For someone who never thought she had an affinity for math, I seem to do an awful lot with numbers. Taking inventory of supplies, checking grocery tallies, looking over the bill after lunch or dinner at a restaurant all require a certain amount of skill, not to mention accuracy and patience.
Recently, counting helped me to assess the changes my husband and I made when we downsized. We were discussing how some homes look crowded because they have a few too many pieces of furniture in the rooms, and how we tried to be careful not to overstuff our new home. The discussion prompted us to count the number of pieces of furniture in our living room, which escalated into figuring out the total number of pieces of furniture we kept for our current residence. And that, of course, segued into how many pieces of furniture we had at the “old” house.
Here’s the breakdown: in our prior home we had 62 pieces of furniture; in our current residence we have 29. We knew we cut our living space in half, so it makes sense that we have about half the furniture. We only have space for half, right? But in addition to cutting the number of pieces, we also downsized in the size of the furniture we kept. For example, our king-sized bed from the old house would have overfilled the bedroom, so we sold our master bedroom suite (which included eight other pieces) and shifted to the guest bedroom’s queen-sized bed with four side pieces that are smaller than the master suite’s counterparts. Those changes pushed us to downsize the amount of clothing and accessories we (mostly me) kept, so it helped us in more than one way. It’s easier for me to change the sheets, make the bed, and turn the mattress with a smaller bed. It’s easier to find things that fit me and work for my wardrobe when I’m not sifting through many other items that no longer work for me.
While we are talking about numbers, I should mention that it has been slightly over nine
months since we downsized and moved into the new house. We regret nothing, although I am still trying to remember if I gave away a set of miniature needlenose pliers or if I just can’t find them among the remaining tools. We still have some bins to sort through, but the process goes on. I keep one large bin handy for items to donate so that we can quickly move things along as we notice them.
These days, most of what we count are the blessings that this move brought to us.
This blog post is part of a series called Downsizing. It is the chronicle of moving from a 2475 square foot home to one approximately half its size during the first six months of 2016. It takes place in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania.
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