Dear B.,
I'm sorry, I didn't take the time to read all of the responses, but I felt I just had to respond.
I would suggest that you guys high-tail it to a counselor to help you work out your expectations! I can't emphasize this enough! If you want to keep your house and she wants to sell it, this is a major issue. My brother broke relationship with my parents over this issue (with other issues mixed in).
It is your house, your children can have any opinion they want to have and they can express that opinion, but they don't own the house, you do.
Here are some useful questions to ask yourself:
1. Is this the best market to be SELLING a house?
2. What is my daughter's motive in wanting to sell the house?
3. If your daughter did clean out the room on her own as someone suggested, would you care about what happened to the stuff that was in it?
We felt it would be wiser for my parents to sell their large home and get rid of stuff, but we waited until they felt they needed help to accomplish that. It took many weeks and much work to help them declutter and downsize and get ready to sell the house.
The idea of selling the house while your husband is in the hospital is overwhelming to me!
I don't know if any of this will help, but it's part of my two cents!
A.
Also, why would you need to downsize now that you will be having MORE people in the house? And won't their rent and bill payments help you catch up on your mortgage payments? How are you going to afford the hospital bills? Will you need to sell the house so you can pay those bills? Can your daughter and her ex-husband help to make any of the repairs to get the house ready to sell? What would help you be "ready" to sell the house? In other words, WHY don't you want to sell the house? Is it so your husband won't worry or will be able to come home to the same house he left. Or is it so you will feel safe and secure in familiar surroundings while you go through the situation of him being in the hospital? In other words, for your or his sense of security?
Here's something to consider: Is your neighborhood going uphill or downhill in value? If downhill, then selling now might be a good idea. If it's going up in value, then you can afford to wait(for emotional reasons) to sell.
If my husband were in the hospital I'd sort of want to wait until he was out so he could be PART of the decision to sell. Unless it's a huge property and it would not be good for him to do the maintenance.
Do you see why I think it might be a good idea for you and your daughter and her ex-husband to sit down with an emotionally uninvolved person like a counselor to work through some of this stuff? There's so much involved here!
It might help your daughter to read the responses people sent you. Maybe it will help you guys have a chance to talk in-depth about the issues involved and you can work out a suitable compromise. Like maybe your daughter could help you clear out the room she's concerned about. If it's emotionally difficult to part with stuff, then you could take pictures of it and "have" it on paper, but you could get rid of the item and have the room. In this way, you would be making progress toward your goal of downsizing some day.
I will pray for you.
A.