Then again, I’m only at 1600 square feet with the wife, 2 kids, dog, cat and rabbit. I forgot you had started at 2700, but it still has to be quite a jump for you down to 1200.
Basement would be sooo nice. In this part of Texas, basements are non-existant, and attics get too hot to store anything you care about.
We don’t have basements in California because earthquakes.
That sounds more like an upsize to me - 1200 + 1000 + 800 = 3000.
A good sorting / shelving / stacking regime should see you clear, and not much need to throw stuff away.
Do I win anything for my downsizing?
4-bedroom house (more than 2700 square feet + oversized double garage + workshop) to a 200 square foot studio apartment.
It was a very… interesting… experience. 
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Well, a year ago, I went from living in my full-size van (most of which was used for storage) to living out of my backpack.
So if you get a prize, I better get three.
You “win” there.
It must have really sucked to go through that.
Yeah, it did. But things eventually got better.
Did you get a bigger backpack?
I can’t put myself in those shoes, I’ve always had a place to go, and even when I was short on cash Indy is a pretty cheap place to live so I had a home even without leaning on friends and family. I’m sure it’s much suckage, but I couldn’t let that one by without making a joke.
Ni, I managed to get into a subsidized housing program. It’s only a room, with shared bathrooms and kitchen, but better than living in my van (mostly) and definitely better than living on the street.
Inspection on Wednesday. Get to find out how good of an electrician the current owner is.
And hopefully find out if the attic will handle a renovation. Could be signing a purchase agreement Friday.
Inspection yesterday. Needs new roof within five years, or maybe tomorrow. Chimney needs flashing now, gas line needs redone now, electrical box needs inspection by electrician now. Furnace is from 1925, which we knew, and it puts out a ton of heat, pilot light I think uses as much gas as our current furnace does when it’s running. Lots of piddly small things, caulk everywhere, basement sealed, a lot of DIY crap. Shower is St. Bernard drool pressure. Asbestos tape on heating ducts, fine as long as it’s not disturbed…
Good things, not only can the attic handle the renovation, our inspector bought and flipped a house just like ours and did the attic, and he’ll take us over there to check it out. Solid house, good bones, great neighborhood, solid outbuildings. Shower has new lines leading to it, house pressure is good, probably bad fixture.
It’s doable. And we’re saving enough on the mortgage to get the roof done next year, or the furnace, whichever is a bigger deal at the time. We’ll have to sink 15k or so in the next 5 years. But the attic renovation will be 10k less than we had thought since most of it I’ll be able to do.
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Monitor cleanup on aisle 1!
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Built back when heat output was more important than running cost, right?
As an aside - what about insulation in the walls / roof? Double-glazing on the windows?
Walls are good from what we can tell. Attic is going to be redone, so while I’m doing that I’ll redo it with the pink stuff. Windows have nice new storms on them, and then the original glass windows. Doors need adjusted and weatherproofed. On a hot day it was nice and cool in there with no air on. The storms need caulked though. I’ll be getting my caulk in everything there. Which sounds a lot funnier when you say it out loud.
The deal with the furnace is that it was originally a coal unit and was converted maybe after WWII? Dunno. It’s the oldest one our inspector had seen running in 20 years of work. We’re going to pull the gas bill, and if worst comes to worst, we’ll keep it low and use space heaters this year.
My HVAC is on its last legs, probably installed in the early 90s. (House was built around 1981.)
I picked up one of these a couple years ago (photo is distorted, it’s tall not deep)
It worked great! Supposed to be more efficient than the ceramic or exposed element ones.
Then in the spring, I picked up one of these on clearance for under $40
Pretty much the same workings, but with electronic controls.
I used them on opposite ends of the house this past winter and my furnace hardly ran at all. My electric bill was lower than the previous couple years, so I guess the efficiency claims are true. (My neighborhood is all electric.)
I used to have one like that but gave it away, it worked really nicely. That’s pretty much what I was thinking of using. The sealed oil ones are awesome. I used it in my garage for a bit, and while it wouldn’t really warm me up to toasty if I’d been outside, it kept the garage bearable if I was working on something.
I do feel for you, Woodman. We’ve moved so many times in the last 14 years that we’ve accumulated so much unrelated stuff. The house we’re living in is big enough to store most of it, but we don’t NEED to. Downsizing is hard. 
But good luck to you, because it will be SO much better when you’re done!
Heaters are an interesting issue. We’ve had a lot of problems with them over the years.
We have an old column heater that is still going after 25 or so years, but we’ve had heaps of problems with ones that have electronic controls - and it’s always the electronic controls that break.
What we’ve worked out is to buy basic heaters with just on/off switches and use a separate electronic timer to control it. The separate timers still have the same issues with breaking down every couple of years, but they are a lot cheaper to replace than the full heater.
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Verbal agreement on the purchase agreement. Rewriting today for signature.