Big City, Little Apartment: Adventures in Downsizing Home Life

This academic year, my husband and I are engaged in a trial run with downsizing and relocating.

The precipitating factor was Steve's sabbatical leave from the University of Michigan. With all our children off in college, we decided to move from Ann Arbor, a Michigan college town, to New York City. We downsized from a five-bedroom house to a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment on the seventh floor. It's palatial by New York standards but a huge change for us.

We rented out our house furnished, so we're traveling light. We brought clothing, computers, books, kitchen equipment and a few pieces of furniture. We bought the remaining essentials from Ikea.

Our sparse furnishings have proved to be a non-issue, owing to the huge windows and the fabulous view from the Roosevelt Island apartment. We overlook the East River and a constant parade of ocean-going ships, barges, tugboats, police boats and private yachts, with Manhattan as a backdrop.

We're in a brand-new building with brand-new everything in our apartment. I finally have a kitchen with a granite countertop.

But when I try to imagine permanently moving to something comparably sized -- from our 3,000-square-foot house to a 1,000-square-foot apartment with no garage, basement or attic to absorb the overflow -- I see some hard choices ahead.

While 1,000 square feet is plenty of living space for two people, it's not enough for all the things we own that turned our nondescript house into a real home.

Downsizing to this extent would mean jettisoning most of the artifacts I collected when I lived in Asia, the artwork and family photographs that cover our walls in Ann Arbor, and a lot of furniture. We would have to get rid of about 2,000 books and drastically prune our wardrobes. If the place is anything like this, there wouldn't be room for dressers in the master bedroom.

But judging by our trial run, the hardest and most time-consuming part of a permanent downsizing will not be making daunting choices; it will be sorting through the stuff of everyday life -- clothing, reading matter, work-related material and all the kitchen paraphernalia.

With most of this tucked away in dressers, closets, cabinets and drawers, I had no idea how much there was until we had to clean everything out. Renting our house as furnished meant that we had to remove all our personal effects from our bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen and home office.

What to keep and what to give away was a deceptively simple starting point that soon became more complicated.

Decisions about clothing were largely personal, but some were jointly made. What should we do with things we will never wear but that represent important ties to our family history? With all three daughters weighing in, we narrowed the choices to a few pieces of formal dresswear worn by grandparents, my wedding dress, a prom dress that had been worn by my sister and me, and one that our daughter had worn. Knowing that very old clothing can yellow and disintegrate, I consulted a museum curator on how to preserve these family treasures. Her instructions: Store the items in acid-free boxes, layer a sheet of unbleached muslin between garments and use acid-free tissue to puff up the sleeves.