DOWNSIZING I DÉCOR FEATURE
Downsizers share joys and challenges of packing up memories and rethinking ‘home’
Homeowners share stories of moving to next stage.
DOESN’T ANYONE want the piano?
There is so much not to like about preparing to move to a smaller home. Inherited knickknacks, leftover hobbies, sentimental childhood possessions, decades of paper files, boxes of family photos, not to mention the furniture, all complicate your decisions to Keep or Pitch.
As moving day approaches, downsizers by necessity become more ruthless. With less time to prevaricate, it becomes easier to say OK and let it go. As one son told his mother: “stuff” just slows you down.
Yes, it’s physically and mentally exhausting, but keep your eye on the finish line — and the liberating feeling it brings. It may also be an opportunity to fashion a new look for your home after living with a certain décor for a long time.
Five local downsizers told us what they learned en route to new surroundings.
After skiing in the Collingwood area for many winters, Wendy and Brian Fifield bought a townhouse in nearby Thornbury, thinking they’d use it for ski weekends and move there permanently once they retire.
That was two years ago. Last spring, they took stock and found they’d only spent five weekends at their Kitchener home since buying in Thornbury. The townhouse, which is close to hiking trails and Lake Huron, had quickly become a year-round retreat for their two daughters’ families as well.
Owning two houses is a lot of work. Wendy spent three evenings a week tending their Kitchener garden, but was rarely home on weekends to enjoy it. With the prospect of more baby boomers like themselves deciding to downsize in the next few years, they’ve decided to start now, ahead of the crowd.
At the midway point of a five-year plan, they have sold the house they’ve lived in for 25 years, and this fall are moving into a rented apartment nearby where they’ll stay until they’re ready to move north permanently.
The garden has a significant hold on Wendy’s heart. Some plants will go to Thornbury. A tall maple that began as a sapling her daughter brought home from school, and a curly willow that was part of a bouquet her dad gave her mother are now at least as tall as the house. She’s potted new-growth cuttings from each tree, hoping they’ll survive to take root near their townhouse.
This summer, they finished the basement
of the Thornbury house so they can store belongings there pending the permanent move. The extra living space also will be useful when grandchildren visit.
Wendy began downsizing by going through the house, getting rid of things she wasn’t using. While Brian was away on two weeks of business travel, she combed through one area of the house each evening, put anything she didn’t want to keep in her car, and dropped it off at Value Village on her way to work the next morning.
The storage area in the Kitchener house proved to be the most challenging because it was filled with things they’d wanted to keep, but weren’t using, and in some cases had forgotten about. “You have to
go through everything,” Wendy says. “That’s where I’d tucked the kids’ pictures and drawings, and some of my parents’ things.” By mid-summer, the decisions were becoming more difficult. “A lot of it is just stuff, but a lot of it has memories,” Wendy says. Some things with history, such as her grandmother’s china, will go with them. She’s amused at some of the choices she’s made, such as a case filled with little ceramic heads which she’ll keep because they are such a fond reminder of her mother, who enjoyed making pottery. A pool table and Foosball game will find new homes; the future of Brian’s large fishing gear collection is yet to be determined. As for the apartment rental, Wendy plotted a layout for each room on graph paper to figure out what could go where. After touring a few units, all talk of a one-bedroom apartment faded and a twobedroom unit with a den is their next stop. Sandy and Jim Swann were 48 years old when they went to an information session about the proposed Luther Village on the Park. They had four children, lived in a house they’d built a decade earlier, and weren’t nearly old enough to be eligible for a retirement community; they were just curious. However, their names stayed on a list and they were called about vacancies that came up. Over the years, they moved Jim’s parents in, and later a friend’s mother. Eventually their name reached the top of the list where it would stay unless the Swanns decided to remove it. Then, three years ago, on a drive home from a winter in Florida, they began talking about all the outdoor work required to get their Waterloo home ready for summer. They took a walk around Luther Village where one townhouse in particular, which overlooked garden plots and had a double garage, caught their eye. During the winter of 2011-12, they got a call that the unit would be available for October 2012 possession and they agreed
to the purchase. In April 2012, another call brought the news that it would be theirs June 4, five months earlier than expected.
On June 5, they sent in the renovators. It was a big advantage that they’d had the winter months to think how they’d reconfigure the space.
Sandy, floor plans in hand, had plotted exactly what would go where when they downsized from 3,200 to 2,200 square feet. As an interior decorator, she’s accustomed to doing that for clients, and treated their own move the same way. She even mentally placed lamps and decorative objects on certain tables.
She shed a couple of tears when they signed the agreement to sell their house, but there was no time to mourn. Between downsizing and checking in on the renovations two or three times a day, the weeks raced by.
Her Ottawa-based son Cameron, who has travelled extensively, told her, “Stuff is just stuff and stuff slows you down,” which became a bit of a catch-phrase for them as they assessed everything in the house.
“We just went at it room by room, starting with the guest rooms because they had the least in them,” Sandy says. “The dining room was the worst.”
The Swanns’ children, ages 32 to 40, “were all onboard.”
“They actually took things, though not as much as we might have wanted.” One wanted the baby grand piano, but didn’t have room for it, so kind friends with a large home agreed to take it on a long-term temporary basis.
Many things went to the Salvation Army. Country décor, such as an assortment of good wicker boxes, also went out because they wouldn’t suit the new look for the townhome, which is sleekly informal and more contemporary than their previous house.
Most of the lamps moved over, with one or two additions such as fabulous red chandeliers over the staircase and a modern table lamp with a glass base.
A collection of ornamental boxes was
downsized by about 25 per cent; a few are on display on a desk and table in the living room; many others are tucked into the large dining room breakfront which became a storage unit in Jim’s study. The breakfront’s lower cabinets are “chock-a-block” with things she couldn’t give up, such as three sets of fine china. The Swanns’ house sold in six days, with the sale to close at the end of August. Then they jammed their furniture into the townhouse garage and two storage units and went to stay with friends. By October, they were established in the townhouse, with all the boxes unpacked by the end of December. Swann enjoys repurposing things. A transparent Louis Ghost chair that was in a bathroom is now tucked into a corner of the living room. Two large pictures that had hung unframed were framed to give them increased presence and they now hang behind the sofa. The tall portrait of a woman that dominates the dining room once hung in their kitchen.
In all the pressure to trim back their possessions, Sandy says, “I just had one meltdown ... when videos of the kids when they were young mistakenly went out in the trash.” In reorganizing the townhouse, the Swanns removed a dividing wall between the living and dining areas, leaving them with a room large enough to accommodate a new gas fireplace and Sandy’s ornamental desk that presides at one end of the living room. With the addition of a new round table, the large solarium became their dining room. They wanted to use the living room every day, not just for entertaining, and thought that would be unlikely if the solarium was furnished as a family room. “I did wonder where we were going to have Thanksgiving dinner, but we had 18 people in the dining room at Thanksgiving,” Sandy says. They had former neighbours over for a drink and to see their new digs. But she wasn’t quite ready to accept an invitation to visit the house they lived in for 33
years, even though she doesn’t regret moving. As “more of a forward-feeling person than backward-looking,” Sandy says, “this is much more suited to us now; it already feels like home.”
It was about a year before they actually moved that Jean and Gord Riedlinger of Waterloo began discussing the possibility. They travel fairly frequently and a turnkey home was increasingly appealing. They were leaving a 3,800-square-foot house, but never considered a smaller house; if they moved, it would be to a condominium.
They also knew they wanted to be in downtown Waterloo. After Thanksgiving 2012, when they’d found a 2,600-squarefoot condo and spoken to a contractor about updating the apartment, they listed their house and sold it almost immediately.
Then the hard work began. The house was fully furnished on all three floors, plus an attic over the garage that had become a repository for everything that didn’t have a home elsewhere. The couple went from room to room, making choices that Jean jotted down on a What Goes, What Doesn’t list.
She recalls having trouble deciding about most things, but what Gord remembers most is many trips to the second-hand Generations and ReStore to donate household items. Some workshop tools didn’t make the move; the rest are now in a storage unit in the condo building.
A few things were sold on Kijiji, but that’s a slow process if one doesn’t have much time. They were very pleased that three adult grandchildren wanted quite a few things.
They tried to take breaks, but the task at hand was never far from their thoughts. “You have to keep the focus on what you’re doing, and on the end result,” Jean says.
They didn’t spend much time debating clothing. Most of it was moved, with Jean vowing to sort more thoroughly once they were settled. Gord’s desk was transferred to the condo’s den, but was later replaced by a new desk that’s now in the guest room.
The biggest frustration turned out to be the moving company which, without seeing the house, scheduled two people to pack for four hours the day before the move. When the packers arrived, they took one look and called for two more packers. Packing continued on moving day morning while the Riedlingers worried about the condo elevator which had only been reserved from 1 to 9 p.m.
As for the reward, their new home has views north and west, and on a clear day they see as far as Elmira.
Phyllis and Gary Salm moved from Elmira to Waterloo 10 years ago. Now another move, and more downsizing, is in the offing.
“I want to simplify my life,” Phyllis says. With winters spent in Florida, it seems to her she spends a lot of time preparing to go and, later, preparing to return. For some time she’d been thinking a smaller property would make that easier.
The Waterloo house was listed this summer with no plans to buy another until she had an unconditional offer in hand. She also postponed the necessary sorting through of her belongings. Although the next house will be smaller, “you can’t get rid of things while potential buyers are still coming through,” she explained.
She sold some antiques at sales in the summer of 2012, and discovered “it was such a good feeling to clean out the garage and basement.”
It turns out that the next house will have a less formal look. “The fancy furniture will go, and what will remain is my comfortable old pine and wicker furniture. I’m ready to give up the pretty things. I now prefer a warmer look.”
However, she’s a self-confessed collector of quilts, of blue and white china and particularly of deep blue Royal Copenhagen Christmas plates, which she displays along plate rails in the kitchen.
As downsizers quickly learn, it’s pos- sessions with memories attached that are the most difficult to leave behind. Her mother started her on collecting Christmas plates, and pieces of blue and white china “have also become part of me,” she says. “I couldn’t live without them. Every one has a little story behind it.”
Phyllis grew up in Plattsville, so at the moment she’s not far from her birthplace. But it only takes one move to loosen such bonds. After living in England for 18 months, she felt “I would have been ready to go anywhere.”
Pat Cameron says the hardest part of downsizing is deciding to do it. After that, it’s a matter of taking time to find a new home that feels right.
Pat and her husband, Steve, moved to a condominium apartment in December 2012, two years after they started talking about downsizing. It was an unhurried process. “We didn’t have any timeline in mind,” she says, “but it’s important to do it while you are healthy and can look at what’s out there without having to rush.”
The Camerons were open to anything other than another house as large as the one they were in. “We looked at everything, including townhouses and bungalows,” Pat says, “although after our first look at a highrise apartment we couldn’t imagine moving to one of them.”
They didn’t want to go far from their Waterloo neighbourhood and most of the houses available there were too large. Then they found a fourth-floor corner unit in a stable, well-built, financially sound 12-storey condominium overlooking a heavily treed green space and bought it in March of last year.
Then they made a decision that in retrospect was not the best. Because the attic of their house held a lot of things left behind by their four children, they thought they should empty it before listing the house.
“Everything in the attic was neat and contained, it wouldn’t have affected a
sale, and listing it in April would have been better,” Pat says. Instead, it was June when the house went on the market and September before it sold.
The Camerons totally renovated the condo before moving in, shifting walls around to accommodate furniture they wanted to keep. “What we kept from the house was chosen to suit the condo and what we wanted to be doing, and not doing,” Pat says. “We wanted it to be low-maintenance and we didn’t want an excess of furniture squeezed into it.”
What they weren’t moving was offered to their children, who live in Switzerland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Victoria. “We wanted all of them to have something from home that was meaningful to them,” Pat says, but because of distance and circumstance, two chose quite a few things, the others took fewer things.
Fortunately, all four are individuals and made different choices. There was never an argument over who took what. Zurich was too far to ship furniture, so that daughter chose dishes, art and other keepsakes. No one had space for the piano; fortunately the people who purchased the house wanted it.
When the children couldn’t move all their things right away, the Camerons rented a storage unit, hoping it would gradually be emptied. They first planned to have a moving company deliver furniture and other items to Philadelphia, but in June of this year they instead rented a truck, completed the paperwork necessary to cross the border and delivered things in person before flying back home.
The Camerons have now come through a summer without the pool, large deck and backyard that provided a holiday atmosphere for visiting children and grandchildren. They don’t miss the work required to keep it all in order, and they enjoy the views from their balcony.
“We would never have thought of buying something where we couldn’t step outside,” Pat says.
And while the condo is undeniably a different environment for their offspring to visit, “it’s a new life for us, with many fewer responsibilities.”