Sometimes the Answer Finds You
We weren’t planning to move.
There wasn’t a list of houses we wanted to see. We weren’t spending our evenings searching online. And we certainly hadn’t decided it was time to sell our home.
In fact, we liked our house and its location.
Then we walked into a house we were getting ready to list.
As I walked through it, I started thinking less like a Realtor preparing a house for sale and more like someone imagining what it would be like to live there.
And that’s when something clicked.
Smaller Could Actually Work Better
The house was about 700 square feet smaller than the one we owned.
Normally, that might sound like a compromise. But when I started looking at how the space was laid out, I realized that this smaller house actually had some things our larger house didn’t.
It had more individual rooms, including the possibility of something that had become very important to me: a dedicated office.
When we’d purchased our previous home, we had no idea a pandemic was coming or that working from home would eventually become a permanent part of our lives. The house we’d chosen for one version of our life didn’t necessarily work as well for the life we were living now.
And the office wasn’t the only thing.
The Little Things Started Adding Up
Some of the reasons were practical. Others were simply things we’d come to want after living in our house for more than 10 years.
I had always wanted green kitchen cabinets. I also wanted different countertops. But the cabinets and countertops in our house were still in great condition, and tearing out perfectly good materials simply because I wanted something different felt wasteful.
Then there were the floors.
When we first moved into our previous house, we had our dog Sadie, and darker floors weren’t a big issue. Life with Bunny, our yellow lab, made me look at light-colored floors very differently.
Sometimes your design preferences aren’t really about design at all. They’re about how you actually live.
The new house also had a shaded backyard.
That might not make everyone’s must-have list, but it mattered to me. I love spending time outside and working in the yard, but I don’t love spending that time baking in the sun. It seems the summers in Central Virginia have been getting hotter and hotter each year so while I love my huge garden, I’m excited to scale down a bit, or a bunch. My Sleepy Hollow garden below (beautiful but HOT!).
The house was still in a location convenient to the places we enjoyed. It gave us more usable rooms while giving us less overall square footage to take care of.
And then there were property taxes.
We were living in an area with relatively high property taxes, and we started questioning whether we wanted to continue putting that much of our money toward taxes when we could spend it on other things that mattered more to us.
No single one of these things would have made us sell our house.
Together, they changed the conversation.
Does Your Home Still Fit Your Life?
That’s really the question we found ourselves asking.
It wasn’t, “What’s wrong with our house?”
Nothing was wrong with it.
The better question was:
Does this house still fit the way we live and the things that are important to us today?
Our needs had changed. Our work had changed. Our dogs had changed.
The way we wanted to use our outdoor space had changed.
Even our ideas about where we wanted to spend our money had changed.
The house hadn’t changed. We had.
Sometimes Moving Isn’t About Needing More
As Realtors, we often meet people who assume their next move needs to mean a bigger house, a better house or a more expensive house.
Our experience reminded us that it doesn’t.
Sometimes the right move is about finding a home that simply fits better.
For us, that meant about 700 fewer square feet but more usable rooms. It meant a dedicated office, a shaded backyard and an opportunity to make design choices that we’d wanted for years.
Of course, there was one fairly significant catch.
The house needed a lot of work.
We knew that before we made the decision. But instead of looking at everything we’d need to change, we started looking at what the house could become.
That day, we began putting together a plan.
We realized we didn’t just think we could make this smaller house work.
We thought we could make it exactly what we wanted.
And that’s where our moving and renovation adventure really began. I knew we would be downsizing and honestly, I was not looking forward to it but thinking about making a new house out of an old one excited me. I would finally get to use some of those design ideas I had been saving picture of in my phone. A new house with old dreams. It sounded ideal.
Is It Time for You to Move?
You don’t have to dislike your home to start thinking about moving.
If you’ve been wondering whether it’s time for a change, it may help to ask yourself a few different questions:
- Does the layout still work for the way we live today?
- Are we using the space we’re paying for?
- Has working from home changed what we need?
- Would we rather have different spaces than simply more square footage?
- Are there things we’d love to change but can’t justify changing in our current home?
- Does our yard fit the way we want to spend our time?
- Are the taxes, maintenance and other costs still worth it to us?
- If we were buying our current home today, would we choose it again?
That last question might be the most interesting one of all.
For us, asking questions like these led to a move we hadn’t been planning.
And as you’ll hear in the next few posts, deciding to move turned out to be the easy part.
Until next time…
Lisa Adams
Mark Adams & Associates
CONTACT:
804-237-8585
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