Anyone moved home in their mid 60s? What did you get right? And wrong?

This thread is very encouraging for those who are thinking of moving to make life easier, because the majority of posts that I’ve read have been very positive about their new homes.

I think unfortunately the older you get, the harder it can be.

In late 60s moved from a large 4 bed to another 4 bed. Being a new build all the rooms are a lot smaller. The garden is about the the same as had to accommodate a large shed for DH As family live far and wide still wanted to be able to accommodate them when they came to stay. Neighbourhood is good, very small community and good neighbours. Public transport is non existent but that's no different to where we were before. Since DH died I am conscious of being totally responsible for my transport and have looked at other areas I feel I would like but transport is overall really dire unless you live in a busy area within a town and that is not for me.

I have wanted to move for the last 10 years to be nearer to DD , cousin and school friend. Also OH friends of 60 years at his sports club. I want to upsize to 3 rather than 2 bedrooms,( 1 each) so we can have friends and family to stay OH likes it here as he has a reclining chair which he can sleep in and have the TV turned up to max volume. We are a car ride away from a bus stop and rail station. 7 miles from nearest friend. No one calls without making an appointment as we are so isolated. I have only spoken to tradesmen and shop assistants in the last 2 weeks. The garden is now going back to nature as we can no longer tend it. The only up side to living in this area is the second to non health service. I am not sure that I am joking saying that we could be dead a week and no one would know. I don't care how much work it will take to move but I am determined not to leave here in a wooden box.
Has anyone any ideas or inspiration for how to get OH ready to move?

Moved 3 years ago aged 68 & 69, from a 3 bed semi to a 3 bed detached. We now have a newer warmer house with a utility (which is great after winter walks with the dog) and a downstairs toilet, nice wide drive (our old drive was very narrow & difficult to to reverse out of. Our garden is smaller but unfortunately hubbys health has deteriorated so hes now happier with a smaller plot. Chemists, doctors and park a few minutes walk away. Bus stop round the corner. Only thing I miss is the large garden with a pond. The hardest thing was getting rid of stuff after 40 years in our old house.

Downsized in 2019 to a two bedroom up and down stairs. Cleared out a great deal of stuff. It's amazing what you collect over the years. In the new house I have struggled for room to keep the stuff I wanted. It remains in boxes. No loft to store it. Miss the large bedroom from the old house. Sometimes I think I should have taken one level house. Currently trying to get a low maintenance garden for my older years. I turn 60 this year.

No or very few stairs is a key factor in my opinion, as well as location.

Cont...although I have no near neighbours, my house is far away from the road so I feel safe here. However, at 89 years if age I do need gardeners now to keep the large garden under control. I have no local transport so have to drive the 3 miles to town, Dr, Dentist, Hospital etc. Every so often I do look for a suitable property in a suitable area but, so far, haven't been able to get both in one place. With my dog and rescued cats I wouldn't want to live near a busy road so, looks as if I will be staying put.

As I live in a fairly isolated area - no noisy/nasty neighbours - surrounded by fields and woods, downsizing and moving is very difficult. I could never live in a flat and, as I like my bedroom windows open at night, a bungalow would be out of the question on safety issues. Al

I'm looking to downsize from a large 100 year old 4 bed house 20 miles west of London which needs maintenance I can't afford. I still have a mortgage and will be 70 at the end of this month.
Ideally I'd move near my DS and family who are in Yorkshire but it is likely they will move from there in a year or so which leaves me in a quandary. If I move near them and then they move a long way away will I regret it? So I'm currently putting it off, though not getting any younger! I'm still trying to get my head around the necessary decluttering in order to downsize.
I've a pretty good idea of what I want/need. Enough space for DD (who lives abroad at present) to be able to visit.Space for my grandchildren to stay. Walking distance from a decent sized supermarket and doctor etc in case I can't drive in future. An outside space which is low maintenance. My ideal would be a dormer bugalow with the option to live on one level but still have an upstairs to keep me fit, but I'd consider a bungalow. The stairs in my present house are steep and narrow and unsuitable for a stairlift so that obviously needs to be considered. A decent bus route would be a big bonus. I rarely use buses here as they are not very convenient but have used buses when visiting other areas, especially cities where I can park on the outskirts and travel in with my bus pass.
I'd love to life in a pretty cottage in a village but I know that will never be practical. Villages with no bus service and few facilities are fine when you are young, especially if you are a family with more than one car, but living alone with only the one car would make me very vulnerable. Cars always seem to break down at the worst possible time! I've just renewed my licence prior to my 70th birthday but I know there could come a time when driving is no longer possible so location has to be a compromise. DD is currently nagging me to get on with it!

1 have been happy in our down-size, very close to the family house from which we moved 19 years ago. DH died 2 years ago and I was doing fine, but you never know what is coming at you.
A few short weeks ago I was active, but then came an emergency bowel cancer operation (2 in fact after complication).
I cannot tell whether I will make a good recovery and may have to move again.
Having said all that, neither DH nor I had any regrets about our downsize and it has lasted 19 years.

It was the best thing for me being divorced and about to retire with the mortgage still unpaid. My new small home is perfect but I did not consider the impact on my grown up children. They visit but no longer see it as coming home. They never lived her. My older grandchildren have fond memories of my old home but there is not space for all the younger ones to come together. Maybe I no longer have the energy for that anyway.
Bottom line, do what feels best for you!

Its such a big thing to do. Ive 4 children and grandchildren. Not in each other’s pockets but close . I d hate to not see them…but it’s all off us.Equally Culpable . I think id lose my husband first…. And I don’t want that! Surely we can compromise? C

Farzanah

Well done for compromising and being realistic about affordability Cariad. It’s either being willing to compromise or staying put (as many do) waiting for the perfect property, and then being forced to move under duress when it’s too late!

Yep...compromise was very much the "name of the game" I'm afraid (had to be).

I think, in many ways, it was one of the correct decisions my mother made in their 40's that she wasn't going to put up with a semi-detached any longer (she also likes quiet - and there were drum-bashing students next door latterly) and pushed for the move to a detached house. She chose a house in a road that was currently being built (ie it was the 1970s) and she couldnt get the site she wanted (as the best sites had already been reserved when she went walking down that road intent on living there) and so had to choose another house in the same road. She got a detached 3 bedroomed chalet bungalow. So they had the downstairs bedroom, the bathroom was right next to it downstairs and there was a large kitchen/diner and through lounge size sitting room on the ground floor and one walked out the back door into a conservatory. Upstairs was two bedrooms and a loo and ready access to loft storage space. Underneath the house was walk-in storage. There was a garage and both front and back gardens (though small!) and when they both got steadily more and more ill as time went on = well they'd chosen the ground floor bedroom anyway for themselves and the bathroom/sitting room/kitchen were only a few steps away. I always thought that would be pretty practical layout if it came to it - and boy...did it ever come to it with both their health (physically and mentally)! There were just two issues: 1. That site was much more sloping than a lot of the other sites (but they'd already been reserved and so she couldnt have the one she chose and hence that problem). That meant there was a shortie flight of steps up to the front door and a rather noticeable flight of steps down from the conservatory into the drive and then another flight of steps into the back garden. So the particular site itself was a problem to them and then a problem to sell "afterwards" 2. They should have replaced that bath with a shower a good deal sooner than they actually did and, ideally, the bathroom needed to be big enough for both a bath and a separate shower - so one had the option and no having to clamber into a bath to get to the shower (because of it being positioned over it). So most of the house itself problems were avoided - because of the layout. That didn't stop my mother going upstairs once in a while - she was heading for the airing cupboard on the landing I think - and she duly fell down them at one point and was there stuck until my father came home.

We moved 14 times in about 40 years. I move on my own at 68, then have moved twice in last 11 years and would move again. Just take your time and everything falls into place. Its a good chance to get rid of superfluous “stuff

Well done for compromising and being realistic about affordability Cariad. It’s either being willing to compromise or staying put (as many do) waiting for the perfect property, and then being forced to move under duress when it’s too late!

There are two separate questions here I feel:
1. The house itself - and I feel I did the best a single low-paid person can do in that respect. There is no such thing as a perfect house - unless one has a generous amount of money to hand possibly - and so one has to make out a list of Must Haves and Nice to Haves and get as much as possible of it.

So I was still living in my "starter house" (which had been some sort of miracle to get in the first place - as I've always been single and low-paid and hence it was a Victorian terrace house with back yard that I was still in (despite having reached 60) in a small city in South West England to current house (a detached bungalow with garden in West Wales).

CORRECT:
- It's detached
- It's got a garden
- It's got a reasonable outlook
- The public transport here is awful - but I made sure it was conveniently located in the town itself that I'm in now and there is a local taxi firm that many use (and now I do too) that are used to ferrying people around even just within the town and they are very cheap to use.
- It was built in an era before modern house throwing-up and many new houses with all sorts of glitches from bad building firms
- It's on a pretty level plot and without extra steps (over and above the standard single step into back door or front door)
- It's in a low noise level road (ie vast majority of the traffic entering the road is for someone in the road - with it not being a through road). I loathe traffic noise with a passion and so it HAD to be a quiet road.
- I've been able to make surreptitious adaptations - just-in-case. There's only one bathroom and it's small and so I had to choose between bath and shower (though I want both) and plonked for one of those modern-size showers (not one of those tiny ones houses used to have and many still do). I saw my parents struggle latterly with it being a bath in their bathroom and they needed a shower some time before they had that bath ripped out and a shower put in instead. I say "surreptitious" adaptations as I personally do not want anything that says "disabled" about it and stairlifts and handrails in gardens etc are something I wanted to put myself in a position to avoid (yep...I know there's nowt wrong with it and it's very sensible - but that's how I feel personally re myself and I'm all too conscious there's nothing wrong with having to have adaptations - but errrm...my mother never would have any herself - even though I promised her I'd buy THE most elegant and expensive walking stick I could find when she needed one - but she refused to have one because of not wanting to look any different and I guess I feel the same LOL). So with it being a bungalow and level plot = I don't envisage ever having to do any adaptations.
- So bungalows are very practical and even young fit people buy them and so I felt okay about buying one (though it wasn't a deliberate decision for it to be a bungalow - and I was looking at houses as well at the time).
- I think the absolute ideal is probably a chalet bungalow - with all the rooms one needs on the ground floor and the spare bedroom/s and a second bathroom on the 1st floor.

Some people have also mentioned moving to another area of the country and the Midlands and the North are traditionally friendlier than the South of England (where I come from and was living) and I can attest to that being so - but I moved to a "Welsh" area of Wales for the cheaper housing area I needed in order to get the "detached with a garden in reasonable area" house. Errrm...and the location has certainly made me very aware that many here don't regard me as having "moved to elsewhere in the country" and the combination of unadopted road (with VERY "local" longstanding neighbours) and a part of the country where many people instantly assume when I talk about "the country" I mean all of the UK (and not just Wales) and when I talk about "the Government" I mean the Government and not the Welsh Assembly has not been easy and I've adapted as best I can to checking who else is in earshot before I say things I've been able to say without thinking twice in my southern English city and no-one has thought a thing of it - but here it might cause someone to "have a go" at me this side of the border iyswim and I do relax visibly when I head back to England. I do struggle with being regarded as a different nationality - when I'm obviously as British as they come. So moving to elsewhere in the country does mean realising some people might be thinking a bit differently to oneself (whether for good or bad) and regarding you as having moved to a different country.

So in an ideal world - my house would still be a bungalow - but it would already be modernised (many bungalows are not modernised yet and also many have too small kitchens). It would be a totally modern style to start with - including large kitchen/the missing utility room/missing 2nd bathroom/missing garage/missing 3rd bedroom and it would be back in England (I know exactly the large nice town I have my eye on - and there are bungalows there I could afford, but they'd be too small and old-fashioned for me). So I make the best of what I've got and think I did the best I could for what money I had available to me and get on with things - while keeping a wistful eye on "If money was easier and I could afford it....." but I know many of us have money issues and it's much more likely if one is/has always been single and that's just how it is for a lot of people.

We’re 68 and moved from a 4 bed detached house in a perfectly fine area of my town to a 3 bed semi detached bungalow in a much better area in the same town.
Our new home is 140 metres from our son’s house (but in a different road so not to be in each others pocket, but close enough to be able to help on the school run a couple of days a week).
We are also a 4 minute walk to a local bank of shops, (pharmacy/mini supermarket/off licence/vets & a doctor’s surgery, all this plus being on a bus route to the local hospital
The bungalow itself is smaller than our last home but not claustrophobic and the gardens are low maintenance, it’s perfect for us both now and in the future

LateDH and I moved from a four bedroom house to a new build bungalow when I was 68. The bungalow is in a fairly new leafy estate with a couple of shops round the corner, and a bus stop there too. The only downside, looking ahead, is the garden. It’s bigger than we’d have liked, but, due to buying off plan, and not being able to get near it until it was finished, we didn’t know how big it would be. We knew that DH’s mobility would decrease, due to illness, but thought, initially, that we could have a stair lift installed in the old house. I’m glad that we moved to the bungalow, as, in hindsight, I realise that a stairlift wouldn’t have worked once he was reliant on a wheelchair. It would have been a struggle to transfer him from chair to stairlift, then we’d have needed another wheelchair upstairs to transfer him again. Although we had a room downstairs that could have been a bedroom, there was no room for a shower.
The bungalow was definitely a good move.

Downsized in our early sixties- we have regrets in that we didn’t buy detached, more parking and not such a good location. We also miss the extra space we had - on that note we will look to moved next spring.

We moved in 2013, selling a flat, buying a motor boat and realising DH's dream of sailing on rivers and canals of Europe for three years, then we bought a house in the South of Denmark, and area we both like, as living on retirees' pensions in Copenhagen is just not on.

First: I am so glad we did what we did, when we did it, because DH died unexpectedly early at 67 last year.

My only regret (apart from losing my husband!) is that we did not look to ocarefully at what activities there actually are here for people who no longer can or should drive!

There are very few activities withing walking or cycling distance and the bus service to the nearest town does not run after 9 p.m on weekdays! So we could in theory go to a concert or lecture in the evening, but would have to take a taxi home, or rely on a friend or acquaintance giving us a lift!

So look carefully at transport for the day that is after all likely to come when you either should not, or cannot drive.

And look at whether there are activities you would want to partake in within walking distance. I volunteer happily at the local museum, but am not interested in joing the groups at the centre for my age group, as all that seems to happen is coffee, knitting and gossip. I make better coffee cheaper at home, and knitting is not my favourite occupation and gossip most assuredly is not. Bingo would be possible if I paid a friend half the petrol to get here - I would do so happily, but not for Bingo, as it bores me stiff!

So look carefully at what you will fill your lesiure moments with before you leap!

We moved to a two floor flat on a well maintained urban estate, close to family. We have a large balcony overlooking the river, opposite Kew Gardens, but I do miss having a garden to potter around in. We didn’t want to take on the maintenance of a house so that was something we accepted.
We wanted it to be low maintenance and have renovated rather than look for somewhere suitable, which we enjoyed organising and have done in the past. So now we’ve got a new bathroom, extra shower room/utility, new kitchen, larger main bedroom and lots of extra storage. We also changed the existing staircase to make it less steep and put new wooden flooring or tiles everywhere. We have a garage for extra storage and two parking spaces.
We believe that these low maintenance options are the way to go for us, rather than living in a house..
Apart from the flat itself the area is well served by NHS facilities including a nearby hospital, also reasonable public transport, a supermarket (with a Lidl planned) and a friendly established estate community.

We decided to stay because the location of our house is so convenient for all amenities. The bus stop is just around the corner from our house and the bus runs every 1/2 half an hour to the town.

We do have a dining room downstairs that can be used as a bedroom but no downstairs cloakroom although I do have a working outside toilet.

Will need advice from a bathroom specialist to decide the best place to put the downstairs shower room or wetroom.

Like the idea of a hobby room upstairs.

Just a little warning for those saying they will install a stairlift if they become disabled, they are not always suitable. If you have a stroke with a hemiplegia then a stairlift is not suitable at all as you won’t have the balance to use one.

We moved in our late 60’s to a beautiful 2 bed apartment situated one block from the lake and one block from the high street and a lovely balcony. We thought ‘this is it, we’re settled for retirement’. Three years later I got itchy feet….missed my garden so rented an allotment to fill the void! A year after that I really had fallen out of love with apartment living, bringing up groceries in the lift, too many residents on walkers etc. So moved out, bought a 2 bed townhome in a small community of 48 similar homes just a five minute drive away with the main bedroom and ensuite on the main floor, small patio garden, integral garage, loads of storage space and neighbours ‘just like us’. We love it …..and the stairs are a bonus…..if we need to go upstairs …..but we quite happily live on one floor.

We moved here when we retired at 66. It's a seaside town that we fell in love with when we put our touring caravan on a site here. We toured the area most weekends getting to know where we would like to live. When OH retired we put our house on the market and started packing up various boxes which we put in a cheapish storage container near the caravan site. Picked this property as it's a bit larger than what we wanted but has a big kitchen, bathroom with bath and shower, and big sitting room. Also a large front garden for the cars and caravan. 3 small double bedrooms which is great for when DAC and DGC visit. They come frequently as its a seaside resort.
What would I do differently nothing really. Its a bit of a squeeze in my hobby room though when the pull out bed comes out.
Best thing we did was rent storage close by as it enabled us to unpack slowly rather than living in chaos when we first moved.
Have nice neighbours, 10 minute walk to Drs and walk in NHS center, 4 supermarkets a short drive away, a train station and regular bus service. Sadly they closed our local shop but hopefully it will sell and reopen soon.