So, apparently, we’re moving.
Not today. Not next week. Probably not even until spring.
But Tracy and I have made the decision that it’s time to sell our house and find something smaller.
This was not, I should point out, prompted by some sudden desire to spend the next six months painting walls, replacing flooring, installing baseboards, updating bathrooms, and discovering all the little things around the house that we’ve been perfectly capable of ignoring for years.
And yet, here we are.
The truth is, the house has become too much house.
More specifically, it has become too much yard.
I like gardening. I really do. We have twenty raised garden beds, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time out there this summer growing tomatoes and peppers and potatoes and carrots and assorted other things while attempting to stay one step ahead of Edmonton weather.
That part I enjoy.
Mowing grass? Not so much.
General yard maintenance? Nope.
And snow shovelling?
There are few experiences quite like looking out the window at six in the morning after an overnight snowfall and realizing that, before you can get on with your day, Mother Nature has assigned you forty-five minutes of unpaid manual labour.
Again.
At some point, you begin to wonder why you’re doing it.
Our house made sense for the life we had when we bought it. Lots of space. Bedrooms. A big yard. Room for kids and everything that comes with raising a family.
But the kids grew up.
The house, inconsiderately, did not get smaller.
And lately we’ve found ourselves talking more and more about what we actually want from the next place. Less maintenance. Less yard. Less snow to shovel. Enough room for the things that matter to us without a bunch of extra house that exists primarily so we can clean it.
It turns out there comes a point when more stops being an advantage.
So we’re going to downsize.
Which means, naturally, that before we can enjoy having less house to maintain, I have to spend the next six months maintaining the hell out of this one.
There are walls to paint. Floors to replace. Bathrooms that could stand to join the twenty-first century. Trim and doors and light fixtures and all those little things you stop noticing after you’ve lived somewhere long enough.
Fortunately, we’re not in a hurry. The plan is to put the house up for sale in the spring, which gives us six months to work our way through everything without turning our lives completely upside down.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Of course, during those same six months I also have books to write, books to release, Stories Rule Press work to do, newsletters and blog posts to write, and all the other assorted things I somehow manage to cram into my days.
So this should be interesting.
But underneath all the paint and flooring and inevitable trips to the hardware store, I’m actually excited about it.
Because this isn’t really about getting rid of a house.
It’s about looking at the life we have now, instead of the life we had twenty years ago, and asking a surprisingly useful question:
What do we actually need?
Apparently, the answer includes fewer square feet.
And considerably less snow shovelling.