Book-filled rooms...

When I was 17 and madly in love, I received a letter from my first sweetheart (we weren’t yet lovers), telling me that all he wanted from life was a book filled room and a lover to share things with, “when she is needed”. Even at 17, even madly in love, it didn’t escape my notice that the concept would have been better had he ended his sentence at “with”, and I immediately wrote him back and told him so. It’s probably a good thing that we didn’t marry each other...

Still, after all these years, I remember, and am fond of, his concept. A book filled room and a lover to share things with...well, lacking the lover, I’ll take the book filled room. I’ve been thinking of this a lot lately, mostly from my own book filled rooms, because it's time to think about selling my house. I love my house, with it's book filled rooms, but...it’s too big, and too expensive to keep. When I was younger and heard people say their houses were too expensive to live in, I didn’t know what they meant. Ha! I’ve learned.

I don’t need to be heating and cooling over 3000 square feet of living space when it’s just me and the cats who live here. I’m ready to downsize, but...to what? I’ve been looking at houses, condos, and townhouses on the internet for the past year, and I’ve yet to see much of anything that I like. I don’t welcome the thought of remodeling yet another place, and yet I’m not so put off by the idea that I won’t consider it. I just want good bones, but from what I’ve seen, they’re as hard as ever to find. Many of the smaller houses I’ve looked at are described as “Great first house” or “Good starter house”. These phrases are often used to describe 1200 to 1500 square foot houses with 3 or 4 tiny bedrooms and 2 or 3 baths. Those may be great for young marrieds, but I don’t know anyone my age who’s looking for a house like that. I’d like that amount of square footage with just a few large, open rooms, preferably all on one floor, big enough to hold my furniture and still have room to walk around in. The baby boomers, of which I’m one, still make up a sizeable portion of the population, and probably a majority of us are in the process of downsizing, so we must be a fairly substantial market. Maybe it’s time to come up with a new concept: small, stylish houses for empty nesters who are downsizing. I’d welcome an ad that said, “Great LAST house”, especially if it was for a place with a few open rooms with high ceilings, two baths, and infinite walls of bookshelves...