Empty bedrooms, full memories: why NJ homeowners just can’t let go

Thirty-three years.

That is how long my wife Linda and I have been in our home. I know every creak in the floor. I know which drawer sticks in the summer. I know exactly where the sun hits the backyard on a Saturday morning in April and I know what that looks like because I have seen it hundreds of times.

I also know what every room in this house used to sound like.

The rooms remember

There is a room in this house where I wrestled with my kids on the floor when they were little. Just the three of us, rolling around, laughing until somebody got an elbow in the ribs and then laughing some more. There is a room where we had Friday night dance parties -- my kids, barely old enough to know what a dance party was, just following whatever their parents were doing and loving every second of it. You do not forget the sound of little feet on hardwood.

Years later, those same rooms filled up with friends. Different music, better speakers, me behind a makeshift DJ setup with a room full of people who meant everything to us. The food. The noise. The kind of night that ends too late and leaves you smiling for days.

I will not remember every one of those moments specifically. The details blur with time. But the feeling they left behind does not blur at all. I can walk into a room right now and feel it -- not see it, feel it -- like the walls absorbed something they are not ready to give back.

The house you built

We did not just live here. We invested in this place the way you invest in something you plan to keep.

We made the payments the hard way -- working, saving, doing without things we wanted so we could have the thing we needed. We maintained the yard ourselves. We put in small plants that are now 15-foot trees. We updated the kitchen, added on, built the deck, laid the patio. Every project was a decision and an investment and a weekend and a memory of its own.

When you build something with your own creativity, hard work and your own money and your own time over three decades, it stops being a house in any transactional sense. It becomes something else. It becomes the place where your life happened.

SEE ALSO: Staying in NJ is starting to feel like a bad relationship 

The empty rooms

Here is the part nobody talks about enough. The kids are gone. The bedrooms are quiet. There are two or three rooms in this house that serve no practical purpose anymore except to hold the memory of the people who used to fill them.

And every winter, the photos start showing up. Friends in Florida. Neighbors on a beach somewhere warm. Patios with no snow on them. No property tax bill visible in the frame but you know it is lower.

The math is not complicated. You are heating and cooling and maintaining and taxing a house that is larger than you currently need, in a state that charges you more for the privilege than anywhere else in America. The practical case for downsizing practically makes itself.

And yet.

Aging in place -- and being okay with it

There is a term for what a lot of us are doing. They call it aging in place. Staying in the home you built your life in rather than moving to something smaller, something newer, something with shared walls and a homeowners association and a mailbox that looks like everyone else's mailbox.

I got away from shared walls when we bought this house. I am not sure I am ready to go back.

Maybe it is the work we put in. Maybe it is the family we raised here. Maybe it is the memories -- the ones I can still picture clearly and the ones that have softened into feelings I cannot quite name but can absolutely still feel. Maybe, if I am being completely honest, it is also a little bit of laziness. Moving is a lot. Letting go is harder.

Probably it is all of those things at once.

New adventures are out there. New memories are waiting to be made. New friends exist somewhere that is not here. I know all of that is true and I believe it.

I am still not moving

They call it aging in place. I call it home. And I am perfectly okay with it.

Well -- until the taxes go up again.