Sally, my neighbor to the north, remarked as she was dripping sweat in the alley that she thinks it’s time for her to find a smaller place to live, one with little or no yard work. Yesterday we chatted some more about real estate, the virtues and nonvirtues of our neighborhood, and what we want to live in as we dodder into old age.
I’ve already looked at a few of the condos my Realtor has shown me lately and thought she might like one or two of them, so I forwarded the MLS descriptions he’d sent. She says she wants to move to Scottsdale, not downtown. He’d sent a couple of listings for Scottsdale places, but I could only find one of them, a two-story patio home. Dunno about Sally, but I figure two stories is out of the question for the place where you expect to holler your last hurrah. I don’t want to climb up and down steps every ten minutes now, much less in another ten years when I’m getting really decrepit.
Sally’s determination to move bodes poorly for the Funny Farm. She is the best person to have as a neighbor: quiet and responsible about upkeep. She does not litter the driveway and the street with her rolling stock. She does not allow the paint to peel or the roofing shingles to curl. She’s not a raving mental case. Best of all, she has no barking dogs and no screaming children.
Whenever a neighbor moves, it makes one nervous. It’s such a crap shoot, what moves into the vacant property. Around the corner—mercifully out of earshot from my yard—some moron keeps a big, barking dog locked out in the backyard at all times. The animal is never taken indoors, and that (sensibly) is where it wants to be. It barks and cries nonstop: literally. It never, ever stops barking and begging to be let in out of the heat or cold. Apparently the neighbors complained, so the idiot owner had its vocal cords cut, to little avail. Now it makes a nonstop hoarse, groaning bark, a sound that’s even more disturbing (given the cruelty of the human’s behavior) than the only slightly louder normal barking.
Since the morons seem to outnumber you and me and Sally, I naturally worry about what kind of chuckleheads will move into her house.
Sally’s restlessness exacerbates mine. She’s almost ten years older than I am, and right at the point where yes, she probably does need to get into a smaller, easier-to-maintain place. Me, I could last another decade here. But I’d kind of like to get set in a place where I could reasonably live out the last years of my life before I reach the point where I absolutely, positively have to move.
The place on Portland is really very nice in many ways. It’s almost perfect except for its cramped size. If it had a den in addition to the two tiny bedrooms, or if it had just a little more living/dining space, I would jump at it, even though it is on top of a freeway. But I just can’t imagine spending the rest of my life in three tiny rooms.
The two big problems with my house (besides the encroaching blight) are that it has four bedrooms and I only need two, and that it has a pool, which I don’t think I’m going to be able to care for many more years. A pool requires daily work and is a hole in the ground into which you pour money.
Otherwise, there are many, many things I love about it and that I really don’t want to forsake. For what I can afford, it’s very hard to beat this house. Therein lies the problem: I run around the city and look at perfectly acceptable places but find them wanting compared to what I have. When I do find something that has everything I want and nothing I don’t want, the cost is way more than I could get for my house.
Every time I go through this exercise, I find myself listing pro’s and cons: what’s good about this place, what’s good about that, and so on ad nauseam. This morning it occurred to me that since that strategy gets me nowhere, it might be more useful to consider what my lifestyle is like—or at least, what I value in my lifestyle—and then think about what a house needs to have to accommodate those qualities.
Here’s what happens when I try to codify that thought:
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What, in daily life, do I do or like to have that the dwelling needs to accommodate? |
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| • I love to sit outdoors. I’m not crazy about gardening or doing yardwork, but sitting outside to eat, edit copy, or relax is an important part of my daily life. | |
| • I have a dog and probably always will have a dog until I’m too frail to care for one. | |
| • I prefer not to have to drive far through homicidal traffic to get to shopping, work, and social life. Centrally located dwelling minimizes driving. | |
| • Because I can’t afford to travel, I use the house and yard as a vacation venue. | |
| • I really should be walking or running every day; so need safe, pleasant places to walk, bicycle, or hike. | |
| • I crave quiet. Don’t like to be near traffic noise and would prefer to be out from under the helicopter flight path. | |
| • I cook outdoors more than indoors. The gas grill is not an option. | |
| • I cook almost all my meals at home and so need a roomy, well equipped kitchen, preferably with a gas stove. | |
| • In the winter and spring, I live on fresh oranges. And I love fresh lemons and limes from the backyard. | |
| • I dislike housework and am not fond of yardwork; the house needs to be low-maintenance and easy to clean. | |
| • I spend most of my time in front of a computer and hardly any of it in front of a television. The house needs to have computer or office space but does not need room for a TV/entertainment center. | |
| • I love the park (i.e., open space), even if I’m not walking the dog or exercising. | |
| • I do use the pool all summer. | |
| • I use the outdoors as living space, and expect to be able to come and go in privacy. | |
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A house that would accommodate these quirks would look like…what? |
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| • Two or at most three bedrooms | |
| • Updated kitchen with gas stove | |
| • Enclosed garage with storage cabinetry | |
| • Centrally located | |
| • Reasonably far from blighted areas | |
| • Small, quiet yard with sitting and outdoor cooking areas; at least one shade tree and space for container gardening | |
| • Very private | |
| • No pool | |
| • Sybaritic bathroom; or at least one with a tub that has a view of something other than the toilet | |
| • Far from airports, freeways, and main drags | |
| • Centrally located | |
And what does that describe?
Yup. The house that I’m in. Or…it comes very close to it.
Given that you can’t have everything—it may be, for example, that I never will be able to afford a place that fits that description in a better part of town, and in a city like Phoenix, it’s impossible to find quiet—maybe what I need to do is rebuild this place so that it can and will shelter me in old age without killing me.
Looking again at the pro’s and cons of the house and neighborhood I’m living in:
| What qualities do I most like about my house? | What elements do I dislike or feel concerned about? |
| Citrus trees | Pool |
| Covered deck and shade trees, creating great outdoor sitting area | Yard maintenance and costs |
| Gas stove | Two bedrooms too many; having to air condition more space than I use |
| Skylights | Worsening blight in surrounding areas |
| Full room dedicated to office space | Noise from flicking helicopters; planned double-decker freeway will increase traffic noise. |
| Desert landscaping (relatively low maintenance) | Lightrail, if it’s ever built, will exacerbate blight along 19th. |
| Central location | Not a disability-friendly building—narrow doors, steps |
| Close to son, choir, and friends | |
| Ample storage space; place for freezer | |
| Outdoor gas and charcoal grills |
One of the neighbors remarked that if this neighborhood were going to succumb to the creeping blight, it would have done so by now. I don’t know about that…nothing lasts forever. However, let’s assume it stays moderately safe, especially if the resident is armed with a nice little Ruger, for another ten to fifteen years. In that case, there are some things I could do to make the place work for an aging Boomer:
The totally unused room is adjacent to two bathrooms: plumbing and drains are right on the other side of the east wall. I could pull out the shower stall in the joke of a minibathroom that serves the tiny master bedroom and install a door, joining the two bedrooms through a pass-through half-bath. Then, put in a fine sybaritic bathtub (actually, I’m thinking one of those fake claw-foot things made of the plastic stuff that’s ludicrously easy to clean), lots of lights, and a set of cabinets to serve as a dressing table. Hang capacious and handsome mirrors over and around this dressing area. Replace the louvered folding closet doors with mirrored sliding doors. Replace the aged, tacky aluminum-framed window with French doors opening onto the back patio.
This would at least make that room useful. The existing bathtub in the hall bathroom could then be replaced with a shower stall that’s accessible by wheelchair; the doorway into that bathroom could be widened to make it possible for a wheelchair or walker to get in there.
Alternatively, I could move the storage in the front secondary bedroom into the unused back bedroom; move my office from the adjacent front secondary bedroom into the so-called master bedroom, tear out the wall between the two front bedrooms, reroute one of the AC vents, rebuild the entrance to the (now new) room, tear out the ridiculous closets and install a large walk-in closet, and end up with a very nice, huge master bedroom. This, too, would eliminate completely unused space and improve living space.
Replastering the pool, which will have to happen in about five to eight years, will cost $8,000 to $10,000 in today’s dollars. For about the same amount, I could fill in the pool. So…why not take, say, $20,000 to fill in the pool, jackhammer up the hideous KoolDeck, and relandscape the backyard, extending the shade cover the length of the back and planting a big, gorgeous emerald paloverde out there? This would eliminate the entire pool care issue and extend the low-maintenance garden, making the back sitting area much more pleasant and cutting power and water bills significantly.
Welp. I have to get up and go to work, so this little reverie needs to end. But…it’s something to think about: would it not be better to make this house work than to try to move to a different house, with all the hassle and expense that entails?
I keep saying: why don’t you and your son swap abodes?
My first thought was “I wonder what it costs to fill in the pool”. I’m glad to see you’re considering that option. It seems to me the pool – much as you may enjoy using it – is one of your major stressors about your current house. Filling it in would cost money up front, but save you ongoing expense, work, and aggravation.
@ Frugal Scholar: If we swapped houses, he would end up with a house that requires three times as much work as his place does; he works 40 to 60 hours a week and has all he can handle with the little place downtown. And I would end up in an even iffier neighborhood than mine, paying $1200 a month toward a $210,000 mortgage on a house that’s worth at best $150,000, with black iron plumbing that promises a $3000+++++ bill at any time now and $300 power bills generated by keeping the thermostat at 88 to 90 degrees (mine was $228 with the thermostat at 80 in the daytime and 76 at night). It doesn’t seem like the best of trade-offs, certainly not for a paid-off home with no known major maintenance issues in a relatively safe neighborhood (our crime rate is nil; property crimes and assaults are frequent in his area).
@ Carol: Yes, the pool is a manageable hassle now, but the real concern is how long “manageable” will last as I age. This neighborhood has, that I know of, three very elderly women (in their 80s to early 90s) who continue to live in their homes. One other that I know of died in residence, and two others were hauled off, in extreme old age, to warehouses for the dying. Only one of their homes has a pool. So we know that, in the absence of a pool, it’s possible for a single woman who’s pretty frail to age in place in these houses.
Killing the pool would damage the property value, and since my son will get this house, that would be too bad. Another option is simply to hire a service: that costs about $80 to $200 a month, depending on what you get. Hmmm…. At 80 bucks a month, it would take 125 months for the $10,000+ cost of filling in the pool to pay for itself. That’s 10 years and 3 months.
Interesting. Could make “manageable” a lot smaller question than it is now.
What if instead of daydreaming about getting rid of the pool, I used the cash that project would require to get someone else to do the day to day heavy lifting? For a LONG time… That would go a long way toward making this house more practical as a twilight years dwelling. Then all that would really have to happen to insure long-term livability would be to enlarge the doors to the bathrooms; maybe install a roll-in shower…it wouldn’t take all that much!
Four bedrooms is too much for one person. You might be able to sustain the house for a few more years, at the expense of not customizing and becoming used to a smaller living space.
I’m going through this with my parents now. They are bound and determined to hang on to their large, high-maintenance house for as long as possible (with me doing more of the maintenance) instead of moving, now, into an assisted living facility. My dad’s reduced mobility demands a no-stairs, wide-doorways living space, definitely not available in the post-war house they live in. I wish they could use their energy and current excellent mental faculties to make the transition now, instead of when they have no choice in the future. Depressing.
We always make life transitions too late. Imagine being active, mobile, and energetic, even drawing a nice paycheque, with no home maintenance problems whatsoever. Sounds like a good alternative to busting a hip outside on your pool deck (and no cell phone to call for help!).
@ Vinny: Exactly what I’ve been thinking.
However, I do know can’t to downsize to such an extreme that I go from an 1860-square-foot place with lots of room to a three-room apartment without enough space to park a desk for my computer.
There’s gotta be a happy medium.
Nearby there’s a small development of older homes in a tiny HOA nestled behind a big historic mansion. The grounds are exquisitely maintained, so homeowners have exactly zero yardwork, except insofar as maybe they’d like a few pots or an ornamental or two on their patios. Most of the houses are on one story, and the one I most admired is slightly smaller than mine, with two large bedrooms instead of four small ones.
I had an opportunity to buy the place at a fair price and am still kicking myself for not doing it. It needed a little fix-up…but say what???? Here I am speculating on dumping ten grand into filling the pool and god only knows how much on converting one of the bedrooms into space I’d use? Dumber than dumb.
Really, the most sensible thing, I think, is to keep on quietly watching for a garden apartment or patio home where someone else maintains the exterior and the interior is roomy enough for me to feel at home (not in a motel room) but small enough for easy care.