Downsizing

Several years ago, Jan and I starting toying with the idea of moving far away from Northern Illinois when she retired.  Lately, we’ve started to dress up the idea with a bit of reality.  If the housing market doesn’t improve, we won’t be moving anywhere for quite a while, but it’s always useful to plan ahead.

One of the questions we’ve been grappling with is how much room do we really need?  Right now, we range around in about 1900 square feet of usable space.  There are times we think it’s too much (like when we’re cleaning) and other times when it doesn’t seem like enough (like when we’re at war), but the general consensus is that we have one room too many.

In the last few days, I’ve found a way to “test out” how to really know what it’s like to live in a smaller house.

Tear one of your main living areas to shreds.

This week, we’re doing a long overdue kitchen remodel.  And it is unusable.  It also is empty and all the shit in there had to go someplace.  We have our refrigerator and a bunch of furniture stuffed into our front “living room” and our stove and the rest of the furniture smooshed into our back “family room”.

And things are pretty damn tight.  Plus we have no table to eat at, no dishwasher and no running water in the kitchen, which we can’t get into anyway.

So, not only are we experiencing what it would be like to live in a smaller, ill-conceived house, we’re learning what it would be like to live beneath an underpass and scavenge for food.

With the way things are going in this world, that may be where we end up anyway.