Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal

Jan. 22, 2020 10:00 am ET

Firms and services that specialize in downsizing can help you let go of your stuff—and the emotions attached to it—before the big move

As a top Hollywood talent agent for over 40 years, Deborah Miller Lakoff represented big names like William Devane, Ned Beatty, Bob Uecker and Julio Iglesias. For proof, one could just look in her garage.

“There was a massive collection of stuff” stored there, says Fred Meyer, who is Ms. Miller Lakoff’s nephew. In addition to autographed memorabilia and keepsakes, there was furniture, books, records, clothes, family heirlooms, photos and formal dinnerware.

The second—and bigger—challenge was deciding what to do with everything else. For this, she called in reinforcements, hiring Greg Gunderson, president and owner of Gentle Transitions, a Manhattan Beach, Calif., company that specializes in helping people downsize and move.

Mr. Gunderson called in a number of dealers and collectors who purchased some of the high-value items, with all of the proceeds going to Ms. Miller Lakoff. Finally, Mr. Gunderson’s team also packed up everything and did a final “clean out” of the house so it would be ready for the next owner. The whole process took between 2½ and 3 months and cost $2,300, says Mr. Gunderson. He charges $75 an hour, adding that a typical move to a one- or two-bedroom apartment in a retirement community ranges from $3,000 to $6,000.

The daunting task of downsizing has led to an array of companies and services that promise to make the process easier. Much of the focus is on getting rid of things and coordinating the move. But the real service is persuading people to “let go” of items they’ve held on to for decades.

“There are ways to honor the memory of something without having the physical piece in front of you,” says Mary Kay Buysse, executive director of the National Association of Senior Move Managers, a trade organization with about 1,000 member companies.

When helping their 89-year-old mother downsize in Greenwich, Conn., David Borie and his sister, Mary Zara, turned to a Darien company called The Settler. Their mother, a retired artist and interior designer, had chosen the move-management company to help her deal with the contents of her 6,000-square-foot house and coordinate her relocation into a 2,000-square-foot apartment in a Stamford, Conn., retirement community. The company put color-coded stickers on items to designate their status—if they were going to be moved to the new apartment, given to a family member, sold, donated or thrown away.

Before any artwork was removed, Mr. Borie made giclée reproductions (high-quality prints made with an ink jet printer) of some of the pieces their mother had painted, along with a lesser-known portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. (Washington is a Borie family ancestor, a seventh-great-uncle.) He and his other three siblings each received the reproductions and also had the option to get a giclée print of a painting by another ancestor, Adolphe Borie.

The four siblings supported The Settler’s objectives, but to minimize any quibbles, the company listed all of their mother’s possessions on a spreadsheet and let the children rank them from 1 to 75. The Settler’s staffers used a draft system to ensure that items were distributed fairly.

“Nobody got everything they wanted, but we each got some things. And nobody felt someone else got the advantage,” Mr. Borie says. He declined to divulge what The Settler was paid, but owner Pinny Randall says her company’s services typically range from $10,000 to $15,000.

There were some emotional moments throughout the process. Mr. Borie and his sister worked hard to ensure that their mother was comfortable with downsizing.

His recommendation: Start the process early, when things are less likely to get muddled. And children should be sensitive to psychological struggles when a parent is asked to let go of a lifetime of memories and leave a home they might have occupied for up to 50 years.

Still, once the job is done, many downsizers say they feel a sense of liberation and relief. “Cleaning your shelves and getting rid of things is just a wonderful thing to do,” says Sheri Koones, author of the recently published “Downsize: Living Large in a Small House.” Three years ago, Ms. Koones downsized from a 6,800-square-foot home in Greenwich, Conn., to a 1,700-square-foot home there and got rid of 90% of what she owned.

She says her smaller house is “more cozy” and involves less responsibility.

If you Worked Remotely this Year – Make Sure You Are Covered Tax-Wise

Dec. 4, 2020 5:30 am ET

View original article here:

If you’ve worked from home this year, and that home is in a different state from your office, think about your taxes immediately. Acting now could help avoid surprise bills, interest and penalties when filing state taxes next year.

This year the coronavirus pandemic turned millions of workers into telecommuters, and many haven’t yet returned to the office. People who have worked from a state that isn’t their usual one may need to file returns and pay taxes to more than one state for 2020.

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal

Oct. 16, 2020 3:23 pm ET

As we settle into working and learning from home, repurposed backyard garden sheds and prefab outbuildings offer a pleasant soft divide between family and work life

WORKING FROM HOME wasn’t working for Max Sinsteden, director of design firm Olasky & Sinsteden. His tech-industry husband required only a laptop and pad of paper to get his job done. “I as a decorator, on the other hand, have 400 tote bags and eight huge Tupperware boxes of samples,” he said. When the couple reclaimed for serving meals the beleaguered dining room table that had functioned as his workspace, Mr. Sinsteden thought outside the box, decamping to a new octagonal, bell-roofed outbuilding 20 yards from their 1921 beach cottage in Westerly, R.I. The structure was made in Lancaster, Pa., by Hillbrook Collections and in May muled into place on a flatbed. “They arrive done…literally there’s a cord coming out the back,” said Mr. Sinsteden of such to-the-rescue buildings. “Our contractor dug a trench with conduit to bring power out there, and you connect it up.”

Mr. Sinsteden had his spanking new digs made to order, but even humble lawn-mower huts are becoming remote offices in the pandemic. Call them Sanity Sheds: reprieves just beyond the walls of home.

Between June and Sept. 1, searches for sheds doubled on Wayfair.com compared with the same period in 2019. Custom garden-house builder Hillbrook Collections reports orders up 60% year-to-date, compared with 2019. And in the last six months, NEO Builders in Los Angeles saw 250% more interest in their “accessory dwelling units,” or ADUs, habitable backyard buildings. (California loosened zoning restrictions on such structures Jan. 1, perhaps precipitating the surge).

Transitioning to WFH has been harsh for many, but humans have toiled at home for centuries. “For a long time, we worked where we lived. I’m talking about agrarian [ways] and people who lived above the shop,” said Daniel H. Pink, who studies human behavior in business and wrote “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing” (Riverhead Books). In the U.S. after WWII, he said, work and family became distinctly different domains. Now tech and, in part, Covid are remerging those worlds. “But I think people don’t want them together 24 hours a day,” Mr. Pink added. “So they’re looking for a soft separation between their work life and family life.” An unconnected space helps ensure quiet and tucks away the nagging ephemera of office life—to-do lists, computers, cords—when you’re off the clock.

Syncing your new outbuilding’s style to your home’s exterior look is wise and may entice buyers when you go to sell the place. For what he calls his dollhouse, built in May in St. Petersburg, Fla., designer and home economics expert Joseph Marini opted for hipped roofs to match his brick Georgian-style main house. On the inside, however, he indulged his décor fantasies with decoratively roped millwork and limewashed built-in desks. “I really love Swedish furniture and anything Gustavian, so I tried to mimic that here in a small space I could keep cohesive.”

Even humble lawn-mower huts are becoming remote offices in the pandemic.

Jill Vukelja retrofitted a heated Victorian-inspired greenhouse near her Georgian-style Greenwich, Conn., house. With three daughters learning remotely, the stay-at-home mom finds refuge there for her quarantine hobby: watercolor painting. “It’s a mini-escape…even when it rains it’s nice to just sit there and hear the rain banging on the glass.”

In revamping the space, her designer, Marcia Tucker, proposed simple, easy-to-source additions: a hunter green IKEA desk on birch trestle legs, a gray synthetic wicker chair. Ms. Vukelja swapped out leafy greenery for succulents and cactuses that won’t wither, die and cause her additional stress.

Upcycling your own otherwise-unused possessions works as well, said Charleston designer J.P. Horton, who just recast an ADU on his mother’s property in Charlottesville, Va., into a pottery studio for her. “We repurposed a garage-sale rug and antique chairs that were my grandparents’ and didn’t fit in the [main] house,” he said.

Perhaps to erase the dingy pasts of existing garden sheds, many designers paint their interiors white. On walls and between the chestnut ceiling beams of her little saltbox outbuilding, a late-1700s structure about 300 feet from her home in Weston, Conn., interior designer Chris Roughan turned to Benjamin Moore’s Super White. In her new home office, a respite from the chaos of 10-year-old twins and a husband working remotely, she drafted both table and task lamps. The white walls help bounce the light the lamps cast and brighten the space. “That’s really important because there’s not a lot of downlighting,” she said.

While Mr. Marini painted his vaulted ceiling black so it recedes and makes the 10-feet-by-12-feet space feel larger, his interior walls sport a creamy off-white. “I really prefer darker, moody rooms,” he said. But for a workplace, “that starkness keeps you alert and vibrant and bright and aware.” After his 74-year-old mother moved into a first-floor bedroom as Covid-19 descended, he also began using the place as a hideout from his now-full house. Under the firelight of a rust-finished candelabra that had no place in the main dwelling, “my husband and I sit and have a cocktail around five o’clock and talk about the day. It makes a nice separation, almost like going out to a bar.”

Mr. Marini hired an architect to draw a rendering of his outbuilding, then had a seasoned shed builder construct it (total cost: $7,200). But ready-made options are proliferating. Starting at $500 a month, you can lease a glass-walled 8-feet-by-10-feet pod from ootBox, in Columbus, Ohio. A modern Mono Mini cabin from Alberta-based DROP Structures arrives with a sturdy standing-seam exterior and extremely hygge Baltic- birch interior (from $18,900).

To ensure Wi-Fi access, you may need to amplify your home’s router with a booster or extender. Other logistical considerations include permits, specific to local jurisdictions. The hoops you’ll need to vault through will likely increase with every nicety you want to add, from electrical wiring to a plumbed bathroom. Said David Latimer, CEO of Nashville’s New Frontier Design, whose business has jumped 300%-400% year over year, “It’s the same process for a 5,000-square-foot-house as a 450-square-foot one.”

Another virtue of working from a Sanity Shed: The reintroduction of a (beautifully brief) commute. Even a quick stroll through dewy grass offers an energy reset, injecting fresh air in a workday with every coffee refill or bathroom run. “Human beings need transitions,” said Mr. Pink, who works in a revamped garage a 22-step shuffle from his door. “Human attention is precious, and it’s not infinite. It needs punctuation marks,” he said. Without them, “our attention becomes an incoherent run-on sentence.”

EVERYONE from Mark Twain to Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters worked in their garden sheds. To ready your own Sanity Shed for maximum output and minimum headaches, try this design advice from the pros.

Look down. Install a hard-wearing option underfoot. Max Sinsteden selected stained fir for his Westerly, R.I., retreat because he knew his feet “would be a little dirtier out there.” In St. Petersburg, Fla., designer Joseph Marini chose engineered hardwood that “can stand up to being muddy and wet but has a great stained-gray look to it.” If you’re carpeting, choose durable material like sisal and wool, said interior designer Chris Roughan, in Weston, Conn.

Conscript salvage. To get ample light into his workspace, Mr. Marini reused 1950s French doors from a house he’d recently flipped. “I thought, ‘What a perfect way to do floor to ceiling windows in here!’” Charleston designer J.P. Horton, too, argues for employing castoffs. “I don’t want it to be a catchall for garage-sale stuff, but it’s a good place to be creative.”

Get green. “The number one thing you can do [to improve an outbuilding] that’s inexpensive is add plants, which seems trivial, but living things help a lot,” said Mr. Horton.

Mind your purpose. Mr. Marini displays his collected horde of antique iron urns and footed vases on his shed’s built-in shelving, but he left one wall entirely blank as a “giant work board” for organizing notes on projects—adhered with cobalt painter’s tape—to keep him on task, and it works. “I’ve really been out here every day.”

PRE-FAB PODS

You can hire an architect and builder, or you can nab one of these made-to-order numbers

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Featured Holiday Volunteer opportunities with COVID-19 Updates

Volunteer Opportunities North Shore

Feed My Starving Children

*Feed my starving Children is still accepting volunteers but have strict COVID guidelines for individuals and groups. See website www.fmsc.org

847-984-3486

Pack and fund lifesaving meals this holiday

Fill A Heart for Kids

*There are still opportunities to donate and do projects at home. See website for safe ideas www.fillaheart4kids.org

Help local homeless kids during the holidays

Night Ministry

*Some opportunities have changed due to COVID but Night Ministry still needs help. See website for updates www.thenightministry.org

773-784-9000

A Chicago based organization that works to provide housing, health care, and human connections to members of our community struggling with poverty or homelessness

New Trier Township Food Pantry

*New Trier Food Pantry is closed to public due to COVID1-19 restrictions but any resident in need can pick up food with advance notice. In addition, donations are welcome and can be dropped off between 10-2 www.newtriertownship.com/156/food-pantry

Food donations can be dropped off at New Trier Township office at 739 Elm Street

Pantry helps neighbors make ends meet

Bottom Line

*Possible volunteer opportunities to do from home. See website and call for details www.bottomline.org

Bottom Line helps low-income and first-generation-to-college students get to and through college. They are committed to building strong connections with students, providing them with individual support, and ensuring they have the guidance they need to persist and earn a college degree.

Hillside Food Pantry

*Still need for food donations. No drop in volunteers. www.hillsidepantry.org

During the week Pantry recieves food from donor stores and from the Greater Chicago Food Depository. The volunteers unload the boxes or pallets of food, sort through the various items received and stock the shelves, refrigerators and freezer

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal

Oct. 23, 2020 11:42 am ET

Some houses have skeletons in their closets. For Jessica Mack, the skeleton was hanging by the front door.

A first-time buyer in the Philadelphia area, Ms. Mack, 26 years old, had been browsing property listings for months before finding one in September that looked just right: a cozy Cape Cod, with a nice lawn.

And yet for years, the house’s owner had hung a fake skeleton outside her front door in all seasons, regularly swapping out its attire. Some days it wore a white blouse, on others, a green bodysuit. The owner said she would accept Ms. Mack’s offer if she would maintain the tradition, 365 days of the year.

It was the third house Ms. Mack, a local utilities worker, had bid on. She said yes.

A typical sales contract comes with various contingencies, such as ones that allow buyers to back out if they can’t obtain financing or if issues come up during a home inspection. Now, amid a historic housing shortage that gives sellers the upper hand, some buyers are finding themselves confronted with the oddest requests.

“I’m selling a house right now that is being sold with the cat,” says Eli Karon, a real-estate agent with Karon Properties in Santa Cruz, Calif. The orange tabby has lived there for years, he says, and its owners don’t want to move him.

The house has attracted six offers and is currently under contract. “It’s definitely a seller’s market,” says Mr. Karon. (He says the cat is friendly and up-to-date on shots.)

In Chicago, Ill., real-estate agent Jamie Lemmons once sold a home in which the owners, a pair of retirees, asked for the right to continue visiting the backyard grave of their beloved golden retriever, Buffy. The buyers agreed and lawyers added an addendum to the contract stipulating Sunday visiting hours between 12 and 2 p.m.

While refrigerators and light fixtures are standard fare, some buyers demand more exotic add-ons. In one recent house purchase, Ms. Lemmons’ client said he would buy the house contingent on the seller giving up a neon Chicago Blackhawks sign he had seen during the house tour. “He said, I’m telling you, if you don’t get me that Blackhawks sign, that deal is off,” she says. The seller was willing.

In Naples, Fla., the sale of a fully furnished home broke down at the start of the pandemic after the buyers objected to the seller removing a 6-foot flamingo statue from the house. “I said, to be clear, you don’t want this house anymore because of the pink flamingo?” says Adam Sheets, the buyers’ agent. “They were serious.”

Real-estate agents say often they prefer to keep unusual agreements off contracts involving financing to avoid having a lender look askance. Many are verbal and unenforceable.

Such was the case when Greg Gasior, 52, sold his house in West Palm Beach, Fla., in September and asked the buyers to assume responsibility for the feral cats that frequented his backyard, fearing they would otherwise go hungry. He bought the new owners multiple cases of canned cat food along with paper plates, which he asked them to use for serving so the cats wouldn’t cut their tongues on the cans.

“They were like, um, OK,” says Mr. Gasior, who works in property management. The buyers have sent over a photo showing they are fulfilling the obligation.

“So long as it isn’t harming anyone, I don’t see why not,” says Sabina Dinescu, a real-estate agent with Douglas Elliman in Pinecrest, Fla., of odd seller requests. Ms. Dinescu sold a house last year for a widow who made the sale of her house contingent on the new buyer keeping her husband’s ashes in a safe in a partitioned area behind the master bedroom’s closet, a requirement the seller drafted into the contract.

To Ms. Dinescu’s astonishment, the buyer agreed to the terms. “They didn’t seem too bothered,” she said. “The house had a lot of natural light, and it was at a great price point.”

Brokers say they have to walk a fine line in dealing with offbeat client demands, not wanting to alienate either side of a deal. In one recent transaction in San Diego, Calif., Raquel Benguiat said her buyer fell in love with a seller’s pair of dog statues outside the entrance and repeatedly asked for them during negotiations. “I told them, you gotta stop it with the dogs, because the owner is getting very upset,” she recalls. Ms. Benguiat bought her clients a replacement set.

In central Oregon, real-estate agent Chris Sperry has also played peacemaker. Ms. Sperry represented a buyer and seller in a transaction where the buyer insisted she wanted the seller’s cat along with the house. The seller balked.

“It really got into a heated argument on both sides,” she says. The seller finally agreed to leave her cat, and Ms. Sperry bought her a replacement kitten.

A few years ago Monica Lara, a government employee in Roseville, Calif., bought a home from an owner who was downsizing and wanted to leave his pet beagle behind. It had been the family dog, and his children had grown up and moved away. Ms. Lara and her husband, who have two young sons, said they would let the dog stay.

The seller said the dog was housebroken, which proved to be untrue. But the beagle was affectionate and the kids loved to walk him around the neighborhood. The family featured him in their Christmas photos for several years, until he suffered renal failure and passed away.

Ms. Lara, 51, has no regrets about taking him in. “The dog got a family that loved him,” she says.

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the October 24, 2020, print edition as ‘In Tight Market, Houses Can Come With Skeletons or Cats.’

The Forgotten Front Porch Is Making a Comeback

By: By Spike Carlsen

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal, original article here.

A staple of American homes, long out of fashion thanks to cars and air conditioning, is finding a new role in the age of social distancing.

Thanks to the pandemic, the front porch is enjoying a new golden age. Like their near cousins, stoops, steps, even fire escapes, porches offer a semipublic setting where we can meet friends and neighbors face-to-face—even if those faces are masked. In the words of Claude Stephens, founder of a tongue-in-cheek group called Professional Porch Sitters Union Local 1339, a porch is “the only place where you can feel like you are outside and inside at the same time; out with all of the neighbors and alone reading a book.”

Appeared in the September 26, 2020, print edition.

North Shore Beach Status and Openings

After being cooped up for several months in Chicago, it is time to hit the beaches with the kids this summer! Here is a list of what beaches are open on the North Shore and which beaches are closed, including new restrictions taking in considerations of COVID-19.

Winnetka

Lloyd – closed for the summer

Tower – open June 20

Maple – open June 20

Elder – closed for the season

Centennial Dog Beach – continues to operate as a dog beach

Wilmette

Gilson – open June 6

Gilson Dog beach – continues to operate as a dog beach

Sailing Beach – open with new restrictions for rentals

Kenilworth

Kenilworth Beach – closed currently with re-evaluation at end of June

Glencoe

Glencoe Beach – now open

Load the kids up in the car, stroller, bike and get out doors this summer and enjoy everything the North Shore has to offer at the Lakefront!