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5 Tips for Downsizing Your Home

Written by Tommy Wyher Posted On Thursday, 18 June 2020 08:06
5 Tips for Downsizing Your Home

Downsizing your home is a major life step. And there are many reasons why you’d want to transition into smaller living quarters. For starters, it could help give your retirement savings a much-needed boost; cutting your mortgage and other home owning expenses can help you reach important savings goals. You may even be able to sell your larger home and pay for a much smaller property in cash—foregoing a mortgage entirely. Your living costs will lower, and you’ll be able to address any debt you have with better preparation. 

And lastly, many people choose to downsize their homes after all their children have left the nest. After a while, holding onto so much space starts to feel more like a chore and not a necessity. But that doesn’t mean making the move will be any easier. Here are five tips for downsizing your home successfully: 

Start Eliminating Unnecessary Items

One of the first things you’ll want to do is take an inventory of all your belongings. Generally speaking, you’ll want to decide what you’ll keep, throw out, sell, and donate. The good thing about doing this in a bigger home is that you’ll have the space you need to thoroughly assess your belongings and separate them into their applicable categories. It’s important to remember to separate your needs from your wants here. Designating a space for each of these “piles” allows you to have a physical representation of how much each takes. For instance, your “keep” pile might occupy the space of a guest bedroom. You can then go through your keep pile and start minimizing that, too. 

Get Rid of Duplicate Items

As you’re going through your household items, it’s important for you to sort pay attention for duplicate items that you don’t need. Chances are, you’ll find plenty of unnecessary duplicate items in your kitchen. For instance, you might find several spatulas, wine openers, and can openers. It’s likely that you don’t need to have that many duplicate items, and you’ll find that once they’re gone, you’ll hardly recognize the difference. 

Selling and Donating Your Items

If you have plenty of items to sell, consider spearheading a garage sale. Furniture, toys, kitchenware, electronics, equipment, decoration, and clothing all make for great yard sale opportunities. What you don’t manage to sell at a yard sale, you can sell online. 

Be sure to advertise your yard sale appropriately. Advertise on Craigslist, local newspapers, and post yard sale signs in your neighborhood. You can also sell your items on Craigslist, Poshmark, LetGo, Cash4Books, and plenty of other niche sites. 

Make Sure Your Furniture Will Fit

When you’re downsizing, it can be difficult to accurately picture how your furniture and decor will actually fit in your new home. For instance, if you’re accustomed to having more bathrooms, downsizing to one limits your space. According to Fix It Right plumbing, after you’ve ensured your pipework, pressure, and other plumbing work is in order, you can start to incorporate organizational products that build out your space. 

For this reason, it’s important to start measuring your new property and ensuring that everything fits. Even if it does “technically” fit in a space, the layout might be inconvenient for a giant sectional sofa. 

It will be helpful to use home interior and design apps to aid you in this process. For example, the Magicplan app works by analyzing the space and measurements between walls and objects simply by looking at a picture. You can then annotate those photos directly with the app, using it was a reference guide for measurements. 

Wayfair is another nice app to help you picture how things will fit into your home. Start by taking a picture of a room, then sort through its extensive catalog of furniture, and select “View in room” to see exactly how it would fit and how much space it would occupy. Even if you don’t want to purchase that exact piece of furniture, you can use a sample piece of furniture to see how the dimensions would work (all furniture fits to the scale of the photo, and dimensions are displayed). 

Invest in a Storage 

A storage is a great way to extend your home space without creating clutter in your living quarters. Whether you use your storage space to hold onto mementos or furniture that you haven’t gotten around to selling yet, there are plenty of use cases you can benefit from.” 

Another good thing about storage spaces is that they are highly versatile; you only need to pay for space that you need, and can scale up or down as you sell new items, acquire new ones, or change your mind about certain household items that can be delegated to storage. 

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