It’s Labor Day, and while most folks are firing up the grill or at least taking in a movie to beat the rain, I’m deeply entrenched in the three P’s where I have been buried for months — purging, packing, panicking. Gave the editors the day off, too, not just for the holiday but because they have been working overtime covering for me during this super stressful time.
I love our home dearly, every inch of it. We conceptualized, designed, and built it to our hearts’ desires 25 years ago. When we moved in — which was the easiest move on the planet because I built SO MANY CLOSETS — we said this is our forever house. We are never leaving.
We forgot about getting old!
Not that we are old now — I refuse to age — but we know the future.
The hardest thing in my life was selling the contents of my mother’s condo after her death. I am tearing up now just remembering it. It was months before I could bear to even empty her condo — I used to go over, sit, and imagine she would walk through the door.
I remember we were in her tidy home, boxes of her trinkets lined up on a long table for the estate sale, strangers sifting through her costume jewelry. I wanted to swat their hands away. You know this experience, we all know this experience with loved ones. Shedding a loved one’s possessions is one of life’s passages.
It is not a fun one.
“This is the unglamorous part of real estate you are experiencing,” Susan Baldwin told me. “Looking at the homes, decorating, all the beautiful pictures is fun. Moving is the dark side.”
Then our columnist Karen Eubank got me into Swedish Death Cleaning. I didn’t read the book — already sent Marie Kondo to a book sale — but it’s this: Get rid of your unwanted stuff so your kids don’t have to.
In a nutshell, look at everything in your house. If you don’t love or use it, and if your kids are going to dump it upon your death, get rid of it. I want to spare them the pain I felt sorting through and emptying out my mother’s belongings.
Now Karen and I are both downsizing with full steam. In fact, I haven’t read her story yet for fear of unintentional emulation! So many of our peers are in this passage with us.
My husband Walter and I made the decision to sell early last year. We looked for homes around North Dallas — and wrote about some of them, a whole other story. We even tried to buy a couple. There was very little inventory in the “downsize” market outside of condominiums, and only a handful of zero-lot-line communities in Dallas. Whatever was available was scooped up fast with cash, even in a sluggish market.
That’s one reason why so many Boomer homes are still occupied with Boomers. We have a lot of stuff — more than previous generations, so it’s hard to find good options to downsize to without downgrading our entire life. We’re not dead yet!
Our home on West Ricks Circle is so finely tuned to our needs that it’s impossible to find everything we want: two offices, wine room or storage, safe room, outdoor shower for humans and dogs, large kitchen and entertaining areas, great storage, room for the dogs, and a three-car garage. We fought over square footage every day.
So as I complained in our weekly editorial meetings, Shelby and Karen said, folks, we have a series here: Downsizing Diaries.
As we wind down this adventure, should I survive, I’ll share how I tackled the emotional and logistical aspects of downsizing. Think of it as a guide for anyone moving, downsizing, decluttering, or simply trying to live with less. We’re looking to host seminars featuring the experts I curated — lifesavers, truly. We will be offering out-of-the box suggestions on how to repurpose some of your stuff in a smaller space, if you want. We will even offer psychological advice and comfort.
We FINALLY found a house to purchase. I was made aware of it literally at the owner’s funeral. As you can imagine, everything in my life revolves around crazy real estate and dirt. There is a back story to this adventure involving a wonderful builder, Mills Custom Homes. I spent the spring and summer purging to prepare our home to sell. I’m still not close. Dallas Realtor Steven Rosenthal was here the other week for an open house and he said, “You gotta get rid of more s%#@!” Ugh.
One night I sat in my husband’s office — really a library. It is next to my office, with a pocket door between, just doing a little marketing here… and I looked at the four walls loaded with books around me.
Honey, I’m out.
“I cannot do this,” I told my husband. “And I won’t do this. You need my signature to sell this home and I won’t sign it.”
I’ve been talked off the ledge before by Dave Perry-Miller himself, who I called and asked to get me out of a sales contract two houses ago. Then, as now, it was the stuff. That insurmountable challenge of decades of accumulated “stuff” from two kids, a husband, and a busy, fun life.
Why are we so attached to things? Why did I feel I have the responsibility of keeping it all, including, among many other things, my mother’s Lladros (I found out two were fakes!) and that statue from Romania my grandmother brought back from the old country. The one that my sister and I broke one evening, but we glued it so well that she never knew.
My house is a doll orphanage. My childhood dolls were upstairs in my mom’s 1940’s cedar chest I forgot I had. I even have my late sister’s dolls!
The average household has about 300,000 things. I’m sure I have close to a million if you count the Lincoln Logs and Legos.
When it came time to actually list my home on MLS, the photos did me in.
I had pulled photo albums out of the over-stuffed cabinets, bins and boxes upstairs, piled them on my coffee table where they sat for a couple years. I’d look at them and say, I have a headache.
What finally moved the needle? Three miracle workers: Mary Boyle of The Photo Sister, Jamie Curtis of Curtis Custom Movers, and the beautiful stone at Texas Counter Fitters.
Mary Boyle came and took those photo albums to scan into a hard drive: I had 12,000 photos, and there are more upstairs.
“When they are gone, you will feel better, I promise,” she told me. And she was right. I had a coffee table and cabinets again.
Jamie Curtis came over, brought boxes and packing tape that wouldn’t break fingernails, outlined a gameplan for storing, and an organized sequential move.
“We don’t just drop it all off at the new house in one day,” he told me, “We’ll take some, let you unpack, come and get the boxes, and take them away before we bring more.”
Moving is hell, he told me, but we will make it as painless as possible.
And the stone? One of the biggest turn-offs when buying an older home is seeing the same-old granite everyone used for countertops 20 years ago. It is awful, depressing, the Debbie Downer of the whole house. That brownish-red stuff or the Absolute Black just makes you want to run.
But then I walked into Texas Counter Fitters’ Richardson showroom for the first time. Wow! Owners Chris Blackburn and Andrew Gilbert have curated a stunning, gallery-like space showcasing more than 200,000 extraordinary stone slabs — more jewelry than surfaces. I wanted to move just to have a new quartzite kitchen. (And just wait until you see the other treasures I couldn’t resist.) Paint and wallpaper are great, but nothing sets the tone like beautiful stone especially in a smaller home where the kitchen is the focal point to just about every room.
Help with the photos, help with the stuff, and the lure of beautiful jeweled countertops all over the house became my moving Geritol.
I Say Goodbye, You Say Hello
Remember how exciting it was to get your first apartment after your first job? Filling your new empty apartment was SO exciting. We had very little — hand-me-downs mostly. (The sick thing is we are still schlepping some of those hand-me-downs.)
Many of you are in the same boat, carrying things from your very first home into your last home. That’s why we launched the Downsizing Diaries.
I will miss our home dearly. Hopefully, we will hand it off to a lucky family for another quarter century of fun memories… in the very best neighborhood in Dallas. And I’ve got some new jewels waiting for me — stay tuned. Ryan Streiff of Dave Perry-Miller Real Estate has listed my home for $4.395 million.
Whether it’s finding a home for family heirlooms, making peace with parting ways, or figuring out what really deserves space in your next chapter, we’ll cover it over the next few weeks with our curated sources … as Candy’s head emerges from the Real Estate weeds.
