The best thing you can do for your kids is throw out your junk

[spinbaby]

We spent our day helping an eldery relative clean out her mother's house. The mother in question is nearly 100 and in a nursing home. She had been living in her house for over 50 years and HAD NEVER THROWN ANYTHING OUT! I swear she never threw anything out. We'd pull a box out from under the bed and in the box would be 30-year-old magazines, a pie pan, a sewing kit, some cancelled checks, an old alarm clock, a Scrabble game, and socks. The next box would be just as random. We spent all day at it and didn't make a dent. And the worst of it is that much of this junk is going to her daughter's house where someday we'll have to face it all over again.

I'm going to declutter my house immediately.

[Scout]

1. i dread having to clean out my parents' house...

they've been married 62 years, and have only moved once and that was 25 years ago. they have silver from their 25th anniv. in the basement, that they've never used or even kept polished on display in a nice hutch or glass-door cabinet. plus they just have all kinds of everyday stuff too.

[politicat]

2. Or, if you must keep your ephemera, be anal-retentive about it.

Keep it organized! That ephemera is very useful to a lot of people (historians and sociologists, to start with) but if you have to keep it, organize, organize, organize!

And junkmail -- that should be trashed. Immediately.

[spinbaby]

4. The only things organized were the collector plates

At least 30 years of awful collector plates all neatly boxed with their attendant paperwork. Sadly, she probably thought they were worth a lot of money.

[politicat]

7. Oh... no....

Sadly, the magazines are probably worth more. You might want to try organizing and getting a collectibles appraiser in.

I've found that some of my bought used for half-nothing paperbacks are worth a lot (30 and 70 in a couple of cases, and one is worth 250).

[RevCheesehead]

3. Please be sure to recycle.

We don't need that shit in the landfills, either. O8)

[NV Whino]

5. Oh Boy, I second that.

I had to move my mother up north near me a few years back. Ack!

I was ruthless about throwing stuff out, but I still inherited STUFF when she died last year. I'm still going through it.

[femmocrat]

6. Great advice!

After cleaning out my MIL's house (50 years of knick-knacks and newspaper clippings) and an elderly aunt's house (50 years of flea-market kitsch), we are now facing emptying my mother's house. Fortunately, she is still with us and telling us what to toss and what to keep. And she isn't sentimental over her old stuff.

I am starting this summer on our house! We have been here 22 years and have literally no space to put anything new. It's time to say goodbye to all this junque!

[grasswire]

8. NO NO NO.....

As a dealer in antique and vintage papers, I urge you not to throw anything away more than fifty years old without determining the value first. There are niche collectors for so very many things. And it's just those things that people often throw away that seem to gain value.

[spinbaby]

13. Not much of value

Fortunately, I'm an auction regular, so I have a pretty fair idea what's got some value. Her coffee-table set from the 50s, for instance. But women's magazines dating back to the 70s hold little value--not enough that we're going ot fool with them. We did find one Good Housekeeping from the 50s and hung onto it (pink kitchens!). The stuff destined for the auction house is suprisingly small because most of what she has is junk from the last 30 or so years. There is no way we're hanging onto a plaster owl long enough for it to become collectable.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

9. Yes! I've been dealing with that for years.

I've been cleaning out my mom's house for the last four years. When she was alive she wouldn't let anybody throw anything away, even plastic bags, pie tins and such junk. When we tried to throw stuff away, she got stressed out, dissociated and had a multiple personality episode, which I had never seen before. She growled at me and called me a nasty bitch etc. I figured this out later.

And this was right after she had had surgery on her carotids. She went out to the street and DRAGGED BACK from the curb 14 large trash sacks of stuff we attempted to get rid of. After that episode, over ten years ago, we said "Screw it. We have to wait until she dies."

The house had about five households combined in it. There were literallly trails through the junk and crud. It's taken us 4 years to clean it out, the auction guy has taken most of the furniture and stuff we boxed up in a 40 foot gooseneck trailer. There were 60 boxes of stuff in that trailer besides that furniture. We're still not thru cleaning out. This is a 1500 square foot house.

We still have piles to go through. When I say piles, I mean "8 feet tall, ten feet wide, 6 feet deep, for example.

There was a 10 by 20 foot bedroom that had crap in it FIVE FEET DEEP. That's a thousand cubic feet we cleaned out. Because mom was suffering from Alzheimers and didn't have good sense when she was younger, everything was mixed together randomly.

I have a ton of sewing stuff, piece goods and patterns. Does anybody sew anymore?
I need to sell this stuff.

As a result, on Mother's Day I am bitter and pissed about the burden she has left us with, because she would NOT throw anything away, and she and her mother had way too much furniture in the house. They didn't understand about sorting stuff, and they had no concept of empty space. There were vanities and mirrors to stumble over that nobody used, there were dressers and chests of drawers, all sorts of stuff.

I sent some of the little stuff to a place that is a third party eBay store.
It's called Three Sisters.

I am so sick of looking at this stuff I could scream. It's solid mahagony but I didn't pick it out. I have stuff in my house HERE I need to get rid of that was hand down furniture, and we're trying to move into the house that was my parents' house. Cleaning it out has worn me down. It's stressful going through all that stuff and reliving old bad memories. I sent china, crystal, lots of stuff that was never used to the auction house, and took lots of stuff to the thrift shop as well.


I have no brothers or sisters to help me with this, just my partner of many years.
It's overwhelming. And yet I HAVE to move into that house, and sell the one I live in now, before the end of the year, to survive.

[Connonym]

11. That's got to be so frustrating

:hug: Perragrande Wishing you the patience to make it through

[Crabby Appleton]

14. sounds like what I went through with my mom. nt

[idgiehkt]

10. you just reminded me of one of my treasured memories of my grandmother

I asked her once if she had a button (this was a few years ago) and she told me to look in the box under her bed. There was an old cookie tin that I pulled out and it contained some really old looking buttons, which she said had come off of my Dad and his sibling's clothes; whenever they would wear them out, she would use the clothes for quilt pieces or rags and cut the buttons up and put them in the tin to be used whenever someone lost one.

[mrbill]

12. The Zen of Family Clutter and Crap

Back in the early 70's my favorite uncle George died. He was a weird duck. The administrater of the Estate didn't want to clean up the mess at the house, so lucky me got a summer job. Trashing and listing and packing.

Very educational experience. Don't think Uncle George ever emptied a trash can or did laundry. Phase one was removing living organisms. Then came the paper monster, every newspaper, magazine and junk mail for the previous thirty years. The paper monster was fun, Uncle George had this strange habit of hiding $1 bills in newspapers. Every single paper had to be checked. A sense of humor from beyond the grave? He also hid coins in strange places, found an XF 1909S-VDB Lincoln in a sock.

Past forward to present. Now my attic is totally full of clutter and crap from past generations. My favorite threat to my daughter is "if you stress me out and I have a heart attack then you have to clean up the attic."

It's really weird going through dead people's stuff. Like "rosebud", a little insignificant thing could have been very important.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

15. I am a published (though anonymous) author

A letter I wrote to Don Aslett, was published in CLUTTER FREE: FINALLY AND FOREVER, that I wrote when mom and dad were still alive.

I still haven't written to him with the final chapter: Four years of cleaning up the house so we can move into it. The grandparents didn't throw anything away either.

I highly recommend Don Aslett's books on Clutter.

The Step By Step How To book for judging junk is NOT FOR PACKRATS ONLY.