Downsizing and Reset

I haven't been blogging much or writing articles for thepurplemuse.com very much for the past three months because my wife and I have been fully engaged in making fundamental changes in our life. After several years of discussion we decided in March to work actively to sell our large single family home and begin the process of downsizing into a smaller home. Our children our grown and gone and the house was too large for the two of us. It required too much effort and expense to maintain. In addition we plan to travel extensively during the next few years and keeping up a large home while we were gone didn't make sense to us.

In March we turned on a full effort to prepare our home for sale. We listed our house in late April and signed a sales contract in five days. It wasn't that hard to sell a home in our area if it is prepared properly and priced competively to the market. We had two recent sales on our street for comparison and a very knowledgable sales agent that understood the local market very well.

We leased two apartments (one for our residence and one for my office/storage) for our interim housing so we could get out of our house on the buyer's timetable. We closed the sale in mid- June, approximately 90 days from the date we started preparing our house for sale. During our preliminary survey of the housing market in anticipation of selling our single family home, my wife found a very nice community which included a townhouse that seems to be a perfect fit for our needs. The townhouse is sufficiently large that it includes a kitchen that wasn't downsized. You can guess where that requirement came from! We signed a contract to buy the townhouse a few days after closing the sale of our single family home. We expect to close on our townhouse in the first quarter of 2012. In the meantime we will live comfortably in our apartments during the interim period. We can get started on our extended travels without concern over maintaining our single family home.

The process of downsizing was extremely interesting and liberating to a certain extent. We had lived in our home for 16 years and it was the largest of the three homes we have owned up to the this point. During our prior moves we never had to throw anything away because we always had room to put everything and more. We bought more and more household furnishings as our houses got larger. This time we had to choose what to keep and what to sell, give away or throw away because neither our apartments or downsized future home would hold all the stuff we had accumulated over more than 30 years. We had to touch everything we owned and make a decision if it made the cut to be kept or not. We essentially reviewed our entire lives, the lives of our children and much of the lives of our parents in the process. A lot of things with memories attached we could not keep. The process focussed us on the most important aspects of our lives. We had to establish our future priorities. My wife described the entire process as a reset. I could not agree more. We are pushing the reset button so we can be ready to continue our journey through life with a simpler, more compact home environment that will permit us to continue to learn more about the world and hopefully make some contributions to our society.

Yesterday, we picked out all of the flooring for the new townhouse. We have a small amount of paperwork to do with the builder next week and we will be done with this phase of the downsizing process. We will get to watch our new home be constructed beginning in the fall and hopefully we will move in March of 2012. Our downsizing and reset process will then be complete. We will be prepared to reengage the world from a new home base and continue on for may years to come. We want to make those years as productive as possible. I will have a new place to create my Man Cave Reports and to write my articles and tweet. During our travels we will simply lock the door and go; there is no yard work associated with this townhouse, a mandatory requirement!

It was a tremendous amount of work to get all of the downsizing tasks done during the past few months but it was worth it. I am reinvigorated and ready to go. All of us need to reset ourselves at various times in our lives and this was one of mine. Many of you will have a similar choice to downsize and reset in the months and years ahead. Don't ignore the opportunity if your circumstances provide you the option to downsize and reset. Go forward as hard as you can, until you can't!