My jaw dropped...
"I didn't know you wanted it..."
My mother jokes that her house "comes with a full basement" because of all the stuff in it. Fortunately, she'd purging stuff on her own.
Sometimes I wish she'd check with me first before she gets rid of things.
My mother-in-law, on the other hand, is still accumulating things.
I suppose there was an upside of having parents who sold everything we had so they could buy drugs.
After seeing what our friends’ children suffered, we sold our place, gave away just about everything, donated the rest, and downsized to a small, manageable condo.
Handing your kids a place they have to manage long distance and dispose of accumulated “stuff” is not a good idea.
I think this is a huge reason many older people don’t downsize when it would seem totally appropriate - my disabled neighbor lives alone in a 4 BR 2 level house, yet can’t stand to part with her “stuff” and her son has made it clear he won’t take any of it.
Possessions become completely too precious to part with - sad.
I haven’t decided between the two, but some day I hope to have an auction or “living estate” sale when I downsize. I think it would be very freeing.
We are deep within this process now.
I’m trying to sell a filing cabinet on Craigs list. Turns out, nobody much needs to file paper. When I bought it, used file cabinets got snapped up immediately.
We don’t have stuffed toys, but I do have 300+ AOL floppy discs and CD’s in the original wrappers. I also have two six packs of ORIGINAL kingsize cokes. I have two drawing boards with parallel rules and a big box of obsolete drafting equipment.
I have all my correspondence over twenty years and an equal time span of telephone call records. All that will be tossed. We have a library of 1,000 +volumes that is not required.
Disposal of surplus stuff is a real chore. This is a warning to those only 65 or so.
The kids want nothing.
My jaw dropped...
"I didn't know you wanted it..."
My dear late mother is just the opposite of these people. She was constantly purging. Even when I was in college and paying for most of my own clothes, she would go through my closet and give away anything she had not seen me wearing recently! We used to joke that she would rip clothing off our backs and send it to the Good Will.
As one of my sisters points out, however, running a house full of 11 people dictated her behavior. There was never any clutter in our house, and it was always clean.
I detest antiques and lace doilies.
My style is urban industrial.
We had to divest my grandmothers estate and my in-laws estate and the weeping and wailing over the junk we pitched was comical.
It was junk. Old junk.
I am facing this with my depression baby parents who are in their eighties. A house full of stuff. I have four nieces who will take stuff like china and furniture. I lead a modest lifestyle and only want some of their New Mexico artwork and the bobcat my dad had made into a rug. I am NOT looking forward to getting the house cleared out when that day comes, but I can work anywhere and my brother has a client-facing investment advisor job, so I will be the one doing the estate work.
I know my kids wants the train layout, but we don’t have much in our house. We can dust trinkets or enjoy our kids...we choose the enjoy our kids...
Let me just put something out there.
Ex’s family had a family member die. The family members were cleaning out the house and had to deal with a large porn collection and various ...er...equipment.
It really took the family members aback, grossed them out, and made everything just a bit more difficult.
So clean it up before you go, or give your best friend a key to clean it up for you so the family doesn’t have to.
For someone whose parents died when he was a kid and subsequently lost 95% of their possessions and history, I have to say “Boo, Hoo, Snowflake!” to this.
I’ve moved several times, across the country once. I sold all my stuff before I moved. Now I wish I had hung on to a few wonderful pieces. One, a George Nelson “coconut” chair is now selling for $5,000==if you can find one. WE were friends with the Herman Miller company ad manager, got it wholesale in the first place.
Other than that...I miss a few things. My kids were offered stuff but didn’t want much. Some oriental rugs, other than that, zilch. I cannot give grannie’s silver service away. No one wants those things anymore. I think it’s been in its unopened shipping box at my nieces’s house for twelve years.
Guess what? No need to get attached to things. There’s always more stuff. Yard sales in upscale ‘hoods are your friends.
He was friggin crazy.
It is sad but the parents of boomers and boomers have been on an acquisition spree for the better part of 60 or 70 years. Hoarders do not compare.
Our children have all but ZERO and I do mean ZERO interest in our possessions including the house, the farm, the machinery, the furniture and all. When we are gone there will probably be an auction and it will all be gone in one day. We are seeing quite a bit of land sold or for sale at unrealistic prices by children who have no interest in returning to it or the problems/responsibility of owing it.
As I have said before, a life time of treasures becomes someone else’s junk and problem the day you die. It calls into serious question the sanity of all the acquisition doesn’t it?
I try to myself and encourage my wife to think about what you need when you buy instead of what you want. I would like to go through the barn and the shop and just purge all the things I seldom use but it is awfully hard to do, I might need it someday and usually do!
After my last parent passed, I was tasked with cleaning out the house and selling it. We decided to have an estate sale. I had cleaned out much of the worthless junk while dad was hospitalized found all kinds of “gems”—cereal from the 80s, etc....
My parents had a number of fairly valuable antiques, so we went the estate sale route...As I had cleaned out a lot of what estate sales make their money on...the box of toothpicks, etc. so I decided to do estate sale myself...
I hired an appraiser—not to officially do appraisals on specific items, but to spend a few hours walking thru the house and giving me some general price ranges...What is valuable, what is not, etc. Paid around $70/hour for that service.
Then I had relatives go thru and take what they wanted.
A lot of work to price everything, and I needed some family/friends to assist (there were 40 people waiting outside the front door at 8 a.m.).
Turned out well, made some money and found good homes for things...
Guess our family was a bit of an anomaly as far as this article goes as I took a number of antiques, and my kids did want some relics to remember their grand parents, etc.
Baby boomers are downsizing — and the kids won’t take the family heirlooms
And this article from AARP magazine asserts that getting rid of stuff, especially clutter, helps people lose weight! I'm tacking it up on my refrigerator.