We are in a 4400 sq foot home with an acre of land and what seems like a 1000 bushes that must be trimmed. We id’d a 2400 sq foot townhome nearby and have “agreed” with the owners to purchase it when they find a place they like…problem is they have been looking for almost a year. In this market we do not want to sell our home until we have purchased one to move into.
In anticipation of the move, we have been downsizing and repairing. We lived overseas for more than a decade and enjoyed having a smaller home. We like to travel and I think a townhome will be less hassle, although am a bit concerned about noise levels. We actually wanted about 1200 sq feet but it is hard to get a place of that size in the area we are looking at.
I may have written this before, but when dh and I got married we did the Eaton Press 100 Greatest Books ever written by the month subscription. I would love to get rid of those books, but dh refuses. To be fair, in the last couple of years he has been s-l-o-w-l-y plodding his way through them.
Right now our 3rd bedroom in our 1,650 sq ft condo is used as an office, so they are in there. If ds ever marries and we have some grands, we are going to have to use that room AS a bedroom. I’ll revisit that situation if and when the time ever comes. That 3rd bedroom is VERY small so there is no way to keep the books in there and his desk in there and also have a dresser and twin beds. Right now we also have a sleeper sofa in there. It IS currently a nice setup for an office as the closet is 90% shelving rather than hanging space so we have office supplies, photo albums, sheet music, and other books on those. Someone could sleep in there if we had to use it for overflow. But, they wouldn’t have much extra spare space at all and would have to live out of their suitcase.
I actually think I have a spot where I could move the books, but dh has no interest in making it into a bedroom right now anyway.
Well, that’s sort of our problem. We have four bedrooms. One is the master, one is a guest room, and one is where DH has his hobby. (He paints.) The fourth is the “library,” with three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (crammed with books), and a loveseat and couch from the nanny suite in our old house. They are This End Up stuff and I’d be happy to get rid of them and put beds or sleeper sofas in there instead. Our three-yr-old GD stayed there on a foldout cot, but I’d love to have the room be more of a guest room for when the grands come with their parents.
We are at around 4500. I want to go down to 2800-3100. I still want 4 bedrooms like we have now. Just don’t need as large secondary bedrooms or extra office/sewing. Big deal is that we have grand piano that needs space -H would give me up first I think. At least 2 bedrooms need to be first floor and that’s a problem around here. Would love to say in our neighborhood but smaller house are “Charleston” style with no bedrooms on main and most new downsized houses condos in our area are multilevel. H will not be up to moving out of area we are in. Sigh. And based on past week we definitely need more aging in place features.
I can never get rid of my books and required a library room when we moved to this house. DH wanted a wine bar, and he also needed an office, so we turned this room:
We have customized this house so much, it will be very hard to leave, but we don’t need all of this space (or the type of HOA we have), and I keep thinking that we are going to right-size once more now that we’ll be in Maine at least five months each year. I feel stuck, though, because I don’t want to pay the going rates for what will surely feel like less, but I keep looking.
We are currently in a 5 BR/4.5 BA house with over 4000 sf finished. In process of buying in our new location (another state). New place will have about 3000 sf. We’ll have 4 bedrooms but one is set up as a study/office with built ins, and one is currently being used as a workout room but has a nice size Murphy bed for guests. That’s an ideal set up for us. In addition to the 5th bedroom and 1 bath, we are “losing” the formal dining room, the study and a sitting room. We are fine with that.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but H and I will be looking for a condo 2/2 or 2/1. The most important thing will be that it overlooks Big Water (ocean). Anything else we’ll be fine living with. We’ve adjusted our whole lives for location as our “top of the list” dealbreaker. We live in a 4/1 farmhouse now. It has a great location and view, though not of Big Water. We have a pond, then mountain and field views.
If H had his way we’d be living on a catamaran.
We plan on keeping the farm until we’re positive none of our kids want it, because they’d never be able to buy it back later. For us, we’d be dividing our time between places, and this depends upon us finding an island we like enough to do it vs renting and exploring more during our winters as we’ve been doing.
Serious question: Do most/any of you really use your dining room more than a couple of times a year? I find this room useless, but DH insists we have a dining room/table even though we can handle the same number as the table seats in multiple other spaces in the house.
We use our dining room several times a week. In part, because we decided that we should eat there rather than eating in the kitchen all the time; we had a woodworker make a dining room set for us a few years ago. Adding . . . it’s a beautiful cherry table with unique chairs and it’s just fun to sit there where we have a great view of our garden.
Compmom - your traveling light, living compactly, and seeing different places sounds like an option with lots to recommend it! That was sort of my vision when I contemplated getting rid of ‘all our stuff’ - transform into a life focused on experiences and the present, rather than dragging along the detritus of the past. It has a lot of appeal.
So enjoy hearing all the downsizing options here!
To add: we use our diningroom literally once or twice a year. Had it professionally decorated 10 years ago; really pretty. Zero use and I would not want one at all in next house. Just one sizeable, expandable area for eating (that could accomodate guests).
When we designed the dining room 20 years ago the intention was to be multipurpose.
I am typing on my laptop on the dining room table right now looking out at a mountain view where wildlife frequent. For instance, I have coffee, eat dinner, occasionally sew, host dinners, do FaceTime, homework, card games, taxes, etc. The room is open to the living room and the kitchen but sectioned by different ceiling heights.
I think our plan was to keep the table (H’s hand made grandparents’ which seats 6) clear of objects and plan on using it multipurpose. It has done just that.
We use our formal dining space a lot. It is a space, not a real room because our ground floor has a very open plan (only powder, library, and laundry rooms have 4 walls and doors). What we don’t use, surprisingly, is our kitchen nook table! In House1, our formal dining room was used only a few times a year, and our kitchen nook table was the workhorse, lol. Mr. B wanted to get rid of the nook table after we moved to House2, but I vetoed that idea - the chairs are used by our aging cat to get to the top of the cat tree! Plus, when the grands grow a bit bigger, it will be a perfect kiddie Thanksgiving table.
We eat in our dining room every day for almost every meal that we are home. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the house. Big and spacious and empty. It’s calming to me.
Of course, your bathroom is probably nicer than our formal dining room, lol
It’s just a useless pretty room we use on holidays, if we stay home, but we don’t often. With an eat in kitchen and counter, we don’t need it. We eat at the counter most days.
I love having dinner parties, so my DR is very important to me. The one I have right now is too small for my taste. I have a wonderfully versatile DR table that I usually keep small – 60 inches long – but I have leaves that expand it to 120 inches. The room is pretty crowded when we do that.
In my next house/condo/whatever, I want a really big DR.
We use the dining room on Thanksgiving and that’s about it. The new place has an open kitchen/living room/family room and the kitchen table expands. Not going to miss the dining room.
