What to look for if this is your last house
By Dan Jones ·
Bottom line: the question is not rancher or two storey, it is whether the daily route through the house crosses stairs. If the bed, a full bathroom, the kitchen and the laundry are all on one level, the number of floors is a detail and the upstairs becomes optional space. What actually decides whether a house stays livable for twenty years is construction detail rather than features: a level entry, real clear width at doorways, a bathroom with blocking in the walls for grab bars that do not exist yet, main floor laundry, and good light. Most of it is invisible in photographs. And most people get floor area right and storage wrong.
I am Dan Jones, a REALTOR with Royal LePage Locations West in Penticton, licence number 1118346. I was a Red Seal journeyman carpenter from 1980 before being licensed in 2004, which is why this post is mostly about construction rather than floor plans.
Most house-buying advice is written for someone who expects to move again. This is for the people who do not. If you are still deciding whether to move at all, start here.
That changes what matters. When the next move is meant to be the last one, you are not buying for the next five years and a resale. You are buying for as long as it works, and the things that decide how long it works are mostly not the things in the photographs.
Rancher, or two storey
The most common question I get from downsizers, and the label matters less than the daily route through the house.
A rancher settles the stairs question permanently, which is why the good ones attract competition here. A two storey with the right main floor, primary bedroom, full bathroom and laundry, gets you most of the way there for less, and the upstairs becomes optional space. Watch for split levels and basement-entry homes, which put stairs in the daily route even though nobody calls them two storeys.
Full detail, including what a rancher really costs and the layouts that fool people: rancher or two storey when you downsize.
The things I look at that are hard to see in photos
This is where the twenty-four years of building actually earns its keep, because most of what decides whether a house stays livable is construction detail.
How you get in the door. Steps, slope, and whether there is a covered landing big enough to stand on with shopping in both hands while you find keys. A level or gently graded entry is worth more over twenty years than almost anything inside. Adding one later means either a ramp, which needs run and looks like what it is, or regrading, which is expensive.
Door widths. Standard interior doors in older homes are often narrow. Doorways with roughly 32 inches of clear width matter if a walker ever enters the picture, and widening a doorway is not trivial once there is structure or services in the wall.
The bathroom, properly. Is there space to turn around. Does the door swing into the room and block it. Is there blocking in the walls. Solid backing behind the drywall, so grab bars can be fitted later into something that will hold. In new construction that is cheap to add; retrofitting means opening walls. A curbless shower is easier to create where the floor structure allows it, and effectively impossible where it does not.
Hallway width, and the corners. A hallway can be wide enough and still have a turn at the end that nothing gets around.
Where the laundry is. Main floor, or a flight down. This is the single most common regret I hear.
The garage step. Almost every attached garage has one step up into the house. How high is it, and is there room to make it two shallower ones later.
Light. Not aesthetic. Practical. Ageing eyes need considerably more of it. North-facing rooms with small windows are dim at sixty and dark at eighty.
Lever handles, switch heights, outlet heights. Individually small, cheap to change, easy to overlook when you are looking at the view.
None of this means buying a house that looks institutional. Almost all of it is invisible when it is done well, which is exactly why you want someone looking for it.
How small is too small
People consistently get the floor area right and the storage wrong.
Going from three thousand square feet to fifteen hundred is usually fine as living space. What catches people out:
- Nowhere to put things. Seasonal, tools, luggage, the boxes that survived the sort.
- No guest space. If family visits twice a year and there is nowhere for them, that will bother you more than a smaller kitchen.
- No project room. If you have had a workshop for forty years, losing it entirely is a bigger adjustment than losing a dining room.
The practical test: measure the furniture you are actually keeping and the storage you actually need, then look for a house that holds it. That is a more reliable filter than a square footage target.
Condo, townhouse, or detached
Less about the building and more about how much you want to be responsible for.
Detached is the most control and the most work. Your roof, your yard, your driveway to clear.
Townhouse usually means the exterior and landscaping are handled and you keep a private entrance and often a garage. For a lot of downsizers this is the sweet spot.
Condo removes almost all exterior responsibility and adds shared hallways, an elevator to depend on, and neighbours through walls rather than across a fence.
If a strata is in the picture, the documents move the number as much as the finishes do. What to check before you buy into a BC strata covers what to read and why.
The yard question
Be honest about what you enjoy versus what you tolerate.
Some people garden until they cannot, and taking that away is taking away the point. Others have been maintaining a yard for thirty years out of obligation and would happily never own a mower again.
The middle ground is usually a small, well-designed outdoor space rather than none at all. Somewhere to sit, a few beds, no irrigated slope to manage. And on a hillside lot, remember the yard includes whatever holds it up.
An older house can absolutely be the right answer
None of this argues for new construction. Plenty of older Okanagan homes are better built than what is going up now, and many of them have the wide hallways and solid framing that make later changes easy.
What an older house needs is going in with your eyes open about the systems. What to check in an older South Okanagan home is the list I run, and on a last-move purchase it matters more than usual, because the repairs you are signing up for are ones you will be arranging at seventy-five, not thirty-five.
What I would do
Walk it with the daily route in mind. Front door to kitchen. Bed to bathroom at two in the morning. Car to kitchen with four bags of groceries. Laundry.
Then look at what it would take to change the things that do not work, and whether the house allows for that at all. Some houses adapt easily. Some cannot without moving structure.
That is the conversation I would rather have standing in the place than over email. Tell me what your days look like and I will tell you what to look at.