That awkward age

The stages of life have brought us to yet another awkward moment. Energy, muscle, drive and general activity are in short supply, and most of those reasons seem to enter into potential changes in our standard of living. We are tasked with making some lifestyle changes mainly because the steps leading from our general living space to our secondary living space seem to be a potential death trap. One misstep and we’re in a nursing home – or worse.

The “kids” want us to quit using the steps that lead to our lower-level family room, laundry, workout room and office. They’re worried about us taking that one lifestyle-changing tumble. I get it. I do. But …

They say they want us to be able to stay in the home we built 52 years ago. No question there – we want to stay here as well. That is why we have agreed to relocate all of the above amenities to the upper, main level of the house.

Oddly enough, when we built, we allowed for the possibility of taking in an elderly parent or two one day. We have ground-level access. The room that houses my office and treadmill could have been a bedroom. There is a full bathroom. The laundry room could have been a kitchen. As it turned out, we never needed to make use of the area that way. But here we are, the elderly couple. Who’da thunk it?

So, with our son-in-law, Pat-Can-Do, and input from our daughter, a designer, we are in the process of deciding just which of our three bedrooms will become our laundry/office. The first order of business was to empty a closet in preparation for a potential washer and dryer.

Of course that led to second thoughts on just which bedroom would actually be easier to convert as we considered running water and gas lines and trying to be efficient. So we cleaned out another closet in another room, thinking that might work better. If nothing else, we are doing a lot of purging and making trips to charities and the recycling plant. No matter how we look at it, change is in the wind.

The current laundry room was home to uncounted numbers of partially filled paint cans – the ones you think you just might need but never do. Knowing us, if a wall needed touching up, we’d more likely repaint the entire room, thus providing us with yet another paint can with a dab of paint left in it.

The bedroom we are likely to use has already had a dresser and nightstand removed. We’re still looking for a home for a sweet single bed – hint, hint. We’ll keep the TV in the lower-level family room, just in case. You never know. We might have a house full of people who want to watch a football game or just need to get away from the madding crowd upstairs. Those occurrences happen, at most, maybe once a year.

To that end, we will have to, after all these years, have a TV in the living room. Wall space is at a premium there, so we are looking at options for an unobtrusive screen that doesn’t dominate the room. I might have found a solution in a flat screen that can be programmed to display a “painting” when the TV is not in use.

I will insist on having a TV to call my own in my newly created laundry/office. I know right now I will need my own space. I can only take so much "Wagon Train" and "Gunsmoke."

It’s not like the downstairs is going to be closed. There is no door. This is still our house – it’s just we won’t be up and down the stairs worrying the kids to death.

Getting old is a pain.