I am a house nerd. I am interested in architecture, building design, and building technology. I am interested in simple living, self-sufficiency, and space management. I have done to-scale drawings of house plans for nearly thirty years, ranging from very ornate and/or avant-garde to extremely simple and minimalist. In the past few years, I've been actively educating myself about what kind of house I want to live in, in my later years.
Obviously I am hoping that I won't be living there alone. But one thing ten years of marriage has taught me is that I have a deeper interest in the details of this future home selection than Mr. P does.
It's not that he's not interested in design: he definitely is. He's got spatial-relations skills for days, he's a great lighting designer, and he has strong opinions about what looks good and what works. More, this is a case of me learning about stuff and then talking it through with him. I'm the researcher.
We watch "Holmes Inspection" together and we have mutually decided that one thing we DON'T want is a fully-renovated older house. We just have no faith that the renovation will have been correctly done, or that the original structure will be sound. So the retirement properties we'll be looking at in a few years will ideally be unrenovated. Because we're just going to take all the interior non-load-bearing walls down anyway, and probably the interior sheathing of the exterior walls as well.
We want to retire in a house that is inexpensive to operate, which means it needs to be well-insulated, with low-maintenance exterior surfaces, high-efficiency water use, and minimal HVAC requirements. Obviously, the location we choose will be an essential part of this equation. We're going to be looking on California's central coast, but inland - where temperature ranges are, well, temperate; and "weather" is not really a consideration.
One thing I feel pretty strongly about is not buying too much house. This is about retirement. I want to have time to have a garden, time to work on crafts, time to teach a little if I want or need to. So if it would take more than thirty minutes a day to keep the house tidy and clean, the house is too big. In effect, this means I want no more than 1200 square feet of inside space - and if I can design the layout myself, we could be quite comfortable in quite a bit less.
Far more important to me than the size of the house is the size of the lot, and freedom to make use of it as we please. So we won't even look in any 'association' areas. We'll almost certainly be looking outside city limits.
But at the same time, we need to be close enough to amenities that cabin fever isn't a risk, and close enough to emergency services that a gardening accident doesn't mean dying alone in a ditch. So we're not going to be looking in remote or difficult-to-access areas, like somewhere on a twisty road in the Coast Range. We're going to be in one of the valleys, near a good-sized town.
I want to be able to install photovoltaics, a greywater irrigation system, a composting toilet, and a rain garden. I want to be able to hang a clothesline and put the vegetable garden in the front yard if the site works best that way. There will be no grass lawn, no lawnmower, no leaf blower; there will be fruit trees, and I definitely want some chickens, or ducks, or both. So my yard is going to be messy. I don't want neighbors so close that they are going to bitch about my meadow or my bees.
We are still five or more years off serious house-hunting time. By the time we're ready, we're going to have a very precise set of requirements to set before a local agent. Having never worked with an agent before, I can only guess how they will react to having a set of requirements that treats common considerations as unimportant!
But really: we don't care about the school district. We don't care if the property has the potential to appreciate in value. We're hoping to die there, and our heirs are likely to be the Nature Conservancy and a nephew we barely know. This is about what we want. It's about how we want to live as our lives wind down.
It may be weird to think so closely about all this at midlife. We may not be moving into this dream property for twenty years. But this is a decision that, if made incautiously, could be very difficult to reverse or correct. We want to get it right the first time.