Empty-nesters heading into retirement look to declutter

We weren’t really looking. We’d been chatting, on and off for years, about selling our four-bedroom family home and buying something smaller and more manageable. The kids had married and had kids of their own, they weren’t coming back, and we were rattling around like a pair of acorns. We’d even called a few real estate agents, looked at a few properties, narrowed down the location, but we’d seen nothing we could imagine ourselves living in.

Then our youngest daughter sent us a link to a house. We had nothing better to do that afternoon, and it was nearby, and, whether we were to be actual buyers or just tyre-kickers, we enjoy looking at houses on open days.

The minute we walked through the door, we knew this was the one. Halfway down a dead-end street on the ridge of a hill, one set of traffic lights from town and a three-bedroom, Federation semi. Truth be told, we like old houses and have never lived in a new one. Inside it was even better. Small but perfectly formed, with the kind of appliances and fixtures that if I’d tried to buy them my husband would have spluttered dramatically before declaring that he wouldn’t pay that for a sink! It also had a small but lovely garden.

We were smitten, and the price was doable. We were so smitten, in fact, we did what we swore we’d never do. We bought before we’d sold.

That’s when the stress kicked in. Suddenly, we had to declutter, repaint, recarpet, refurnish (the stylist made it look like a cocaine dealer’s den), pressure-wash and scrub our poor old house from ceiling to basement. It was exhausting and we wondered what we’d gotten ourselves into.

Then there was the agony of our own house now being open to buyers and tyre-kickers. The brutal feedback we received about our much-loved family home was bruising. Would we get the price we needed to make our sums work? Sums we had already committed to? In the end, of course, we got what everyone gets: less than we’d hoped, more than we’d feared.

But our sums would work – just – and we were on our way to a smaller, more manageable but still new and exciting house and neighbourhood. One of the things we’d loved most about our old home and the reason we’d stayed for more than three decades was the community. The friends we’d made within walking distance. The fun we’d had at street Christmas parties and ad hoc drinks on the verge as our kids rode their bikes up and down the street. Would our new neighbourhood be as warm and welcoming?

The endless stretch of time between exchange and settlement was also hard. We had to shed 35 years of accumulated “this-might-come-in-handy-one-day, mum-can-you-store-this, not-sure-what-to-do-with-it, I-had no-idea-we-even-had-this” bumph. That was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting but – and it’s a big but – once we’d made the last trip to the Lifeline shop/tip/council clean-up, a lightness descended.