‘Downsizing is overrated. Creating a family home is a lifetime’s achievement’

Downsizing is overrated. Although the banks, property developers and the Department of Housing will try to convince you otherwise.

Release the equity tied up in your family home – and yourself from the burden of maintenance. Shed the mental and physical baggage seared into the very walls of the house. Avoid the loneliness of the empty nest. Shrewd advice if you’re a bank, property developer or the Department of Housing.

But these are not just housing units to be sold to the highest bidder. These are family homes. Bought as a house, they have evolved with love and life into a home. Not only to children but to parents who have invested a lifetime of money, work and effort into this collection of rooms.

These are houses of 30-year mortgages. Of DIY and make-do. Of no summer holidays. Of not changing the car. Of building the extension. The extra bathroom.

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Creating a family home is a lifetime’s achievement.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to stay. To want weddings and funerals to leave from the home that raised them, among neighbours who bore witness to it all.

[ Is it worth downsizing if I will have to pay endless apartment management fees? ]

There is nothing wrong with wanting the story of your life tucked snugly around you. Within touching distance. Bumping up against it everyday in rooms that shaped and formed the children that outgrew them. Familiar smells, textures and sounds holding a subliminal sense of who you are. Love, laughter and fierce fighting echoing silently through the years.

The ads are encouraging. Grey-haired couples walking in the mountains, raising a glass with friends in a sun-soaked taverna. Everyone smiling, laughing as they step wide-eyed into the post-parenting years

It takes a long time to turn a house into a home. To twist and bend it to fit those who live there. A long time to shape it into somewhere that is loved. Each creaking step and knuckle-skinning doorknob is carried in the bones of those who live there. It is the measure of them. There is nothing wrong with wanting to stay in the physical space that held it all together. To stay at home. It is a big part of who our parents are and the lives they lived.

The ads are encouraging. Grey-haired couples walking in the mountains, raising a glass with friends in a sun-soaked taverna. Everyone smiling, laughing as they step wide-eyed into the post-parenting years. This is to ignore the natural homing instinct. To dismiss it as old-fashioned. To reduce the value of home to a ball and chain preventing the move into a more exciting older age.

In 2019 the government issued the Housing Options for Our Ageing Population policy. Their objective is to encourage older people to “rightsize to appropriately sized units”. To move away from rural and commuter-belt three-bedroomed semi-Ds to more conveniently located apartments with better access to medical and social facilities. However, a 2018 Housing Agency survey found that 92 per cent of adults aged 65-plus are unlikely to downsize because of a strong emotional attachment to their home and locality. One estate agent I know says he has yet to meet a happy downsizer.

[ Downsizing: Fine in theory, but here’s how it can go in reality ]

My parents stayed in their five-bedroom home until forced, through ill health, into a nursing home. No policies, no financial incentives, no retirement villages would have enticed them to move. They wanted to stay at home for as long as possible. It was familiar and it was theirs. The shower was adapted and a grab rail attached to the back-door steps. Otherwise, the house remained as it always had been: decrepit in places and definitely in need of modernising, the vegetable garden gradually succumbing to nature. Moving involves a reimagining of a deeply held identity in a brand new environment.

We need to respect the value of house and home to the older generation. They have paid their dues

Advice to older people is to stay active and connected. Particularly to old friends and family. Relocating to more convenient, age-friendly accommodation presents a challenge. Does anyone realistically have the energy or interest to make new friends at an advanced stage of life? Change is daunting as we age. Comfort in the familiar sustains us as we weather the storm.

The process of buying and selling a house is fraught with uncertainty. Nothing is guaranteed. There are no bridging loans to allow older people to stay in their home while running the property market gauntlet. The market favours cash buyers. Are downsizers to sell up and join the rental queue until a suitable property comes up for sale? Preferably in their locality with the same shop and post office within walking distance? A tough ask of the already tightly squeezed property market.

It is probable that the upcoming generation will embrace retirement and downsizing with a more open mind. It is part of a new way of living. In the meantime, we need to respect the value of house and home to the older generation. They have paid their dues. It’s okay to want to settle into old sofas. Maybe even build on a sunroom.