In the attempt to downsize one has to sell one’s home and, to do that, one has to engage a real estate agent. It is they who advise you on how to arrange the various rooms, what to get rid of, and what to keep in place. They also have your home open to the public for an ‘open house’ at least once a week for the month leading up to the auction. For the owner, an open house involves packing up anything that identifies them, anything that looks like clutter, or can be interfered with, and anything that is easily nicked should some light fingered person wander through the house. To this end, we pack up laptops (on one of which I write this), chargers, external hard drives, family photographs, jewellery, knitting, etc., into several bags or backpacks, and load up the boot of the car. The car is then backed out of the garage, so it cannot be blocked by the real estate agent’s vehicle, or any early arrivals for the open house. Just before the agent arrives, we turn all the lights on and unlock all the doors. When the agent arrives, we open the garage door and turn its lights on, hop in the loaded car, drive around the block and park about 100 metres from our home to see how many cars turn up to look at the house. We have been told that so far 28 groups have shown up, which is apparently a good result (we guessed it was somewhere in the 20s). This ‘open house’ caper has been going on for close to a month now and I am thoroughly sick of it. It is time consuming, repetitive, and draining, and is only assuaged by glasses of wine and ‘8 out of 10 cats does countdown’ on what used to be called the idiot box.
The auction of the house happens in the next week, and I can hardly wait for it all to be over. On the other hand, it will be hard to leave this place, as it has been a home for almost half my life. The place we are moving to has not yet been completed, so we will be homeless for a few weeks. This will be filled with travelling about the countryside visiting relatives and friends and bludging a bed off them for a night or three until we can move in with all our stuff.
“one has to sell one’s home and, to do that, one has to engage a real estate agent.”
Having gone through the above process once many years ago, I decided I could have done it myself. At a fraction of the cost; I just didn’t have the time, energy or inclination, at that particular stage fo my life. But it can be done, and during my sale and subsequent purchase, I saw several successful examples where people had managed the sale of their own properties.
Doderamus,
I am the same way. At this time of my life, I have plenty of other things to do that I enjoy (i.e. palaeontology and blogging) and if it costs me a few (many) $ to go through the process, I don’t really care. You cannot take it with you when you drop off the twig.
I can’t imagine leaving our home. It is the only house we have owned. We have planted hundreds of trees and shrubs. We turned a place that was once a few acres of paddock with barely a tree into a haven for birds and other wildlife. I fear for what will happen to it when we go after seeing what some of the shit for brains vandals who have bought properties near us have done. People who have illegally chopped down ancient gums and turned areas that were homes for wildlife into lifeless gravel and cement encrusted landscaped shit, or appalling vineyards. Our home is not just our home. Many other things live here, and it is much more than a house, or a property. To us, and them. We will stay here until our dying day.
Mark,
I know how you feel. I feel similar as far as leaving a home goes, but ours is just a California bungalow in suburbia, and home is where the heart is, not where the bricks are. It is only the second home we have ever owned. I have friends who have said ‘I am not leaving here’. However, they will have to do so, maybe not under circumstances they would like.
No I am not talking about leaving a home. I am talking about leaving my life. Our life. This place is our life. I know other people who feel similarly about the places that some may just call home, or a house. This is one of the reasons why I get so sick of the vomitous Yimby movement that has developed recently. A bunch of tools who, in my opinion, are just spruikers for the property development industry which has its poisonous claws so deeply embedded in this country. There are members of my family who have moved homes often. In fact so often it is hard to remember where they live. They upgrade at a whim. Like changing clothes. It is simply stupid and contributes to the bullshit housing crisis. My parents moved house, including moving to two different countries, five times before I was eleven years old. After I left home they moved three more times. I lived in eight different places before I got married. I have fucking done with that shit so when people say that we will all do it that is just crap.
Mark,
When I was referring to moving ‘but not how they would like’, I mean either in a wheelchair, a stretcher or in a hearse. I would love to stay in this house because it is familiar, but at my time of life, downsizing is the sensible thing to do. It will be the fourth place I have occupied in the last 42 years. The first was a rented place when we arrived in town; the second was the first house we bought, and this one we are in now was a bigger place we raised our kids in. Now they have their own families and homes, there are three rooms in the house we hardly ever enter. It is time to downsize. The funny thing is that the people who have bought our house are in the same position we were in when we bought the place; a couple with two small children. It seems appropriate and nice to think that they can enjoy the place as much as we did.