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 one side. But I decided to just set up my desktop in a kind of nook/corner of the living room, which is big. The last time I had a setup like this, I was probably still in my 20s. So it’s weird.

But it does work. There are only two of us, and my wife keeps to her office for the most part, as she does in Mexico. I don’t like seeing this setup when we’re watching TV or whatever. But … it works.

While we were in Mexico City this past month, we set up all of our utilities remotely, and I had my wife call Astound (RCN) to get our Internet connection. At the house, we were paying a bit over $90 per month for a 400 Mbps connection, which is over twice what that company charges new customers. Here, we are paying $60 per month for a 1.2 Gbps connection and have locked in that price for two years with no contract. So that was one problem solved. And seriously, I’ve never seen Wi-Fi download speeds this fast.

Speaking of which, Astound would have provided an Eero Pro 6E Wi-Fi router for another $5 per month, but I bought a three-node Eero Pro 6E system last November for the house, and I was able to use one of those nodes instead. This place is so small, that’s all we need, and we get incredible connectivity from the furthest corners of the apartment. So I’ll probably bring one of the leftover nodes to Mexico and get better connectivity there too. (Not that the current system is in any way a problem.)

But I have a lot of other technology decisions to make.

One of the bigger ones concerns my Sonos setup, which is likewise too much for this apartment. I have a silly number of Sonos speakers, for example, and some of them—like the two Sonos Play:5s and the Sonos Sub—are just too big and too loud for this place. At the very least, I will want to get some kind of a subwoofer stand to get the Sub off the floor and help prevent it from rumbling the entire building. But a more likely scenario is that I just sell those three speakers. Less is more in this place.

So I have too much Wi-Fi gear and too many Sonos speakers. But I also have too many computers, and this is where things get tricky. I need a certain number of computers for work-related purposes, and of course I also have PCs coming in and out of the home for review purposes. I haven’t reviewed what I have yet, but will soon. There was a point last year when I had over 20 laptops in the house between my own PCs and review units. And that won’t work here. Just storing the boxes for everything might be impossible.

Whatever happens, I will at the very least achieve some semblance of downsizing and will be better positioned for whatever happens next. If we stay in this place, fine. If we end up getting a three-bedroom unit, preferably a townhouse-type thing, then that’s fine too. But at the very least, I hope to never have to experience all of the moving we did over the past week. And all of the sorting and jettisoning that we still have left to do.

It’s going to be an interesting year.