Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom. Snowdrops arrive in Massachusetts. I haven’t posted photos for a while, and now I’m realizing that today’s selection goes way back to early January, when Erik’s mother was still visiting from Sweden. She showed me a garden-like cemetery in Providence where she loves to run — and where we were […]
Photos from Winter
Every time I walk into a redesigned home I notice one thing in common: sanitized perfection. The low, uncomfortable couches with the clean lines, the teak furniture, and the endless wood. For a long time I just considered this the “mod” look, but rich people have a different name for it. Mid-cench. What Is Mid-Cench? […]
Gender + Money = Interior Design
Source: https://angelaggentile.com/2021/06/15/aginginplaceispreferred/
The growing interest in home sharing, especially for those boomers who are house-rich and cash-poor in expensive housing markets, is being cultivated by nonprofit and commercial programs as well as municipalities. Since 2015, New York, Seattle, Denver, Tucson, Northern California and the metro Washington area all have established or are launching programs.
By Soo Youn, The Washington Post, February 25, 2022
Jodi Raffa has been searching for a roommate for over a year. Her husband passed away five years ago, and compounding her loss was a 75 percent reduction in her household income.
The 76-year-old lives in a sunny three-bedroom, two-bathroom home overlooking a lake in a 55-and-over community in Groveland, Fla. The sunsets from her back porch are “stunning.” However, the homeowners association fees just went up again and inflation has left her “flabbergasted.”
“I live on a very strict budget and…
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Once you’ve thanked and said goodbye to the items that do not spark joy, what can you do with them? Patricia Marx, The New Yorker, February 21, 2022 online Kids have no interest in the loot amassed by their materialistic boomer parents. Illustration by Anna Haifisch Lately, I, a maximalist, have been yearning to be […]
A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything
“This allows us the illusion of being minimalist. We’ve substituted spiritual clutter for stacks of paper.”
Fear of technology in the home should not paralyse us, much less leave us behind. We must be well aware of its advantages and disadvantages in order to use it correctly and get the best out of it. Experts say that good training and joint use by all members of the family help as everyone learns at the same time and the technology becomes a more natural part of the home.
Fear of technology in the home should not paralyse us, much less leave us behind. We must be well aware of its advantages and disadvantages in order to use it correctly and get the best out of it. Experts say that good training and joint use by all members of the family help as everyone learns at the same time and the technology becomes a more natural part of the home.
Again the word training. Once again, we insist that if planning is necessary to manage the home, a digital strategy is needed to incorporate technologies into the home and has to be an important part of that plan. What company in today’s world that wishes to progress has not already thought about its digital strategy? Well, the home is no exception.
We could think that this is a fad and stay on the sidelines, but the truth is…
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“… advice for setting up a safe living situation in your twilight years.”
By Estelle Erasmus, Washington Post, January 25, 2022
My parents lived together their whole lives, first in their suburban home, later in an apartment and even later in an independent-living apartment in a senior community. But last year, when my dad, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, had to be placed in memory care, my octogenarian mom had to live by herself for the first time in her life. She is not alone in facing a change in living situation in her older years.
For the millions of seniors in the United States (predicted to grow from around 58 million to around 88 million by 2050), life transitions such as experiencing widowhood, having a partner with dementia or downsizing after decades in the same home can be a huge challenge. One way to ease the adjustment is to ensure that any new home is comfortable, safe and adaptable to physical limitations.
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“I got into this many years ago because I saw the elderly being taken advantage of, especially those with dementia,” Julie Hall, the director of the American Society of Estate Liquidators and a thirty-year veteran of the estate-sale business, told me. In one of her numerous books, which include “Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind” and “What Am I Going to Do with All My STUFF?,” she describes a woman with Alzheimer’s whose friends and neighbors, hearing that she was going to be institutionalized, showed up at her house and began looting the place. “What I witnessed,” Hall wrote, “was like watching a vulture strip a bone.”
The estate-sale industry is fragile and persistent in a way that doesn’t square with the story of the world as we have come to expect it.
By Lizzie Feidelson, January 7, 2022, The New Yorker
An estate sale is only a true estate sale if the homeowner is dead. If the owner is living, then it’s a tag sale, though many people use the terms interchangeably. When I went to one of my first “estate sales,” in Hewlett Harbor, Long Island, roughly two years ago, just before the pandemic temporarily forced much of the industry online, I was surprised to discover that the owner was not only alive but there, in her soon-to-be-former house. A recent widow, she wandered through the rooms, dazed, dressed in a fringed denim vest.
The house was a beige Colonial-style four-bedroom with prim hedges and a small, sloping lawn. I arrived thirty minutes early, but a…
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“…many of us have a view of social care as representing loss rather than gain, as something to be avoided, not something that could help us to maintain our wellbeing and life goals, these messages are just feeding the beast. They reinforce an association between social care and death – the ultimate fatalistic thought. And in the face of death we turn away for as long as we are able to.”
Cpeanose 