Downsizing

Moving a loved one from a home they may have lived in for decades to a smaller apartment or villa in a retirement community is never easy. Downsizing, interviewing realtors, planning an estate sale, selling a home and actually making the move can be mentally and physically exhausting for families. Over the next few weeks, we will explore each of these areas individually. We'll start the conversation and invite experts to join us to offer their advice, too.

We might as well start with the toughest one of these topics...downsizing. We hear from families that figuring out how and where to start this process is actually paralyzing to them. It is sometimes the only thing preventing them from making the move to senior living.

1. Plan ahead and organize your supplies. Round up boxes, plastic tubs, colored "dots" from the office supply store, newspaper/bubble wrap/packaging, marker, spiral bound notecards, labels for boxes, scissors, trash bags, heavy duty tape, and a folding card table.

2. Develop a timeline. The more clutter...the more time (and boxes!) you will need.

3. Start in one room and work all the way through it. Set up three extra boxes: one for family to go through, one for charity, and one for storage. As you pack and sort through things, be ruthless. Is this something you really can't live without? What will you really do with it? How about storing it for now and seeing if you really need it after the move. For items too big for the boxes, use the "dot" system. Stick a dot on each piece that will be going somewhere other than the senior community. Green for charity. Blue for family. Yellow for storage.

4. As you pack the items that will actually be moving to the senior community, give the box you pack a number. Then use the spiral notecards to develop a "master list". On the first notecard, label it #1. Then list what items the box contains. This will make it much easier to find the vacuum cleaner bags or the hammer as you are in the midst of unpacking.

5. Above all, be patient with your loved one. When we moved my grandmother in to her senior community, she had 52 little butter tubs she used "all of the time" and insisted on moving. While it seemed excessive to us (especially to my cousin, Jeff, who was concerned not just that she had that many old butter tubs, but that she had eaten that much butter!), it was important to her.