<p>We have a hard time letting go of “stuff” around here. Hubby still has things from his parent’s home that are older than I am (some older than him as well). My folks have now filled up all 4 bedroom closets with their clothing, plus a few hanging racks as well! My brother periodically goes in & just bags & tosses door prizes they win from golf tournaments as well as other “stuff” that accummulates around their home.</p>
<p>My S is helping us “declutter.” He IS making headway, but it is somewhat slow going (I admit, I have a lot of “stuff” from my non-profit that I run out of my home & one room of my parents’ 5 bedroom 3 bath home).</p>
<p>Anyone have great tips they want to share about what has helped them with the decluttering process?</p>
<p>A friend moved 3 times in 1 year. She said that was great incentive to toss out non-essentials, including goblets they got from their wedding! </p>
<p>We have lived in our house for 19 years & my parents have lived in their home for 45 years or so. Some of the remaining junk is from two of my brothers & includes HS photos (they’re in their 40s & 50s and moved out decades ago into their own homes) & also bank statements & checkbooks, some are empty gift bags & baskets. We told them we’re tossing and/or bagging things (folks have no objections, tho mom retrieved a few more hangers). My younger brother said go ahead while my older brother asked that we bring the bagged stuff to his home. (He lives alone in a goregeous 4 bedroom 3 bath home crammed with mostly never used STUFF and obstructs the view of his lovely home & cramps his entertainment.) His office is also getting very cluttered (used to be very nice and spacious, now there is no space for clients).</p>
<p>Anyway, would appreciate insights and help here.</p>
<p>Set mom or dad up with a shredder and a box of old financial stuff…if there’s anything they think they’ll need later they can set it aside (or scan it before shredding). Perhaps your brother would be better off doing this with his HS photos too - a flash drive and photo frame might start a whole liberation for him!</p>
<p>I’ve helped a borderline hoarder (not saying your folks or bro are quite that bad!) before and found it was too overwhelming to do everything at once. So we focused on one type of item each day - ie. one day to grab up all the baskets, make decisions, and drop off at a women’s shelter or salvation army or toss in the trash (luckily no animals or smoking in the home, so much was donated). The next time we gathered coats, then bags/luggage, then books…you get the picture. It kept the time and stress of each cleaning session to a manageable level and allowed her to see how much of each type of item she really had. That, in turn, allowed her to make good decisions on what should stay and what could go. In addition to the boost that she got from having clean, clear space in her life, passing the items along to those truly in need gave her a great feeling of satisfaction. Now when she finds a great sale that she can’t resist, she often buys specifically what the shelters/Ronald McDonald house need and drops it off promptly!</p>
<p>I am doing this right now at my own house. It really helps if you can do it in pairs, and that one person is unemotional and totally objective about the things.</p>
<p>For Hanukkah, my husband gave me several days with someone to help me. I have made tremendous progress and it does get easier once you see the results. A good friend or relative can be that other person as well.</p>
<p>Some advice:</p>
<p>Start with a charitable heart. Know that simply because you aren’t using it, doesn’t mean someone else can’t. </p>
<p>Set manageable goals. For example, one day we tackled the master bedroom and hall outside of it. Know your limit in how much time you can spend in one sitting. I find 4-5 hours is about all I can do. </p>
<p>That missing piece of the puzzle is never going to show up – ditch it.</p>
<p>Set a dollar value, if it costs less than ____ I am getting rid of it and will replace it if needed (most likely it won’t be needed.)</p>
<p>Don’t save things for your children, most likely they won’t want it/them. I set aside three plastic binds for things from their childhoods for them and that is is.</p>
<p>A very morbid motivator for me has been if I were to suddenly die or get very ill, could my family manage all this stuff. The answer was no and that has really helped. </p>
<p>For me, I am finding it life changing. One new thing is that I am avoiding bringing potential clutter into the house. I didn’t shop the post-Christmas sales like I have in the past, no Target bags waiting to be emptied, etc.</p>
<p>Congratulations! Thank goodness your parents aren’t resisting this! That would be too stressful. </p>
<p>There’s the 3-box system – keep, toss, donate. Give yourself 10 seconds to decide. That first gut reaction is usually the right one. Then take the stuff to Goodwill or wherever <em>that</em> day. If you let it sit around, you or someone will go back thru it and be ‘salvaging’ things…like my dh does. Same thing with the trash. Get it to the dump ASAP!</p>
<p>Old clothes – I finally stopped saying ‘one day I’ll fit into that again’ and started saying ‘even if I could, why would I want to?’ Amazing how quickly I emptied the closet after that! </p>
<p>Prudence on Slate.com had some good advice this week on stuff that belongs to people who no longer live in the house. Give them a deadline. Say, “In one month, I’m cleaning out your stuff. Come by and get what you want.” Remind them one week ahead of the deadline…then, if they still don’t come for it, you are clear to clear. They may whine but you have an answer…“if you wanted it so much, why didn’t you come get it?”</p>
<p>And tell your brother to come get the stuff himself if he wants it so bad…you have enough to do without being a junk delivery service!</p>
<p>*A very morbid motivator for me has been if I were to suddenly die or get very ill, could my family manage all this stuff. The answer was no and that has really helped. *</p>
<p>I envision my husband & a new girlfriend going through my stuff- that keeps me going.
( of course if he found out how I have been weeding out his jeans from high school, misc pieces of rusted fishing gear & 8 track tapes by the Guess Who, I may not be around much longer)</p>
<p>Thanks for the tips. My younger brother has done the lion’s share of weeding through many of the bedrooms & we only have the storage room. We have to get everything out so that they can rip out the bad old carpet & have just cement flooring that they will patch and coat with some sort of finish. I will have my stuff for my non-profit stored there so we can reclaim our house.</p>
<p>My folks have TONS of baskets & gift bags that I think we’ll drop off at the local thrift shop. The brother who probably won’t show doesn’t have that much stuff there, so we’ll just make him a small bag & get dad to take it to their office. We took a box of pots yesterday, so slowly but surely, we’re making progress. I need to have this done while S is still here, before he starts his job on the East Coast, so that gives us a deadline. ;)</p>
<p>Good luck. My problem is making H and S go through their stuff. Finally down to son’s closet after I have done all I should (could involves getting rid of stuff they would keep) and the electronics from forever in another. Finally got retired H to sort through a lot of stuff- the end is in sight. </p>
<p>Deadlines are good. The save/toss/donate in a limited thought time is great. You need to carry out any threats. Enough warning and time passed to make good on them. I dread having to junk the stuff my father hasn’t- he did start and needs another decade to do the job (already in his 80’s).</p>
<p>No tips, just encouragement to stay on the task of sorting through stuff at your parents’ house. </p>
<p>When my folks decided they were going to move to a retirement community, their home sold in less than two weeks. On one hand, that was great, on the other it meant clearing through stuff in a short amount of time - about 4-6 weeks as I recall. </p>
<p>With my parents, I just did one room at a time. I tackled some of the easier rooms so the task wouldn’t be so overwhelming to them. I am starting to have flashbacks right now - it wasn’t easy.</p>
<p>When my parents sold my grandpa’s house, the buyer offered to let them have anything they wanted in the house and then he and his wife would take care of getting rid of the rest. It was an older house and they were planning to basically gut it and start over. Worked great for my parents as they didn’t have to figure out what to do with it all. </p>
<p>Unfortunately the stuff they did bring home is now sitting in my bedroom giving me little room to keep my stuff. It’s only 3 pieces of furniture, but they’re not exactly small pieces…</p>
<p>Actually, we were lucky that the buyers bought a lot of stuff from mom & dad - lawn mower, grill, tools, etc. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, now when my dad can’t find something he swears that we left it at the house and “Joe” is using it. For weeks after they moved (actually there was a double move, but that is a whole other fun story) dad insisted we did not move his sweaters. I reassured him countless times I had checked the shelves in his closet before we left the house and the sweaters WERE NOT THERE.</p>
<p>Finally, months later, he opened a drawer in his bureau and found the sweaters. He was feeling too sheepish to tell me, but one night he had a sweater on and I was able to tease him about the missing sweaters. </p>
<p>"Unfortunately the stuff they did bring home is now sitting in my bedroom giving me little room to keep my stuff. It’s only 3 pieces of furniture, but they’re not exactly small pieces… "</p>
<p>I admit there is an advantage to my mother moving from her house, to a condo 10 yrs before she died & in that both my sister & brother ( but especially my brother) , boxed up all her stuff & took it.</p>
<p>( before I really got a chance to look at anything- but oh well)</p>
<p>I don’t have to experience what some of my friends are doing, which is having to all but bodily carry their parents who no longer can care for themselves, to a retirement facility.</p>
<p>^^^Same thing happened to me with my g’parents’ things, EK4. At the time I was kind of mad/hurt but now I don’t mind. My DH’s parents left him a bunch of ‘stuff’, most of which is not my taste but which I must live with. If I had anything more of my g’parents’ Cedar Rapids furniture, I would be living with little or <em>nothing</em> that I chose for myself. </p>
<p>I have told my D that unless something has real meaning to her (beside ‘that was <em>Mom’s!</em>’), she is not to consider herself bound to keep anything. The stuff with intrinsic value should be sold for whatever it will bring unless she really, really likes it for itself. I know there are half-a-dozen things she will keep. For the rest, let it go! Possessions are a burden more than a pleasure, especially to the young.</p>
<p>I feel your pain, HImom, but you know it’s a great thing to do. We’re going to be moving to a new house that’s half the size of our current one, but much more lovely. So it’s the good kind of downsizing. Still, it’s hard for me to get out of the habit of saving things, and when I have very little time I procrastinate about doing a really meaningful sort. </p>
<p>I’ll confess that I will save things for my potential future grandkids - and even my hard-nosed son agrees that he wants to keep the Brio train set and the amazing collection of Legos. Is anyone else doing this? </p>
<p>And then there are all these family heirlooms that I think the kids will want someday (okay, I’m ducking, ready to be assailed for that statement :)) The kids were great about cleaning out their rooms while home for the break, which leaves me with few excuses for my own bad habits. They are ruthless and barely sentimental when it comes to figuring out what to keep.</p>
<p>One thing that’s hard for me is that there’s quite a bit of stuff that I know I could sell on Ebay or Craigslist, so it’s not so easy to just send it to Goodwill instead of recouping some of the cash I spent in the first place. Feel free to give me a pep talk about letting go and getting it over with instead of trying to sell - I like the phrase above about starting with a charitable heart!</p>
<p>In our first 20 years of marriage, we moved 14 times. Nothing like that to keep the clutter down. Now that we have been in this house 15 years, “stuff” was piling up. Then we had a flood that meant moving every blessed thing out of the downstairs. If you have to take it out, box it up, carry it upstairs, then bring it back down and decide where it should be in the newly cleaned out room, you get really critical about what to keep.
Maybe you could stage a fake disaster and remove everything. Pretend that you are this week in Brisbane, or last year in Nashville - water is rising and you have to move it.
If you haven’t used it, watched it, read it, worn it for 5 years, give it away. OK, keep baby books, photo albums, Grandma’s silver - that’s obvious, but three French press coffee makers? “Christmas Sweaters”? Old John Clancy novels? Back issues of National Geographic and Southern Living? (Those recipes are online now - get with it…) I do admit that I had lots of all of these things.</p>
<p>I do not in the slightest mean this as a dismissal of the troubles of folks in real floods right now. Sorry if it sounded like that.</p>
<p>Depending on where you live, this might not be a good suggestion for now due to weather. But several summers ago, renting a dumpster was the greatest and most freeing thing our family had done in a long time.</p>
<p>We were tearing out carpeting in our guest room to prepare to host a student from Afghanistan–and we had to unclutter the guest room so he could live there. That meant the things we wanted to keep had to go to the basement, but there was no room. So, we started in the basement and spent a family weekend sorting. We took all the adult clothes we hadn’t worn in a year to the DAV. We gave all the children’s clothes that no longer fit to our church for a neighborhood clothing “swap” we hold twice a year. Some (but all) books went to the local library’s sale. Toys (other than classic ones) went to the local YWCA for its battered womens’ shelter.</p>
<p>And pretty much anything else that was cluttering up the basement and guest room went in the dumpster. Many were boxes that had been in our basement for the 15 years we had lived in this house. I convinced my husband that all the odd pieces of lumber and trim could go. And the stuff that our parents sent to us when they downsized? Most of it went, too. (Nothing of value–just stuff they didn’t want and we didn’t want either.) We filled the dumpster twice. It was awesome.</p>
<p>That will be three years ago in June. I can only think of ONE thing that any of us have looked for since then that went in the dumpster. That was the turntable from my husband’s pre-marriage stereo set-up. Our older son wanted it for “scratching.” (That’s apparently a new form of music.)</p>
<p>Selling things is a hassle–you have to arrange for shipping or have a stranger come to your house to pick up the item. Make a detailed list of the items (e.g., women’s long sleeved cardigan sweater, men’s swimsuit), take them to Goodwill, and get a receipt so you can take the tax deduction. TurboTax even figures out the market value for you!</p>
<p>I’m in the midst of downsizing too. It’s hard, and yes, all this stuff is a burden. We are moving to our smaller vacation home, which is already furnished. We have to decide what to get rid of, what to try to sell, what to switch out with things at the other house, etc. </p>
<p>I also have things I know could be sold, but I don’t really have the heart for that. I think my H and our house cleaner will have a garage sale for the bigger items when I am not here. I have lots of collections, lots of things from my childhood and my D’s childhood, lots of antiques…and my D says she doesn’t want any of it. </p>
<p>I find it very hard to give away books and toys from D’s childhood. I should have gotten rid of those things right after she was done with them, as I did her clothing.</p>
<p>But…new year…new start…time to turn the page. That is my new motto.</p>
I need to have this done while S is still here, before he starts his job on the East Coast, so that gives us a deadline. ;)</p>