Reasons for moving from our home of 46 years started popping up 10 or 15 years ago. First was the lawn. A good part of our 23,000-square-foot lot is grass that grows with a vengeance before we want to be away having fun. Looking back, the days when we were free of obligations were the same days the lawn was dry enough to mow. The moral is: Man is not born to be shackled to a lawnmower.
Moving became more possible once the kids left — 20 years ago. Some empty-nesters choose to stay on the homestead, adding extra rooms for the depleted family — an Americanism I’ve never quite understood. Others like me long to pull in their perimeters by sizing down. So for years, my wife and I have wrestled with what sort of home we might live in next. A smaller home on a small lot? A tin house in a mobile park? A condo?
The trouble today is that foreclosed residents of Marysville’s McMansions are being forced to size-down to exactly what we’re looking for. Big houses are a drag on the market, small ones are in demand. Big houses sell at deep discounts while the price of condos remains high. Nevertheless, there is a time to stay and a time to move.
Developments that cater to seniors don’t take kids. I like kids — so long as they contain their music — so I refuse to live anywhere that bans kids. My ideal is a condo in Seattle’s Belltown where one can pop out onto the street within walking distance of coffee shops, big-city newspapers, the Pike Street Market, great entertainment and world-class people watching. If my present home sells for double its appraised value I might live there. Little chance of that.
Zip Realty, a web listing-service, displays 314 Marysville homes priced similarly to mine. I’d like to think that any discriminating buyer would see my home as the best of the lot, a 46-year-old veteran of family life that proved itself by graduating children into productive roles in society. That rosy view of our house took a hit once we took a square look at it from the viewpoint of a buyer.
Take the space under the kitchen sink for example. Way back underneath, where the sun never shines, where damp scrubbing pads fester, where leaks and residue and stains accumulate, where any sensible buyer would be loathe to reach for fear that something evil might be nesting there — is a sample of what has to be dealt with.
Beginning under the sink, I tackled all the lower cabinets in the kitchen with an eye toward cleaning and brightening them, painting and even cutting laminate surfaces for the shelves. Of course this required a lot of contortions. Cleaning and painting floor-level cupboards required sticking the top half of my body inside which wasn’t too bad. The bad part was trying to lift my aging frame back onto its feet. Oh boy. Ouch. Of course it took a Bandaid to seal up a bleeder. It seems like I bleed a little every time I pick up a tool lately.
The cabinets had to be emptied of contents for me to do this work. Once all the stuff was in the open we were amazed at the uselessness of the “collection.” It’s not our fault. Our parents’ DNA had been ever-so-slightly tweaked during their experience with the Great Depression. Habits of being thankful for what they had, patching it when needed and not throwing away anything of potential use were burned into their nature which was passed on to us.
Pie-pans from commercial bakeries are stout enough to be cleaned up and re-used so we have a stack of them. The same goes for little loaf-pans. Just the thing for baking gift Christmas breads. Plastic tubs that once contained Costco potato salad are perfect for storing home-made soups in the freezer and should we decide to make a fifty-gallon batch, we have enough containers to hold it. Plastic cups from long-gone thermos bottles, every vase from 40-some years of gift bouquets. What we need is a jumbo dumpster, not a yard sale.
So much stuff! We have pieces from our mothers’ china collections, our wedding set of Flintridge, a miscellaneous collection of Port Merion China from England and our every-day Corelle that serves 12. Glasses for every occasion and stack upon stack of serving bowls. Of course there are mugs and saucers and pitchers and uncountable salt-and-pepper sets to fill the gaps. “Hands off,” she said. “Let’s see how you take care of the garage and tool shed.”
The tool shed: What to do with a hedge trimmer if there is no hedge? An axe with nothing to chop? Or a 101 cans of paint, sealer, adhesive, stain-blocker, solvent, spackle, stain and so on? Above in the garage’s rafters lie an inoperative trombone and alto sax along with a box of piano keys from an art project that never got off the ground. A Flexible Flyer runner-sled and a chimney brush rust beside an old Coleman camp stove that hasn’t been lit for at least 20 years, all of it stuffed between two adjacent roof-trusses.
A wise friend once told me, if you haven’t used it in the last three years, get rid of it. If we did, there would be little left in the house but an echo and we might be able to squeeze that into the nearby condo we’ve been eyeing. But for now it is painting, cleaning, repairing and de-junking to bring the place up to buyer’s expectations. Anyone want to buy a house?
Comments may be addressed to: rgraef@verizon.net.
