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 r...