Add value to your home, not just tchotchkes
Why you need to take a physical inventory of your home each year
Every time I came over, I’d notice his home was getting a little emptier. I winced, knowing he was getting ready to remind me for the millionth time that he was going to die and needed to clean his home “of all this junk.” I hated these conversations with my grandfather, who loved to bring up death. There were a handful of times where I got up and left, dead tired (pun intended) of him reminding me he wouldn’t be around forever. I’m well aware that all human beings die, but I didn’t want to hear it every five minutes. As a homeowner now, I (grudgingly) get what he was doing far more now than I did as a renter. It’s a tip that homeowners should take each year, too.
When my grandfather first asked me if I wanted to have his home, I panicked and said, “Absolutely not! I don’t want this kind of responsibility.” For more than a decade, he kept asking me the same question every single time he saw me. No matter how many times he told me his home was paid off and I’d just pay taxes, I just kept seeing overdraft fees in thought bubbles. I didn’t understand how home ownership worked nor taxes, and not being able to call a landlord to fix things sounded like a lot of stress.
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One year after he died, I bought a condo and realized just how ridiculous it was for me to repeatedly turn him down for home ownership. If I could rewind time, I’d have taken that house in a millisecond and rented it out, especially after learning a boatload of knowledge about property management in a year’s worth of being on a condo board.
Recommended Read: “5 lessons I learned as a first-time homebuyer”
But it was really his anti-junk stance that stood out to me. If he couldn’t find a use for it, he needed it to be gone. As a ceramics painter, that was the ultimate challenge for someone like me — considering most of the pieces that I painted and sold served no purpose other than decoration, give or take a few candy dishes, clocks and lamps. In fact, I was quite surprised to see a handyman ceramic piece I painted for him that managed to stay in place in the tool section of his basement. He even cut up little pieces of wood to add onto the foot-high handyman. I expected that crafty piece to disappear the millisecond I walked out of the door, but he seemed really fond of it.
But as a master mechanic and gardener who built his home, he was more focused on fixing something. Decorating to him meant buying a few nice towels, always having an aromatic lotion and soap in each bathroom, and fresh sheets. He would’ve made an excellent hotel owner. But just buying random things for fun? Whatever brain circuit activity happens that creates hoarders is something he’s missing. Although I didn’t consciously mimic him with this, I also have the same throw-everything-away habit.
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Why you should do a physical inventory of your home each year
As much as I hate to admit it, he’s not wrong about evaluating your home each year as though you could die tomorrow. Why?