How did your home living situation change as you got into your senior years

In My Humble Opinion
21

Worrisome issues all.

I’m 68 and active, still enjoying 20 mile hikes and climbing small mountains, mowing our small lawn with a non-self-propelled mower and climbing onto the roof to clean gutters. I did all the driving for a 2400 mile road trip this year. But I only cut down trees of about 6” diameter or less, that can’t possibly fall onto anything important. I don’t lift more than about 40 lbs now. I only do concrete work with a mixer, I don’t mix with a hoe any more.

But my spouse, 72, is significantly disabled. She can’t walk very well or very far. She sometimes needs help to get into our house from the car, but usually can do it by herself. She won’t drive beyond the closest small towns, and not at all after dark. She has a cane and a handicapped parking tag.

I think we could improve house access to make our home work for us years into the future, but when we discuss it things devolve into argument. I want to redo the front walk, which includes 10’ of elevation, by providing space for two chair lifts. She wants a long sloped boardwalk curving through the woods behind our house, but I don’t think she could even drive a car back there.

It’s a big worry right now.

22

We lived in a house for 47 years. At one point we considered buying an apt. in NYC near our daughter and actually saw an agent. But after the 2016 election we decided to stay in Canada. But things were getting harder. Things like carrying dirty clothes down 2 storeys to the basement and clean clothes back to the 2nd floor. Things like schlepping the trash cans and recycling bins to the bottom of a sometimes icy driveway (about 50 feet) and back. And I had loved my vegetable garden, but it had gotten just too hard for me. So six years ago we sold the house and bought a condo (we were in our early 80s then). I like it well enough, but we have deteriorated physically and mentally during those 6 years and our kids are trying to get us to move to an assisted living facility. Downsizing and moving into this condo was hell. I liked the assisted living place well enough, but I just can’t face the thought of downsizing and moving yet again. We got rid of half our books; we would have to get rid of at least half of what is left. We brought our piano to the condo although my wife had stopped playing (and I never did). She has not played since we moved (and it hasn’t been tuned in a couple decades), but when I suggested that perhaps it would be better not to take it to the assisted living place, she threw a hissy fit. I think a lot of things like that would happen if we tried to move.

23

I bought the house I’m in partly because it’s easily adaptable to aging in place (I’m 77). At this point my only issue is that I’m still recovering from back surgery, and sometimes I have to use the porch post to stabilize myself when climbing three steps; I have a do-it-yourself railing kit, but I haven’t gotten around to installing it yet.

My father (on whom be peace) lived in the three-level house he bought before my older brother was born in 1946 until he made his last trip to the hospital in 2001, but when he developed inclusion body myocitis — not the same as ALS, but the symptoms are similar — he restricted himself to one level. And he hardly ever left except to go out to the deck that my BIL built for him (over his objections).

24

I pulled up stakes in Toronto Canada and hooked up with a medical professional in tropical Australia who is now my 15 year partner.
Spend the first ten years back and forth travelling and in Australia on tourist visa and then the last 5 years permanent visa ( leading to citiznship)

I sold out the company I ran for 37 years to get out of my debts but left nothing in the kitty. Moved full time to Aus in 2020 sneaking through the covid barriers with just a single suitcase.
Then back briefly to close out the rental house in Toronto and sell off the biz and home stuff.
Since I’d been coming to Aus for 15 years I’d built up a far bit of “home” here and only brought some clothes and art stuff with me on the last two suitcase trips. Never did ship anything.

Fast forward to now, we and our best friends both looking to downsize even tho we all like where we live both the houses and the neighbourhood but upkeep a problem and I’m horribly lazy about the upkeep where partner takes on both our place and her nearby dottors for yardwork.

When I first came to Australia there were villas available of 2-3 bedrooms for circa 300k but now that has become $500k and makes no sense to sell ours.
Don’t want an apartment.
Both of us relatively healthy - 72 and 77 …I’m still riding motorcycle but both of us have some health issues…not dire at the moment…but both of us have longevity genes…3 out of 4 parents lived to 95.
Lack of affordable downsizing places is dire.
At some point will be assisted living but partner being a nurse helps a lot …
Had a scare a few weeks back with an out of blue sepsis ( septic shock ) that could have gone wrong but for quick decisions and actions - even then it was a near thing…luckily with no lingering consequences. Just as a heads up …if you don’t know about sepsis …read up …it kills more than heart and stroke combined…I knew nothing about it. :astonished_face: It is akin to getting hit with a freight train…and was a bit of touch and go even with top end hospital ICU care within an hour.
Partner had always stressed we need to be close to medical and it paid off…ambulance in 5 minutes and 10 min to reach the hospital. Something to bear in mind if getting away from civilization is something in your thoughts.

Hopefully we are building a granny flat with the kids and that will work brilliantly for us…but it’s only at early planning stage and we have the approvals we need and general agreement. Fingers crossed it works out over the next couple years.
Meanwhile enjoying the tropics before it gets too hot. 40% of the house and 90% of our living area is screened deck - lovely breeze and mid 80s at 2pm. :kangaroo:
This is a very nice place to retire to.

25

Thanks for the clarification.

I never raised a family, so for that plus career reasons I’ve not had the traditional trajectory of living in one locale, much less one residence, forever. Golly that sounds boring and limiting.

Since college I’ve lived in 2 countries, 6 US states, and at least 10 residences, not counting temporary moves.

To the point of the thread …

At about age 43 I apexed in household complexity with a 3-story ~4000 SF McMansion on a lake. For just wife and I. I was still doing DIY, plus lots of paid-for maintenance. Work, work, work. My basement looked like Home Depot there was so much equipment & supplies in there.

By stages I’ve downsized from that first to a 1-story plus basement 3BR house, a 3 BR condo, a 2BR apartment, and now a ~1000SF 1.5BR apartment. Along the way my wife died, so after some detours there’s just me. I’m now 66 & still with full health, vigor, & mobility.

The building handles all maintenance, the housekeepers clean, and I often eat out, so somebody else cooks. I do that more for the social interaction than any inability to cook for myself. I was the main cook all the years my late wife and I were married.

Between living in a walkable area and a local shuttle, I can go a week without needing to drive. I don’t avoid driving and just yesterday I drove 25 miles away to meet someone for lunch.

The punchline being where I am now and how I live now will probably suffice until I’ve got significant mental or physical infirmity. There’s no way to accommodate live-in help here (unless I moved to a larger apartment), but if I did need a drop-in helper for a couple hours a day for the ADLs, that’d be immediately available.

Setting aside clothing, the total weight of my possessions today is WAG 5% of what it was at the McMansion. And I love the absence of possessions. The day you realize you’re not using it and not going to, get rid of it. And do not make finding the optimal home for your cast-offs an obstacle to their disposal. Sell or donate if that’s easy, recycle if that’s easy, but you’ll find dumpsters have an easy and infinite appetite for whatever you don’t need. The rest of the world is already awash in other people’s stuff; they do not need yours too.

Like @ThelmaLou’s wise counsel, I’m expecting to move to Independent Living before I get too raggedy. Better early than late, although as said I’m already pretty well ensconced in a similarly “big easy button” way of life.

From watching other people struggle with this, I’ve picked up on one key message. Do not hold onto the accoutrements of youth after you’ve given them up. When you’re done e.g. skiing, avoid the temptation to keep the gear “just in case” or as a reminder of your earlier vigorous exploits. Just get rid of it. That slow steady drip of disposing of the unneeded is much more compatible with the waning vigor of advancing age.

The alternative, as expressed by many folks upthread, is a lifetime of detritus piled around you everywhere that is both physically and psychologically too enormous to move. So there you sit, trapped in a maze of your own making, composed entirely of an obligation to warehousing stuff that is now useless to you. What a ghastly burden to place on yourself at a vulnerable time of life.

26

Your description of your current life is exactly what I experience at The Home under the label “Independent Living.” The only difference I can see is that many of my apt-related additional expenses are included in my rent, i.e., heat/ac, water, basic cable TV, land line, and internet (although I have my own T-Mobile Gateway). We also have two meals per day provided (although lately I’ve been preferring my own cooking), and housekeeping is included once a month, but I have my own 2X/mo. cleaner who has been coming to me for 12 years.

My point is, that if and when you’re ready to make a move to IL, I don’t think it will be that different from what you’re experiencing now.

And I heartily agree that my downsized lifestyle feels weightless compared to my 2,200 sq ft house (+ 2 car garage) in the country → my 1,100 sq ft (+ 2 car garage) in the city. I also had a vacation house, and I was carrying the note on two other properties. Now I can almost literally get my arms around everything I own except my car. Divesting myself of all the stuff was incredibly stressful, but now that it’s done, I don’t miss the burden of all those possessions. Except my books. :sob: I’ll probably never recover from the loss of all the books I had to leave behind when I moved into the city in 2012. I hope I get to see them again one day in heaven… :sun_behind_cloud:

BTW, speaking of moves (and apropos of absolutely nothing), when I was in my mid-30’s I worked at a place where I had to get a security clearance. One of the things the PTB wanted to know was all my previous addresses from birth. Sitting down to list them, I figured out that I had lived at 43 separate addresses, with my parents at first (Air Force brat), then on my own. From that time (early 80s until now) I’ve only had five more addresses. I suspect this is my last one.

Carry on.

27

I did not find it emotionally stressful. Just a lot of work & hassle. Which is what led me to my advice of dripping it out slowly and steadily, not waiting until an impending move forced a mad slapdash 24/7 flail to dispose of stuff.

It takes all kinds.

Late wife and I used to sorta collect books. Or rather gather books; there was no curation & no “complete the set” thinking.

At one point we realized we owned 1000 books we had never read and in all likelihood would never read. Books were a religious talisman for a life of erudition we were not actually living, just pretending to hope to someday live.

They all disappeared without a tear the next week. They then represented folly & hubris in the buying, not learning in the (non)reading.

IMO most human folly is a reasonable behavioral response to false, ignorant, or wishful thinking.

Purge the false thinking and the false behaviors fall away effortlessly.

28

I did that. While having COVID. Don’t recommend it. It was exactly this time two years ago.

This is so insightful! I was known as the person who had hundreds of books. It was part of the way I saw myself and the way I wanted others to see me. I wouldn’t say I exactly led a “life of erudition,” but often in college, I could write papers using research from my own books without having to go to the library. (Remember “papers,” “research,” and all those index cards? Squeezing one more line of text onto a typed page? :zany_face: )

But there was another element: as someone with NO family, I went to books for information, advice, and comfort the way many people go to their families. I left behind books I had as a child in Japan. Books that beloved teachers had inscribed to me. Books that had been with me at every stage, helping me and supporting me.

That was the BIG move/book purge from the country to the city ~12 years ago–this last time (two years ago to The Home) I brought ALL my books (the ones I had left) with me to this apartment. Now I buy virtually all kindle books.

29

When maintaining both a house and taking care of my mother got to be too much for my father he sold the house and they downsized to an apartment. That way all the maintenance on the home was someone else’s problem and he could focus on mom. Also, he reasoned that renting an apartment was better than buying a condo because if things went sideways they could just move again… which turned out to be a wise choice in about 18 months. So they moved to another apartment. When mom died dad moved in with my sister which was…. let’s just say mixed. But that sequence worked for dad passably well.

I had an aunt and uncle who went into assisted living. Somehow or other - I do not have all the details - it turned into a nightmare. They eventually extricated themselves and went back to renting their own place.

Currently, as I enter my senior years (I recently got my first senior citizens discount at a local chain movie theater) I am still renting a conventional apartment. I occasionally toy with the notion of looking into 55+ locations but the waiting lists are long around here. Several friends and I are planning to pool our resources for a retirement place, which “age-in-place” designed in from the start to maximize it’s usefulness to aging geezers. We’ll see how that turns out.

30

My sympathies. I was able to put my foot down on the boxes of LPs that we have carted around the world. I did the donkey work of uploading them all, so there was no real reason to keep them. Sold some scarce albums to a record store, sold some online and a few at a yard sale and gave away the rest. She insisted on keeping my work bench, which weighs a ton, so we paid to ship the bloody thing. It’s sat unassembled in my daughter’s garage for the past three years and I’m pretty sure will still be there when I’m dust.

OMG, the effing books! My wife never met a book she didn’t love, and has actually read everything on the six bookcases we have. Now, if they’ve been read, why don’t we get rid of them you ask? No freaking idea. We unloaded tons of them when we left Anchorage. I shipped all my Alaskana books to a non-profit before leaving Portland. And yet. . .six bookcases full still.

31

As someone who has a similar love affair with books - I don’t get rid of the ones I’ve read because I frequently re-read them. They keep on giving me enjoyment.

That said - I did have to downsize my library at one point. That was painful. But I was able to admit there were some books I probably wouldn’t ever read again. I still have too many.

32

I’m trying to be ruthless as I re-read. It’s sort of working, in that I think I’m donating as many as I’m buying.

A neighbour came over the other day and asked me for books. He’s learning English, and he saw that I had a lot of books. I took it as a good prompt to offload some Agatha Christies: comparatively simple English and books I don’t really need to own. This is the second immigrant neighbour who has asked me to donate books. A bit forward of them, but I’m actually quite happy to.

33

Pretty much. I wasn’t specifically trying to duplicate IL. I was just trying to remove all the drudgery from life, so all I had to do all day was have fun. Some Dopers glory in their many chores and life of familiar drudgery. I glory in zero chores and novel fun insofar as possible. Every day is being on vacation, not just living, or worse yet, just existing.

If I get to the point I need assistive devices to walk or roll, that’s about when this becomes untenable versus the bland convenience of 2 or 3 meals per day just down the hall. And the camaraderie of fellow infirm dodderers. We do have a few very elderly living here, but I believe it’s sort of lonely for them. This building doesn’t have much of a neighborly social circle. Everybody nods and smiles and gives the perfunctory greetings, but not much more. If I couldn’t be out in public daily, I’d quickly become a depressed hermit. So moving to IL for the company, increasingly senile though it may be, seems to be a worthwhile thing to do.

34

Whe we moved into our current home in our young 50s 14 years ago, we bought a split level. When I broke my ankle shortly thereafter, we realized that no single level had facilities for bathroom, sleeping and kitchen. With perfect foresight, I wish we had bought a ranch which would serve us further into the future.

I do not intend to even move into an assisted living facility. I very much enjoy not sharing walls with neighbors. If I lose the ability to handle stairs, I could imagine moving into a very small detached ranch home. We are working at maintaining our health and fitness to forestall that as long as possible. I could imagine living in this home for quite a while, hiring out cleaning and exterior maintenance.

When this home proves too much, I could imagine moving to a small apartment. Likely rent over own, just to reduce maintenance issues. Hire cleaners, have food delivered, check out library books electronically, even sell car and rely on Uber if need be. When I’m no longer able to maintain that level of existence, I expect to wish to check out. We’ll see if my attitude changes when that time arrives.

My dad lived in the same home - bungalow on NW side of Chicago - for 70 years, from age 7 to 77. He had a stroke at age 65, after which he was mentally alert but physically limited. My mom had very aggressive breast cancer. When they moved out of their house to assisted living, we suspected she was planning for my dad to be able to continue after she passed. They moved around Thanksgiving. Mom died in her sleep in January. In retrospect, I wonder if she took her own life with pills of something. Her doctor said she did not expect my mom to have passed that quickly, but that she had no more than 6 or so very unpleasant months left.

My dad died 1 month later, also in his sleep.

At the time, I felt they died too young - in their mid-70s. But when I listen to my contemporaries dealing with their parents in their 80-90s, I think how lucky we were that both of my parents were fully sentient up until the days they died.

35

Be careful not to conflate “assisted living” with “independent living” in your thinking and planning.

The former is like living in a hospital-lite or rehab center. Very medical-centric and only appropriate for people who can’t get through a single day without significant nursely assistance.

The latter is like living in the dorms in college, except with wrinkles and walkers. You’ve got an apartment of your own (one or two people), and a restaurant / cafeteria down the hall. And some manner of group activities, transportation, and general wellness oversight. You’re able to have as much of an outside life as you can muster.

Huge difference between the two.

Both represent a life 40yo us would find rather confining. But as we get out into our out-years, there’s a vast difference in QOL between the two. I too would rather avoid AL; via suicide if necessary. Shame our ignorant country thinks Jeebus cares enough to sentence us all to a miserable lingering lonely infirmity.

To me, IL represents a way to squeeze the last 2 or 4 years of quasi-independence out of life. After exhausting living on my own in the simplest ways possible. From there to, with any luck, drop dead before “graduating” to AL.

36

We are both 62. I anticipate selling the house within 15 years ( I’d rather 10) and moving to a co-op or condo that is all one level. It will be in the same general area although possibly closer to my daughter’s home than I am now. We might go to one of those active 55+ communities but I doubt it - the only reason I’m planning to sell the house is the work involved in shoveling snow, mowing the lawn etc.

If I already lived in a co-op/condo I wouldn’t be looking to move ever. I live in a really good neighborhood to age in place. That’s something to think about, too. Most people I know who live in the city stay in the city as they age. It’s the people in the suburbs who have moved, mostly to independent living arrangements or at least developments that run buses to the supermarket and the mall Because the places they lived in aren’t really liveable without driving.

37

True. But the advent of UberLyft has changed that equation.

I can UL all over my local area, say 10mile radius a couple times per day for less than the daily cost of owning & operating a midrange newish car. For sure it’s a larger cash outlay than a fully paid-for 20yo Toyota.

But for a middle-class suburban person or couple, they might find UL makes a perfectly decent and affordable substitute for driving themselves once they can no longer drive themselves.

Couple that with delivery of lots of stuff, and the routine erranding of daily living can be greatly reduced. If one has the mental flexibility to let somebody else pick out your tomatoes.

38

In some places- but there are still places where Uber/Lyft is not convenient or maybe doesn’t even really exist because they wouldn’t get enough business to be worthwhile. Because almost everyone drives.

39

Not quite ime but ymmv.
My folks moved to an AL apartment, renting on a month to month basis. The entrance was like a very nice hotel lobby, common areas were carpeted, with comfortable seating, lots of natural light, an elegant dining room overlooking a courtyard. It did not have any resemblance to a hosp or rehab facility. It did not reek like a nursing home can. Private rooms were small, but included a patio. The facility did not provide nursing care but if one needed help with ADL’s you would have to hire private duty caregivers. AL provided housekeeping, laundry and meals, for an extra fee they would dispense medications.They organized recreational outings and transportation to doctor appointments. Basically it allows a senior to maintain some independence but without the cares of shopping cooking and cleaning house. Some one on staff checks in with the residents in some shape or form on a daily basis.
The AL population was older more fragile and in decline but still managing their own personal care.

If a resident still enjoyed a cocktail or a cigar/cigarette they were allowed to indulge but in their apt or on their patio.

40

In what way do you believe IL will be able to support you that you could not do independently - say in a studio apartment with cleaning service, food delivery, and Uber/Lyft?

My parents died in what you call an IL facility, and my MIL in AL. Both were very nice facilities, but aren’t the sorts of places I wish to live. I realize it is likely I am being unrealistically pigheaded and that my wishes might change.