Downsized (Premium)

One month ago, I wrote about how my wife and I were selling the house and moving temporarily into a nearby apartment. In doing so, we've fulfilled a long-time desire to downsize, though "fulfilled" is perhaps a bit strong since we're still working through what that looks like. But whatever: we're in the apartment, and though it currently looks more than a little bit like the set of Sanford & Son, we will keep working on it until it's where we want it. Or until we decide we need a bigger place.

It's an interesting thing going from a 3,100 square foot house---with another couple of thousand square feet of storage in the basement and garage---to a 1,100 square foot apartment. But the short version is that the apartment can't possibly hold all the stuff we were storing in the house and something has to give. To that end, we spent many weeks selling and giving away things big and small, and we still have a lot of stuff in storage that we need to deal with. And it's getting there.

Since my wife and I both work from home and have done so for many years, figuring out workable home office setups is top of my mind. But here, we have a useful precedent: in our even smaller (750 square foot) Mexico City apartment, we've settled on a system where my wife works from the second bedroom, which doubles as an office, while I work from the kitchen table that we'll never use for meals anyway. That works fine for the short trips we've taken so far, but it won't do here.

And yet, we don't really have all that much more space here and, more to the point, don't have two rooms that we can use as home offices. My wife and I debated two- or three-bedroom apartments, but the short version is that two-bedroom units are much easier to find and are less expensive. And while we would have gone with a three bedroom if we could have, the place we liked didn't have anything available when we needed it. And so we compromised by choosing a local place with two bedrooms and a short-term lease. If things don't work out here, we can just move again in the fall.

It's only been a few days, but things are working out here, assuming you can overlook the boxes of stuff we still need to triage. The complex we're in is small, with two-story buildings. We're in the back corner of the furthest of those buildings, and on the second floor, and it backs onto a wildlife area that is unused and won't ever be used. And it's very quiet here, much more so than we'd even hoped for. That was a nice surprise.

My home office setup is not ideal. I'm still working from the same desk and basic setup that I had in my dedicated home office at the house; there I was using what was usually a dining room as my office, but I moved into the finished part of the basement during the home sale process so we could stage that room as a dining room again. But I don't have a dedicated room. I could use what would normally be the dining room here, though it's open to the kitchen and has no wall on ...