What Do We Do With The House? |
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My spouse died
Sue Vanderhyde knew she would have a hard time living in the same house where her husband collapsed and died of a sudden heart attack. "If he would have died in the hospital, it would have maybe not been so important to get out," said Sue, who decided to move to a small cabin in the backyard of her house on Lake Issaquah, Washington.
The cabin was barely 30 paces from the house, but it provided Sue with some important psychological distance from the house while she mourned her husband and tried to figured out what to do with the place they had shared. "In a way I was an exile, not because I was away from the house, but because the cabin was so small," said the primary school teacher, who is now 57. "It did provide me a time not to make any decisions."
Sue was able to keep up the mortgage payments on the house by renting it out to a married couple she found through a classified ad. After three years in the cabin, Vanderhyde made up her mind: she wanted to keep the place. "I finally thought, 'what am I doing this for.'" She's now back in the main house and has this piece of real-estate advice for the recently widowed: "Take your time. Don't rush it too much."
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