Reston Real Estate: Road to Less

This is a sponsored post from Eve Thompson of Reston Real Estate. For a more complete picture of home sales in your neighborhood, contact her on Reston Real Estate.

Last week I wrote about what drives a move. It’s rarely as simple as “I want a different house” and almost always “I want or am being driven into a different life.”

I think that one of my strengths as an agent has been to listen carefully for the driving cause of a home move and to be sensitive to the other issues associated with that cause. One of my favorite kinds of clients are the downsizers, or empty nesters. It can be such a great time of life — but one that can be fraught with a potent mix of excitement and nostalgia.

I remember the day my husband Rick and I knew it was time to give up our single family home on Buttermilk Lane. It was the fall; we were bagging up our 100th plus bag of leaves on a cold blustery November day and I thought, “Wow, I am so over this.”

Our youngest daughter had left that August for Georgia Tech so we were rattling around in our house, forever shouting to one another from the upstairs to the downstairs. It wasn’t a huge house but it was so much more than we needed and more importantly so much more than we wanted to maintain.

It seemed every weekend was dedicated to house maintenance or other related management. We were both seriously over it!

Our downsizing journey started on that cold afternoon in November. We made a side stop in a lovely townhouse overlooking the Van Gogh Bridge and ultimately landed in our perfectly sized Lake Anne condo. The townhouse was ultimately still too large and too vertical but was probably a necessary step for us in the transition process.

At the time that we decided to sell our Buttermilk Lane house I was not a real estate agent so we engaged an agent with good understanding of the Reston market and scheduled a walk-through of our home to discuss what needed to be done to get it ready to sell.

Our place was in pretty good shape — we had a few things to do but the vast majority of our effort was in purging the house of the accumulation of 15+ years’ worth of junk.

I was shocked at how long this step took. We started in November and were listed about 12 weeks later and it took every bit of those 12 weeks to get it ready.

In the end we had less junk, less to take care, less to worry about and lots more time. We also moved into a great community where a snowy day becomes a reason to host a casual pot-luck. Not a bad exchange.

Here are a few great downsizing options.

Open to different kinds of houses but want a great walkable community? Check out these great options.

Want a more urban experience with tons of dining options? Check out these Town Center options.