We have downsized and decluttered in stages.
10 years ago we had an about 4500 SF house with on 2 1/2 acres, with a guest house, pool, huge covered patio and two double garages. It makes me tired to think of it. That said, we had 6 people living there when we bought it.
A couple of years later with only 4 of us still at home and your youngest in high school we moved to an about 3000 SF house on 1 acre, no pool. We truly got rid of a lot of stuff. We had one double garage at the prior house that we used just for storage. We had stuff in there that had been there for years (mostly stuff the kids had outgrown or stuff that was no longer relevant).
So we lived in the 3000 SF house for 6 years. Then, in 2018, all kids on their own, we moved 4 hours away to what we felt would be our true downsizing retirement home. It was quite a bit smaller. I think around 2200 SF.
We sold our house before we could even look for a house and rented a 2 bedroom apartment as a short term rental while we looked. Most of our stuff, we put in storage. We got rid of lots of stuff they we just didn't like or had no room for (including some furniture) but the storage unit was large but packed full.
The new house was on 1/3 of an acre but did have a pool. It didn't long after moving in to realize this house had little storage. The house we had sold had a lot of built in storage. This had known. The old house had a nice sized utility room. This had virtually no storage. The clothes' closets were tiny. This house was 20 years or so older than our last house. It was maybe $40k more money for a much smaller, older house.
What did it have? A great, great location. The 3000 SF house had been in an acreage community 20 minutes from the closest grocery store. Now, i have multiple grocery stores within 5 minutes. At the old house, a "close" shopping center or mall was one 40 minutes away. Now, I have several within 15 minutes.
Still that storage situation and the tiny master bath and tiny closets and some other negatives were pretty big.
So we did a 6 figure remodel. We gutted the master bath, expanded the utility room, added a large closet to the bedroom, removed the fireplace from the living room. We added a sunroom (fully done with flooring, AC, heat, etc). We basically touched every room in the house in one way or another. The only thing we didn't do was remodel the kitchen. It would have been nice but was just too much money and the kitchen while not ideal was OKish. We took care of the huge storage problem by removing the existing pantry and building one much larger. The house is now about 2400 SF.
I am happy how it worked out. We finally have the storage we want and the remodel was really, really worth it. And the size of the house is a good size for us.
Oh -- you might wonder why we didn't just buy a newer house that was more expensive so we wouldn't have had to remodel. I would have if I could have. But, this market was extremely hot. We contracted on this house before it was officially listed and still had to beat out 2 other people and pay significantly over listing price. The area is highly desirable and houses even now with the Pandemic still usually sell very quickly. When we were looking there were literally no 1 story houses to be had in the general area we were looking at that were better even if we had had an unlimited budget. To get a 1 story (which we wanted) we either had to buy and remodel, build a new house or simply not buy in this area.
So after all that this house is a lot more expensive than the one