Making a Senior Apartment Home

While making the move from a long-time home to a senior apartment home is no small feat, it can also be a good experience for the whole family. Here are some quick tips for senior apartment living from downsizing experts to make it easier.

Prepare to move.

Considering each item in the current home and deciding which to take to the new apartment home can feel daunting. Take one room at a time. Japanese organizing consultant Marie Kondo suggests, “The key is to pick up each object one at a time, and ask yourself quietly, ‘Does this spark joy?’” Then put each object in one of six piles:

1. These are the items you simply cannot live without, the ones that are irreplaceable, the things that spark the most joy for you.
2. These are the practical things that make life easier. Be judicious, keeping only the items that you truly must use on a regular basis.
3. Pass along to friends or family. These are heirlooms, stored items that belong to adult children, things that you aren’t using anymore but may have sentimental value to friends or family.
4. These are things that you, your friends or your family would rarely use but can be put to good use by people who need them more than you.
5. These are items that truly need to be stored for later, like things you are keeping for a relative that is overseas but returning in a few months. Be careful here. It can be easy to overfill the “store” bucket, which would really just be putting off the hard work of deciding on items’ eventual place.
6. Throw away anything that no longer has use to you, your friends, your family or other people.

Hire help.

A great professional organizer is a nice-to-have. Ideally, in the weeks prior to moving, your professional organizer helps you sort room by room, item by item as detailed above then packs up precious and keep items to move with you, delivers or ships items to be passed along to family, makes donations, delivers stored items to your storage unit and tosses the rest. Yes, you can actually pay someone to do all of that.

A terrific moving company is a need-to-have. Particularly if you don’t have resources to hire a professional organizer, seek out a moving company that will take care of all the packing and unpacking, moving and delivery of items to a storage unit.

Make the most of small space.

In an article titled 8 Tips for Decorating Any Apartment, MasterClass offers these tips on making small spaces feel larger:

• “Consider designing with furniture pieces that have decorative, substantial, or eye-catching legs. Legs allow the eye to continue beyond the furniture’s body instead of coming to a halt at its base, which tends to happen with low-to-the ground pieces.
• “Glass or mirrored tables can keep furniture from feeling too heavy in smaller spaces.
• “When choosing a bed, go for one that has shorter legs or even sits on the ground to make the ceiling feel higher. Beds that are propped up on high legs can cut the room in half.
• “While painting white walls or using other light colors can also help make a room feel larger, painting a dark color on one accent wall can have a receding effect, which can give the appearance of more depth, and in turn, make something like a small studio apartment feel bigger.”

Additional senior apartment living tips for making the most of small spaces are:

• Place a mirror on the wall directly across from the window.
• Add accent lighting like a lamp on a bedstand, wall sconces or undercabinet lighting.
• Use a loveseat in lieu of a couch.
• Add accent furniture that doubles as storage space, such as a coffee table with a hidden compartment or storage
• Upgrade to a small flat-screen TV and let go of the bulky old one.
• Make the most of the room height with long panel-style curtains hung a few inches above the window and flowing to the floor.

Create a family wall.

Frame on one wall a collage of favorite family photos across multiple generations. Post a visible rotating schedule of visiting friends and family on the same wall. Both are great reminders that company is not far, and also serve as terrific conversation pieces for visitors.

If you would like to learn more about an Ontario Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) offering a full continuum of care including assisted living, independent living, memory care and more, contact Inland Christian Home. Call us today at (909) 983-0084 or reach us online.