroom home where the storage room converts to a third bedroom when absolutely necessary. The living room is very small and the kitchen is quite small too.
This post was originally published on The Simple Dollar .
I grew up there with my parents and two older brothers. There were periods when my mother’s younger brothers also lived with us. It was cozy at times, to put it mildly.
However, when I look back at it, I have no bad memories of life there. I don’t remember a single situation when something was uncomfortable due to the small size of the house. There was always a place where I could retire. There was always enough space to do business with the whole family and to participate in any projects that interested me.
The house I live in today is much larger, but the story is much the same. I live here with my wife and we have three children. I have no bad memories of life here, and there are no situations where I would be really uncomfortable. There is always room for privacy and there is always room for projects.
So why is the house bigger? What does this big house give me that the smaller house in which I grew up doesn’t give me? Honestly, the biggest benefit of a large home is that it has plenty of room for more things . This home offers an abundance of storage rooms – nearly a dozen toilets, a garage with a huge amount of storage space in the attic, and large rooms with plenty of room for storage-oriented furniture (like bookshelves).
Naturally, when you have storage space, you tend to fill it up . We have lived in this house since 2007 and have gradually filled up the warehouse space. We have boxes of old children’s clothes and toys. Many of our personal collections have grown, such as the board games collection. Our children have accumulated a certain amount of their own property, because when we moved, we had only one child, who was very young, and now he is approaching adolescence.
Recently, however, I have been thinking more and more about the house in which I grew up. In a way, it’s not really all that different from a home I’d like to retire to, with the possible exception of another beautiful entertainment room. guests and a little large kitchen. I would even consider moving into the ideal smaller home right now, even with growing children, if I could find the right one.
Why live in a smaller house?
So why would I even consider contraction at all? For me, it really boils down to three key points.
First, we really don’t need that much space. I could easily clean 30% of the area of this house and still be completely happy. With the right layout, I would clean up 50% of the square feet of this home without delay.
This is due to the second reason, which is that it takes longer to maintain a large home. It takes longer to clean. There are still things that can break and need to be fixed. There are other things that just need attention.
Another reason: a big house is just more expensive than a small one, even if it pays off. Property taxes are higher. Insurance above. Maintenance costs are higher. Of course, in theory, this increases net worth at a faster rate, but it doesn’t help with cash payments, and I’m not at all sure if the rise in home value will offset the much higher insurance costs. maintenance costs and property taxes.
In other words, life in the house of a smaller size means lower bills for housing, and more free time, and both of these points seem to me attractive.
Smaller homes and social status
Some people see their homes as a status symbol. For them, this is an indicator of the success they have achieved in life, which they can proudly demonstrate not only to all their friends and family, but also to people who pass by their house.
Often, the sense of status is determined in part by the size of the home. The larger it is, the more expensive it should be and, therefore, the higher the personal success of the people who live there, at least that is the logic. It was a logic that used to make a lot of sense to me, but the more I look at my life and really think about what I value and what I care about, the less it makes sense.
First, I don’t give a damn about impressing people passing by. These people are not part of my life. I really don’t care what they think of me. It just has no real impact.
Second, my friends are my friends, not the friends of my home. My friends don’t visit me because of the size of my house or the “quality” of my furniture. They come to visit because they like my company . Many of the same friends and relatives who visit us now were the same people who came to us in their day.
Third, having a big house is not the sign I’m looking for to indicate to myself that I am successful. I look at other things. Am I doing the job that I enjoy? Do I have time for rest and relaxation? Do I have a good relationship with the people closest to me? This is a success for me.
Because of this, I do not feel the external need for a large house. I did this a few years ago, so we bought our current relatively large house. The feeling of a home, which provides an internal or external sense of status, has greatly disappeared in my mind, and with it the urge to own a large house has disappeared.
Finding the right balance
Let’s say I was actually in the market to buy a smaller house. My intention was to buy this new home, sell our current one and appropriate the difference in value, and then enjoy lower bills and less time. Makes sense, right?
The first problem that arises is finding the right size. I’m obviously open to a smaller house, but how small is it?
Let’s get rid of the “little house” right now. I am fully aware of the ” small house movement” but I find that many of the “small houses” I see go to extremes.
Many of the tiny houses I see lack room for basic things like washing clothes, washing dishes, or other things a person might do at home, which leads me to conclude that they have to do many of these things outside the home – where it is inherently more expensive, which for me does not give a purpose. I want to be able to effectively accomplish these basic life tasks at home with a minimum investment of time and money. They are also rarely equipped with a basement or proper foundation, which is very important if you live anywhere where severe storms occur regularly.
Then I want something more than a “house”. I want a home with a functional basement on a good tiled foundation. I also want to be able to have enough room to do the basic functions of managing my life at home – washing dishes, preparing food, washing clothes, storing small amounts of things, entertaining a small group of guests from time to time without ridiculously cramped conditions, and so on.
But, on the other hand, our current house is, frankly, too big. There is a lot of wasted space that is mostly only used to store things that we don’t use and that we rarely look at. I have a ton of boxes in my garage that are basically for sale in the yard … but that pile of boxes has only increased over the past few years. And this is just a small part of what really needs to be removed from our repository.
In other words, I want to save the space that we actually use in our home, along with a small portion of the storage space and essentially clean up the rest.
So what are we actually using? We use three of the four bedrooms in our house, although we can use the fourth for a while as our kids grow up. This is not necessary , however, as I have shared a bedroom with my brothers for many, many years growing up. We actually only use one of the two family rooms and only two of the four bathrooms. We have a lot of closet space, but we really need 30% to 40% of it if we cleverly cleaned out unused things.
The result is a home with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, only one family room, and a lot less storage space, which adds up to a reduction of about 40% of our square footage.
The key here is to think about the space that you will actually use, not the space that you can use from time to time. The trick is to learn to separate the space that you will use quite often from the space that you will rarely use, even if you can imagine using that space accidentally.
For example, I can imagine a board game room with a table ideally designed for board games. While I would probably spend some time there, the truth is that it doesn’t actually do what our dining table doesn’t do, except in rare situations where I might leave a very, very long game set up. for a course for the whole day or several days.
When I’m so honest with myself, the idea of paying a whole extra room for it, even if it sounds like a cool use to me, is pretty silly. It’s a rare use, even for me, so it’s foolish to pay the cost of building / owning this room, extra insurance, additional property taxes, etc. just to maintain this space.
Focus on the space you really need for what you really do every day: eat, cook, relax, sleep, support yourself, support your key items, and so on. Don’t worry about the space needed for rarer items. If you find that you need these spaces, you can usually find ways to, in fact, borrow them for free outside the home.
Reducing the size of your material
Thus, the task remains to deal with the material that we have accumulated over the years in our current home. Drawers in our closets. Furniture in rarely used rooms. The attic and garage shelves are crammed with all sorts of things.
What should we do with all this?
Some of these are obvious yard sales and Craigslist feed. Obviously, there are many things we bought for our kids when they were babies or toddlers that can be carried over to new families quite easily, and some rarely used gifts just sit on shelves in the garage or in the back of the house. a pantry that can be sold to make space.
Toilets must be emptied and tidied up. This actually includes many different categories of things, so let’s take a look at each of these categories.
We need to shred old papers. We have several boxes of old papers that you just need to shred. At the moment, the 2009 electricity bills don’t serve a real purpose, especially since we have digital copies of these things. They simply need to be crushed and disposed of properly, which is a major challenge in itself.
We need to honestly evaluate our rarely used items. Almost every toilet in our house is full of items that we rarely use. This is a tricky issue because it is very easy to imagine using these items , but to be honest, we rarely – if ever – use these items.
So the challenge is to break through the notion of using objects into the reality that we don’t actually use those objects, and this can be harder than it sounds.
My solution to this problem is to use a simple scoring system for everything in the closets. Just go through each item and ask yourself a simple question: Has this item been used in the last year? If so, leave it. If the answer is no, then get rid of it. If the answer is … not sure, take a piece of masking tape and write today’s date on it, then leave the item on for a while. Then, if you are using an item with duct tape, remove it. Then after a year, go back to the closet and remove any items with duct tape.
We need to properly organize what we store. Unorganized space means the material takes up more space than it otherwise would and / or some things are difficult to access. Well-organized space means everything takes up a minimum of space while still being easily accessible. Unfortunately, our toilets and other storage areas lean towards the former.
Once we figure out which items we are actually holding onto, it will require a major reorganization of our toilets and storage facilities. Things like temporary shelves, wire shelving, clearly marked boxes, etc. are definitely okay.
What is this all for? The goal is to reduce the amount of space we use in our current home so that it can be easily transplanted into a smaller home. Think of it as a kind of testing ground for the smaller home concept.
Pulling the trigger
Why, then, with such a clear game plan, are we not downsizing? Personally, I would be happy to cut staff at this stage, but there are several factors that prevent this.
First of all, the rest of my family really likes our current home. I think the biggest reason for this is location.
My children have several close friends within walking distance of our house – in fact, of the three children my daughter considers her closest friends, two of them live literally a stone’s throw from our house. There’s a park just across the street with a playground, a huge open field, and a perfect quarter-mile running loop, which means there’s something for everyone. On top of that, one of my wife’s closest friends is also around the corner from our house, and she has other close friends within a mile or so.
The idea of moving out – and losing that close access to these things – neither of them likes. Personally, I have nothing that ties me so strongly to this place, but the needs of my family are very important to me.
Second, there is no additional reason to go beyond saving time and money by reducing your home’s footprint. We have no reason to move to work. We have no reason to move to school. We have no reason to move for social reasons. We have no real reason to move in order to improve access to cultural sites. Our current location is pretty good in all these respects.
Third, our current home is actually a pretty good “payback” for this area. While I think a smaller home would definitely end up in a nicer place, when I compare our home to some of the much larger ones found in some of the newer apartment buildings nearby, our home seems rather modest in comparison. I find our electricity bills quite reasonable (especially compared to what we paid when we first moved in), and our property taxes and insurance rates won’t dramatically improve unless we move much further from nearby cities.
At the end of the day, this will honestly be a lot of work and we are already quite limited in time. It looks more like “resistance” than a real reason why a person does not move, but without a good reason to move forward, this kind of “resistance” can keep a person from moving.
So why take this into account?
So if we’ve essentially made the decision not to lay off staff, what’s the use of thinking like that?
Well, first of all, no one’s life can be the same forever. Over time, many of the factors preventing us from moving to a smaller home will shift and move us to a smaller home. As our children grow up and leave the nest, many of the factors that motivate us to stay in this home will change and encourage us to shrink. It’s also good to have a well thought out plan if we ever need to cut staff for financial or other personal reasons.
On the other hand, the results of preparation for the reduction will be beneficial, even if we never move. A yard / Craigslist sale of our unused items cleans up our storage space and brings us extra cash. The reorganization of our storage facilities also makes our items that we want to keep more accessible.
Second, thinking about what could make a home “better” allows me to see ways to make our home “better”. Thinking about a smaller home prompts me to find ways to incorporate the features of a “smaller home” into our present home.
Final thoughts
If I were to go back to my young self, before buying a house, I would sit down and advise this younger self to buy something smaller with a different layout.
This house will cost less. It will have lower property taxes and less insurance. It also takes less time and effort for maintenance. And I wouldn’t actually lose a single really useful living space.
Would I listen? Probably no. Instead, I would have hoped to think more closely about buying a home and what we really need , which is ultimately the purpose of this post.
If you are thinking of buying a home, consider a home from a smaller range. A smaller home will save you money and time, and probably won’t diminish the living space you use every day.
Good luck.
The problem of moving to a smaller home | Simple dollar