Your Next Chapter in Idaho: Aging in Place the Smart Way

Love your home and don't want to leave? Learn how thoughtful renovations, ADUs, multi-generational living, and home modifications can help you stay safely and comfortably in the home you love.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to the Idaho Life Show on a Saturday at noon on KIDO. Garrett Thill here with Shelby Matson here at Idaho Life Real Estate. And this segment is for the people in the valley who heard everything we just said about the right sizing and quietly thought to themselves, yeah, that maybe is a really good idea for somebody else. You know, I love my house. I am not moving. I raised my family here. I planted those trees. My husband's workshop is in that garage. You're not gonna get me out of here.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

So many memories, right? Which I totally respect. And I want to be clear right off the top. Staying put is a completely legitimate path. We are not in the business of pushing people out of their homes that they absolutely love. The biggest mistake people make in this conversation is assuming the only path forward is to sell. The second biggest mistake is the opposite. Assuming you can stay in a four-bedroom, two-story home forever without any changes, and discovering at 78 that you actually can't, right? The right answer for staying put usually requires some thoughtful adjustments along the way, and they're a lot less dramatic than people imagine.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Yeah, you're absolutely right. So let's talk about those adjustments, what they actually look like. And the single biggest one, and the one that gives most people the longest runway in their existing home is converting a primary bedroom on the main level. And if you already have a main floor, primary bedroom, and bathroom, you're way ahead of the game. And if your primary bedroom is currently upstairs, you start thinking about whether you can convert it to a main floor room into a primary suite. So sometimes a den or a formal dining room, which you just don't really see people using very much anymore. That's true. That becomes the new bedroom. And a half bath can get expanded into now a full bathroom. Yep. Since the plumbing is already there, it makes it a lot easier. And this can be actually one of the highest value renovations for aging in place. And it can extend the time that you live there for more than a decade or two.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Absolutely. A few other modifications that come up over and over. A walk-in shower with no curb. This is a big deal. Instead of a tub shower combo, right? Grab bars in the bathroom, and they make these to match nice to finishes now.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

They look nice now, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

They actually really do. They don't have to look institutional. A zero-step entry into the home, that means either a no threshold front on your front door or your side doors, or a graceful ramp built into the landscape. Lever style door handles instead of round knobs, which matters more than people think the first time arthritis shows up. Wider doorways, better lighting throughout, and honestly, the difference between aging in place safely and not sometimes comes down to whether you can see clearly at three in the morning when you're getting up for a glass of water.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

That's right. And a topic that's coming up more and more, which we again spoke about this on another segment, is adding on that accessory dwelling unit or the EDU to the property. You that mother-in-law suite, the converted garage, which you spend a lot of time talking about that, that converted garage that has the little kitchenette and the bathroom. Then the Treasure Valley has been gradually loosening up the rules around the EDUs, which is fantastic. They've been doing this for the last few years. And there still are local zoning and permitting considerations that can vary by city, by maybe you know, if you're in the county limits. And so you do need to check whether your specific lot and your neighborhood, you know, with the HOA, CC and Rs, if they if they allow it. But that option definitely exists in a way it did not 10 years ago. So it's worth at least having a conversation to see if it can support it.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

And the use case for the ADU is fascinating. Sometimes it's for an adult child and their family to move move in closer, right? So they can help. Sometimes it's for a long-term caregiver. Sometimes the parents move into the ADU and the adult child's family takes the main house, which is becoming more common as generational, multi-generational living grows. Sometimes it stays as a rental for additional income that helps fund the rest of the retirement. There's a flexibility to having a second unit on the property that gives a family options for a long time, often longer than people expect they first build.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

It's very true. And that ties directly into the broader trend of that multi-generational housing, which is one of the fastest growing categories in American housing right now, which is really fascinating as well. So whether it's parents moving in with an adult kid or adult kids moving in with the parents or three generations under one roof, roughly one in five Americans, get this, one in five Americans now lives in some form of a multi-generational household.

SPEAKER_01 4:52

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

And this number has more than doubled in the last 50 years. And the Treasure Valley is right in line with the national trend. So we have more buyers searching specifically for two primary suite floor plans than we ever did three years ago.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yes. And when this works, it works beautifully. Grandkids growing up around grandparents, that I love that idea. That's fantastic. Shared child care, shared expenses. Help close at hand the moment somebody needs it, right? You're right there and available. When it doesn't work, it usually doesn't work because the housing wasn't right for it. The bedrooms were too close. There was no second living space. The kitchen got cramped. No private outdoor area for anybody. Which is why, if multi-generational living is on the table for your family, you want to be intentional, very intentional about the floor plan and the layout from the very start, not figure it out after the fact.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Don't want to do that. And a piece of the aging in place conversation that doesn't get talked about enough is hiring out the maintenance work that you used to do yourself, right? So a landscape service for the yard, snow removal service for the winter, housekeeper, maybe twice a month, a handyman almost on retainer, if you will, for those little small jobs that constantly come up around the house. And these are not luxuries for a lot of folks staying in a home that's a little bit too big for that stage of life, right? They're the differences between thriving in a home and slowly being worn down by it.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Oh, that's that's a strong statement right there. Yeah. Right. And it can be hard to make that mental shift. A generation that prided itself on doing its own yard work and its own repairs doesn't always reach for the phone easily. But the way I think about it, every hour you don't spend dragging a hose around the yard is an hour you can spend with the grandkids, with your spouse, with a book, a walk along the green belt. That's for sure. That's a trade most people, once they start making it, are very, very glad they did.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Yeah. And a quick note on financing improvements. So for homeowners who have quite a bit of equity and they want to make significant aging in place renovations, like we just spoke about, a home equity line of credit or a HELOC, they're probably one of the most common tools. If you don't have just money laying around, that would be nice if we did. Not everyone's got that. But you're basically borrowing against the equity in the home to pay for those improvements. So a little less stressful in the bank account that way. And then you typically only pay the interest on what you actually drew, right? So we're not financial advisors or lenders, and there are definitely trade-offs to multiple different borrowing strategies. But this is a tool kind of worth knowing about and worth talking through with the lender. If you're staying put, you say, I'm not moving, we're gonna renovate.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Absolutely. And I want to close this segment with the honest trade-off because I don't want anyone hearing only the rosy version.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Give them the hard part, too.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

That's right. Staying in the house you love is a wonderful path when the house is right for the next chapter, or can reasonably be made right with some thoughtful renovations. Staying in the house you love is a much harder path when the house is fundamentally not right. Second story, only bedrooms, narrow doorways, a yard you can't keep up, neighbors that have all moved or passed on, isolation from family, that's all really hard stuff. The honest question to keep asking yourself is, is this house still serving the life I want? Or is that or is the life I want quietly getting smaller to fit in the house?

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Is the life I want quietly getting smaller to fit the house? Interesting. So that is a question worth sitting with. So coming up, we don't want to end here, our final segment of the hour, we're going to walk through the third path on our list, which is moving into a community designed around this stage of life. So we're going to lay out the whole continuum in plain English so that you actually understand what each one is. And we're going to close with what our next chapter family consultation actually looks like here at Idaho Life. Stay with us.