From the Editor’s Desk: Smaller (Premium)

Six weeks ago, we moved from a large home into a small apartment about 7 minutes away. The move itself was fast and furious, and I’m most delighted that I didn’t throw out my back or otherwise hurt myself during the process. But now that things have settled down, we have a clearer picture of how this major downsizing has impacted our lives.

Fortunately, it’s mostly positive.

I like to say that squeezing 3,100 square feet of stuff into a 1,100 square foot apartment is an interesting problem, but that undersells it: that house also had at least another 1,000 square feet of storage space in the unfinished part of the basement and a two-car garage. This amount of downsizing in a single step required a lot of work—we sold, gave away, and threw out all kinds of stuff—and some hard decisions. It also required a bit of fudging, since we are also renting two cheap on-site storage areas at the apartment complex to store overflow items like Christmas decorations, empty electronics boxes, a mattress, a love seat, and some other items.

We have enough space in the apartment, but it would ideally be divvied up better for our needs, which include three bedrooms and not the two we have so that we each use one as an office. The layout of this apartment probably makes sense for most people, I guess, but there’s a dining room we’ll never use, and I’d love to wall it off and use it as an office. I may still move into there at some point, though the current layout, in which my “office” sits in the same room with our couches and TV does at least offer me some outside light and views of greenery.

I wasn’t surprised that this amount of space would work—though I had to convince my wife of this, and we got a short-term lease purposefully just in case—but my big worry here was noise. We’ve had our own standalone home since 1998, and each time we moved, for the most part, it was into a bigger home with more space between us and the neighbors. I was never a fan of all the upkeep one has to do with a house, and we specifically moved from our last house because of all the things that would soon need to be upgraded at great expense. But the one thing I did love about that house was the quiet. It was an ideal place for writing.

Oddly, noise isn’t an issue at the apartment. We specifically chose a corner unit on the second floor to minimize the noise, and there is an untamed nature area right behind us that’s owned by a golf course but will likely never be used. But our neighbors are always quiet, and there are no barking dogs or other annoyances. We have people below us, behind us, and next to us, and we rarely hear anything at all. I’ve responded in kind by disconnecting the thumping Sonos Sub from our speaker setup and by lowering the volume on TV and music nights. But I suspect we’re the loudest people in our part of the complex.

Where our home was in a quiet rural area with a nice nature walk next to a creek, our apartment is near the train tracks that pass by the downtown area. The trains come much more often than I had expected—we could hear some of them from the house in the distance, but here they are very close—and they can be loud, but I love trains, and I almost can’t get enough of it. And we have found a nice 40-minute walk that goes through two nearby parks and then the neighborhood behind (yes, literally) Main Street, and it’s just as nice as before and more diverse.

The weirdest thing about the move is how we have to think through getting anywhere. We’re only minutes from the old house, but we approach the places we visit—home of friends and family, stores, restaurants, the gym, and so on—from a completely different direction, so we’ve had to adjust our understanding of the best ways to drive to places. This has been surprisingly interesting, and it’s helped us complete our mental map of the area by fitting a few more pieces of the puzzle in place.

Financially, this might be the smartest thing we’ve ever done. I described our previous move, from Massachusetts to the house in Pennsylvania, as a financial downsize, because it was, despite the house being so much bigger than the previous place. But this is a downsize in every way, and our monthly costs have dropped more dramatically. One of the issues with the house was that it used electric heating, and it was very expensive in the winter: in January, our electric bill was over $800. But our combined electric and gas bill last month at the apartment was just $100.

Selling the house also made us completely debt-free for the first time in decades. We don’t carry credit card debt or anything like that, but we have had monthly car payments at different times, and have had a mortgage on each house. Many financial advisors will argue that a mortgage is “good debt,” but whatever, it’s the only way most can afford something that expensive. Now, there’s no mortgage, and there are no property taxes, another sticking point here in this part of Pennsylvania. And our rent is cheaper than what we were paying before between the mortgage and the home equity line, which we had used to buy the apartment in Mexico City. Which is now paid off.

This is good for all the obvious reasons, though there is that uncertainty about where we end up. Technically, everything is temporary, but this apartment is particularly temporary, and it’s possible we could move again later this year. We need more than six weeks to figure that out, but it’s a when not an if. Fortunately, living here has been a positive experience so far. We’re not suffering in any way.

But most interesting to me is how people respond to this change.

Most assume (correctly) that this is a temporary thing and (less correctly) that we’ll buy a home, a condo, or a townhouse at some point. We might do that. But we may just keep renting, and try to find a place with three bedrooms. We’re not sure yet.

I also get the same vibe from many friends and family members, that they are intrigued by what we’re doing but unsure that they could ever do this themselves. Most have homes full of crap, and the thought of going through it all and getting rid of most of it is so daunting as to be a non-starter. But my wife and I have spent years downsizing in preparation for this day, with regular pushes to shed as much junk as possible. And my takeaway is that it might not have mattered: we still had an incredible amount of stuff to go through before we could move. A house full of stuff is a house full of stuff.

(That said, some people do find it beneficial to get rid of stuff and lead a more minimalist lifestyle. We certainly do, so I don’t regret all that work.)

I’m curious to see which of them follow us down this path and which simply choose to stay in their large homes even after the kids have gone. We had neighbors in their 70s across the circle from us at the old house and were chatting with them, post-move, at a get-together recently, and it was hard not to juxtapose what we had done, in our 50s, with what they had done. They said that were still using all of their equally big house, leading to some questions. As it turns out, their two sons—both in their 40s with families of their own out-of-state—still had their childhood bedrooms waiting for them.

Yikes. Viva la différence, I guess. But that life is not for me.