The real truth behind downsizing: what no one tells you

Hey there, home seller. Welcome to the Creative Home Staging Show. Come on in. Come in. Come in.

Hey. My name is Kasia. And in this show, we talk about home staging for home sellers. If you are getting ready to sell your house soon, you are in the right place. We cover home staging tips, strategies to help make it easier on you, and ways to influence buyers.

So roll up your sleeves, get a notebook and pen handy. Yes. I do things the old fashioned way, and let’s get your house ready to sell. Hey there, home sellers. Welcome back to another creative home staging show.

I am your host, Kasia McDaniel. And today, I am talking about the real truth about downsizing and what no one tells you. Because until you actually go through it yourself, you really have no idea. You read all these articles and, yeah, I need to do this. I need to, you know, pick and choose.

But when it comes down to it, the reality of it, oh my gosh. Yeah. It’s it’s amazing. It really is what you have to pick and choose. So that’s what I really wanna go through because if you are downsizing and you’re moving, selling your house, right, you’ve got to pick the correct stuff.

And I thought I did. We personally just moved, and downsized from our 3,000 square foot house. We recently moved from The US to Germany. And the German houses are notoriously known to be smaller by a lot. They’re not the grand McMansions that we’re used to or the bigger bedrooms or anything like that.

No. No. No. You basically have to pick your essentials and be happy with that. And that’s basically downsizing.

If you’re moving to a smaller home, like, maybe you’re going into one of those tiny homes. Right? Maybe you’re moving into an apartment. Maybe you’re an older couple, and you’re thinking, oh, well, you know, all we need is just no. No.

Apartment. A little condo is perfectly fine. Yeah. Pick your favorites. That’s what I wanna start off with is pick your favorite things.

Because if you don’t, you’re gonna have a lot of excess. Like, we found that we had we had all these boxes. We thought we did really good in downsizing. We donated a whole bunch of stuff before we even moved. And now I’m finding I still have things I have to donate.

I already donated two two carloads of donations already, and I still probably have more. I know. So let’s talk about that. And let me go through kind of things of what I did. I have some pictures I’m gonna show you so that you can take a look.

So if you’re listening to the podcast, I’m gonna have the pictures posted again on my blog post so you can take a look and follow along. Alright. So let’s talk about furniture. That one definitely is the biggest challenge that you may have when it comes to downsizing your house. You’re gonna have to pick again your favorites.

Is there a favorite armchair, a favorite couch? Maybe you have multiple living areas and spaces, and you’re, I wanna really take this couch. But then you realize when you measure it, definitely measure it. You’ll want to take to, take stock of what you have and what it is that will really fit in your next home. Maybe you have a big sectional that you really love, but a sectional is not an easy piece of furniture that will fit in every type of living space.

Okay? So that might be something you will have to take into consideration. Basically, the living room furniture is a big one. Maybe you have some bookcases. I know my kids have their own bookcases.

They were kinda worried that they would even fit in their bedrooms. They may have to put it at in a different room, maybe even in the hallway. You know? That’s an option too. So there’s lots of places to stick things and put things in different spots than the way you’re used to using it or having it in that room.

Okay? So don’t feel like all of your furniture has to fit in the living room. I know I had one rolly cart. It was a three tier cart that I used to use to hold plants and some other things. Well, now it’s their little bar cart, and that’s what we use it for.

I had a table, like a shorter one that was an entrance table, that I now use for the liquor to store because there’s no room for the liquor where we want to put it in our kitchen in the kitchen area. Okay? So just be open to suggestions on reusing things that you have that may not be used the way you think. Right? So definitely, you know, living room furniture, that’s, you know, minimized, downsize that.

Bedroom furniture, you may wanna take a look at. If you have a big, huge king-size bed, you may have to downsize to a queen, or maybe the headboard is just too massive, too big, too dark. Right? Maybe it’s a four poster bed that you need to get rid of, and it just needs to have just a headboard. And maybe just one nightstand versus two.

Maybe you have a a chest of drawers and not a dresser that’s wider, so you wanna go up in height. So there’s a lot of things with furniture that you can take a look at that will help you downsize, help you realize what you really need. Because when you go through your clothes, you may realize, oh, well, I don’t need this dresser anymore. I could just use the chest of drawers. I don’t need both.

Okay? So furniture is a big, big component of downsizing of what you can take or should take with you and move to your next place. Okay? Now if you’re looking to, you know, downsize and you’re, you know, selling your house and you still don’t know how to arrange things, I do have a home staging tips membership that I started that can help you answer all of your staging questions. Maybe you’re thinking, okay.

Well, I could put this here. Well, do I, you know, use this wall color? What other questions do you have? Maybe you’re not you have all these tchotchkes that you’ve collected over the years. Do you put those out on display?

Questions like that, perfectly fine questions to ask without having to pay for a full home staging consultation. So I’ll leave the link in the show notes for you to take a look at so you can get join the home staging tips membership and get your questions answered. The junk drawers or junk cabinets, if you have those. Yeah. It’s those are there because they have no home.

Right? So if they don’t have a place to go, like, say, for example, my junk drawer cabinet used to have electrical cords, USB cords, cords I had no idea what they went to anymore, but my husband insisted that we had to keep them. Well, we never know when we’re gonna need them. Well, if they’re not hooked up to something right now, they’re not being used. Get rid of them.

Yeah. Get rid of them. Just get rid of them. They’re they’re not gonna give you they’re gonna have to figure out a way to store them. And in this house, I have a teeny tiny little storage room.

I say teeny tiny. It is probably eight feet wide by I could probably it’s five eight feet by five feet. So it’s really small. I can put two storage units, and I’ll I’ll show you the a picture of it. So far, we’ve gotten one shelving unit in there to store some boxes and things, But that’s it for excess stuff and a garage.

So we do have a one car garage where we can have, like, Christmas decor. Otherwise, if the junk’s cabinet doesn’t have a home, I’m getting back to that, like, flashlights. Okay. Yes. But I have 15 of these little dinky blue ones that we got for free from Harbor Freight.

You know what I’m talking about. Those? I have 15 of those. Why do I need 15? I don’t, but my husband insists.

Okay. So, again, you’ll have to go through this with yourself, your spouse, whoever’s moving with you to figure out what it is that you need. Right? So that’s the junk cabinet. Right?

Another thing that I found that I didn’t have space for that I’ve gotta find another spot for in the storage room are things like party planner, party platters, and cake decor items. The I don’t have enough room for, like, the my kids love baking things with sprinkles. I have I don’t know how many things with sprinkles. You know, those little those jars or whatever that come. I have different kinds for Halloween.

I have ones for Christmas. I have ones for random colored ones. Yeah. Yeah. They they collect.

They’re like grumplings. They grow overnight. I swear. So yeah. So cake decor party platters.

Pick and choose which party platters you wanna take with you because if you think you’re gonna be entertaining, that’s fantastic. But, again, pick I have, again, too many, and I have to store them down there because there’s no room in my kitchen to put them. And I’ll show you the kitchen. I I promise you. Another thing that I found so I packed up in our house that we had.

We had long curtains. So, depending on the house that you live in, maybe you had blinds that were there. You didn’t have to pack away, but I had curtains and even dark you know, the dark paneling, the dark darkening room darkening curtains. That’s the word I’m trying to get to. Yeah.

So I brought I took those down and brought some of them with us because I knew they might work out, but I knew that the Germans don’t have, rods, typical rods, like, that we’re used to. Right? They have, like, this metal string rope, if you will, and you clip the curtains on to that. So think IKEA. This is all IKEA.

Okay? You have to think IKEA in this terms. And so, yeah, some of the curtains are way too heavy for that, and it’s not gonna work out. Some of them don’t even have any rods or that metal string there. So they have something called, Rouladen, which are basically the metal shutters that come electrically or you pull it yourself down, that are shutters that make the room dark in there.

Like, pitch black. Even in broad daylight, it is pitch black in that room. It’s amazing. It’s great. It’s a fantastic thing.

But if you want some curtains in the room just to give some color, yeah, sometimes you don’t have that option. So extra curtains, sheets that I had because we would have lots of guests in this house. We can have some guests, but not like the whole set that I used to have. I brought all those. I don’t know why.

But, again, extra sheets and curtains, those have to go in storage somewhere. Suitcases. Oh my gosh. Suitcases. Because we took two large suitcases per person plus a carry on, yeah, we actually ended up getting some suitcases.

We didn’t have enough at first. We actually ended up some from the thrift store before we left. And now that we’re done with them, they’re going back to a thrift store because I have no room for them. Right? So if you’re gonna be traveling, right, find your favorite ones, thrift, donate the other ones.

Okay? Because it basically comes down to how much storage do you have. Do you have enough? And in German houses, you don’t have very much. And especially in a tiny home or an apartment or a condo that you’re downsizing to, you’re not gonna have very much.

You can you know, obviously, I mentioned the garage, but you can’t put things that are temperature sensitive in the garage. Right? So if you have a bunch of candles like I do, and I love my candles. I love looking at them. I don’t like burning them.

I know. They just look so pretty, but I have them. Yeah. So you can’t put those in the garage because those will melt in the summertime. Right?

You can obviously put, like, holiday decor, tools. We have some bikes that we brought with us, the outdoor sports, folding chairs. Those go in the garage. Okay. Fine.

So the garage is gonna have some shelving in there as well. So let’s move on to the kitchen. This one was a tough one for me because I came from a really large kitchen with I don’t know how many cabinets. I had a lot of cabinets. 20 cabinets.

Probably more. Probably more. 25. It was a lot. It was a huge kitchen.

This kitchen, half or a quarter of that is what I have left to work with, and literally, I had to pick my favorites. For example, how many mixing bowls do you need? I had two sets. I had to get rid of one because it wouldn’t fit. Serving bowls, I had to get rid of some of those too because, like, really, how many do I need?

Whisks, spatulas, measuring spoons. Oh my god. I had so I didn’t realize how many measuring spoons and cups I had. I had, I don’t know, about five different sets of measuring spoons and measuring cups. There’s about two two or three of those.

I’ve narrowed it down to two and two of each just to have an extra set. Right? But there’s kitchen things that I just even the pans. So some of the pans don’t fit in the smaller oven that we get. Yeah.

What? Yeah. So the cookie sheets, for example, some of the casserole dishes, definitely, I kept those. But, again, the minimum amount. Pots and pans.

Yeah. I have really a lot of pots and pans. I would say probably about 10 pans. I know. It’s a lot.

I lot. I know. I know. And then pots. Yeah.

I had a I had a mix mismatch of collections of them. And because moving here to this house, it’s an induction oven. So my pans are not induction ready. I can’t use them on induction top stove top. So I had to buy new ones.

And so all those other pans, they were good they were warping anyway. And these new pans that I got, I’m able to use back in The US on a regular gas stove, electric stove, whatever is ready for anything now. And now I can do that and take them all back. So all those pots and pans that are extra, guess what? Those got donated too.

So yeah. So it was it was a lot. And when in the kitchen, that one was I really had to pick and choose how many bowls we had, how many, because the shelves and you’ll see in this video, I’ll show you. There’s so many shelves, and then it gets up too high that I can’t even reach it. I can barely reach it.

It’s crazy. So I had to kinda double stack everything to kinda make it all fit and still be able to use it. Right? Otherwise, I can’t why have the shelves all the way up there? I need a stool to get up there.

Right? Mugs, glasses, same thing. I had to pick and choose which glasses. How many glasses? You don’t need twenty, fifty, 20, maybe 12.

Again, depends on how many people are gonna be living in your home. If it’s just the two of you yeah. 12. Right? There’s some favorite mugs if you drink out of mugs.

Right? So yeah. So there’s there’s a lot of kitchen things that I had to pick and choose, which one are my favorites, and just leave it at that. Yes. There’ll be some more washing to do, but it’s your favorites and you’re gonna be using them.

Right? Towels and sheets. I talked about sheets already, but towels. I didn’t realize we had that many washcloths. Dear god.

It just collects again, bremlins in the closet. I swear overnight. I don’t know where these came from, but I have I don’t know how a a basket full of little washcloths. I don’t need that many. Right?

So downsizing and the decluttering that I did was not enough the first time. You won’t do enough until you move into the house that you’re gonna be moving into and then realize, oh, yeah. Mhmm. The one last area oh, I forgot to mention. Clothes.

Clothes. Again, it depends on your closet. How big is your closet gonna be with it moving into? Is it big? Is it not?

Probably not. You’re gonna have to go through and decide which ones, again, are your favorites. And I do this even when I’m shopping for new clothes. Right? If I’ve I try on something and I don’t love it, I’m not buying it.

I have to love it. I have to go, oh, yeah. I wanna wear this one every single day. Right? No.

No. Yes. You don’t wear that every you don’t wear it every single day. But if you could, you would. Right?

That’s the favorite clothes. That’s though those are the ones that stay. The other ones are kinda like, well, it’d be nice to have if I, you know, needed it. Nope. Nope.

Those are gone. So, again, I had some clothes that I was thinking. I’m like, yep. Even before we moved, they were gone. They took them out.

And even now here, I’m like, oh, I still gotta downsize a little bit more to make this fit into this wardrobe because in Germany, they don’t have closets. You have to get them, make them from either from wardrobes from IKEA or just find, you know, big, wardrobes to put in your, bedroom, but they don’t have built in closets. So you have to create your own or get your own. So, yeah, clothing is another big thing downsizing wise that you don’t realize, oh, well, I have all these clothes. Why would I ever do yourself a favor and start going through them?

And if you haven’t worn them in a while in in that season like, you know, if you go through a season. Right? So we’re going into spring. Right? So you’re getting out of the, winter season.

What winter sweaters did you not wear this summer this winter? Right? What ones do you did you not even go for? Pull those out. Put them in a bag for now.

Okay? And as you go through even each season as you go through it, which ones do you think you’re not gonna go to and grab? Right? But then you don’t put don’t give it away just yet. Just hold on to it for a little bit.

And then after a while, you realize you don’t miss it, and you have more room in your closet, and you’re thinking, oh, well, I didn’t need that anyway. Right? So yeah. So those are some tips that you can do to figure out which ones which things you can use to help you the, move when you’re downsizing and the reality of downsizing because it is a it’s a oh, man. It threw me for a loop.

It really did. So the kitchen was my biggest struggle. That one was the hardest along with clothes and linen. Even my kids, when they open up certain boxes, they realize, I I don’t want this. So they haven’t had their own box, probably two boxes now, of things that they didn’t want or need or didn’t fit anymore even though they went through, you know, downsizing before we left.

Right? Yeah. No. No. They’re still doing it.

So it’s a constant cycle. It’s not a bad thing, but it helps refresh your memory on what you have. Right? So, anyway, so I hope this gives you a better idea as to what you need, what you can do to help yourself when it comes to downsizing the reality of it. Until you go through it, you won’t really know.

And it’s it’s just an eye opening experience. It really is. So, hopefully, it gives you some things to think about and decide, do I really love this? Do I not? Okay?

I hope you guys have a fantastic week, and we’ll talk to you later. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Creative Home Staging Show. I hope you got some good tips in this episode, and I hope you come back and listen for more. If you wanna connect and want to take action, there are some ways you can stay connected with us. Number one, you can watch this episode on my YouTube channel at Blue Diamond Staging and Design to get more visuals.

I like to share some short videos there as well, so take a look at my channel there. Number two, you can also leave a review. Your feedback helps this show grow. You can go to the show and tap the three vertical dots to open a menu and hit rate the show. Number three, you can also find custom playlists from older home staging episodes that I called home staging do’s and don’ts, as well as pre home staging playlists for those of you who are new to home staging.

And number four, if you have any questions about today’s episode or need some home staging advice, you can go to bluediamondstaginganddesign.com forward slash chat and contact me via email or call me. I hope that this podcast is just a way for you to get to know me and how I can help you. Remember, you can do this, and staging is temporary. Keep up the good work, and I can’t wait to connect with you more.

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