Things were changing in the summer 2019. Our youngest daughter was entering her last year of college. Our oldest daughter had been out of the house for about a year. We were beginning to feel like empty nesters. My wife asked me what I thought about downsizing. We had been in our house since 2006 and were coming up on having been there for a full 13 years. One of the bedrooms upstairs had been converted to an extra family room when our son moved out and another bedroom turned into a music room when another child left. My wife didn’t like going upstairs to clean rooms that weren’t used that often. There were a lot of reasons that now seemed like an ideal time to downsize.
Probably the biggest roadblock to us moving was the shop. The people that originally owned our house also had a huge RV. They build a shop in the back yard to house this vehicle. The shop had more of an industrial garage door instead of what you normally find on a house garage. The drive was paved all the way up to the garage providing a good place to entertain. There was a loft in the back of the shop that we hung a huge screen from to watch movies. With our projector, we were able to show films on the 8-foot-tall screen. Over the years we had ping pong and foosball tables. We had many BBQs and fish fries. We enjoyed entertaining outside and it would be a tough decision to let this go.
Late in July, my wife asked me again if I would consider downsizing but this time I said yes. The housing market was good for selling. Our son had sold his house the first day his was on the market that year in the spring. We talked to a realtor about what we needed to do to prepare our house, spent about a month getting everything ready, then put the house on the market. Within 24 hours, we had accepted an offer. Within the next 24 hours, we had made an offer on a house and in less than 24 hours the offer was accepted.
In less than 2 weeks, we talked to a company about having a “living estate sale”. This is just like an estate sale you might have we someone in your family passes away only we weren’t dead. We decided that this move would be a new start. We would sell practically all the furniture in our house except for one bedroom set. We were keeping that one because it was passed down to my wife from her family and was also our first bedroom set. Because they did the estate sale at our house, we would need to pack and move anything we planned to keep to our shop. Likewise, anything that we were selling that was currently in the shop, needed to be moved to the house. We planned to keep all the shoppers at the house so no one would think anything we wanted to keep was for sale.
After a couple of days preparation, it was obvious that we could no longer stay at our old house. We started staying with my wife’s brother and his girlfriend. The estate sale took place about a week and a half after we moved out. About a week later, we closed on the sale of our house. The original plan was for us to close on the purchase of the new house on the same day. We planned to have a moving van packed with our stuff ready to pull out immediately after the closing. The closing on the house we were purchasing was delayed about a week. Our new house was a new construction and the seller agreed to let us store our belongings in the third car garage of the new house until closing. The day before the closing on our old house, we moved everything to that garage. Because we had sold most of our old furniture, all our stuff would easily fit in this small garage. In a way it was sort of sad.
Our 2-week stay with family turned into 3 weeks because of closing delays. We had spent a lot of time selecting furniture for the new house prior to the closing but weren’t able to actually purchase anything because the finance companies don’t like to see a lot of activity in your accounts during that time. So in addition to moving things from the garage into the house after the closing, we had to go buy new furniture for most of the house. We would get new stuff for the living room, dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom. We also had to buy a new refrigerator. We had to wait for all of it to be delivered which took several weeks for some items. We ate off an old folding table and used camp chairs as seating in our living room. It took about a month before everything was settled but we are very happy with the new house. People have told us that they wished they could do like us and sell everything if they ever moved. I don’t know if it was the best plan, but we made it work for us.