The Pace of a House

Our new TV.

My wife and I recently switched from cable to fiber internet in our home, mostly for the cost savings. Our old cable speeds had been fine—more than adequate for streaming and email—but the change made clear how far behind we’d fallen on home tech. Almost everyone we know crossed this bridge years ago. 

That switch prompted a closer look at how we actually watch television. Our old set, a once state-of-the-art 1999 model, sits in the bedroom: a 26-inch screen with 720p resolution. Before the new service arrived, we checked its back panel to see if it could accept a streaming device. There, improbably, was an HDMI port—so we plan to purchase an Amazon Fire TV Stick to extend its useful life. 

We've already bought a new 50-inch QLED screen for the living room to match the fiber’s potential. It now sits in front of the fireplace on a new stand, a simple piece of furniture that nonetheless changes the room’s proportions. It’s the first substantial item we’ve added to our home in decades, a small but telling shift in how the house is organized around our daily life. 

Last October, we finally completed a long-deferred maintenance project. With that behind us, and alongside the move to fiber, smaller upgrades have followed naturally: the new TV, a noise-cancelling headset (so I can watch TV when my wife is sleeping), and subscriptions to streaming apps. 

Retirement recalibrates scale. With life’s major transitions mostly behind us, incremental ones come into sharper focus: an old television still serving faithfully in the bedroom, a larger one claiming space in the living room, a long-awaited piece of furniture, a house quietly returned to good repair. 

None of this is momentous in itself. But small changes shape how we live in our homes, especially when larger shifts are no longer driving the agenda. Some people remake their spaces all at once; others, like us, move slowly, letting familiar things continue to serve while new ones find their place. In that slower rhythm, our everyday world has room to clarify itself, and the life we’ve built here becomes a little more legible, one measured step at a time.