Moving this year after 20 years in a house: 400+ miles, from a three BR house and garage to a one BR condo . . . it’s certainly a process. Slowly I had decided more and more can go. After donating over the last 4 years and buying little new, I’m mentally (not yet physically) down to clothes, books, pictures, 3 boxes of mementos, 2 boxes of kitchen, and 3 or 4 pieces of furniture.
Have not done it for ourselves, but did it for my dad. Three bedroom house, had lived there for over 30 years, wood working hobby (tools galore), lots of stuff.
I got a full size dumpster and filled it. One room at a time.
My brother was not so helpful bc he kept seeing value in things I wanted to toss.
Really, no one wants dad’s old table saw! Anyone serious about wood working, would want an updated saw! I think it was sentimentality. But that was the saw dad cut the tips of his fingers off with! Oy.
So, if you work with a partner, get the least sentimental person you know or your progress may be hindered!
So, the dumpster was key! Next, getting the things you want to keep, for sure, marked or put in a pod or stashed in a single room or moved to the new owners.
Next, hire someone to come in and take the rest. We had an estate slash flea market person come in and take the rest.
We got very little money and I did not care. The goal was an empty house ready for sale.
Again, my brother thought I was too harsh and too ready to throw away or give away “perfectly good things” that “someone might use one day”.
Identify the time you can devote to this project a week. Do you work or have other obligations? If you work, contract with yourself for the time you can devote and stick with it - same for your H. (a day of the weekend? An hour 3 evenings a week? Two hours daily if you don't work?)
Identify how you are comfortable unloading stuff. Are you willing to get a dumpster? If not, identify your couple of sources of donation - for instance, a certain Goodwill in town.
Start. Like literally start TODAY. Pick a drawer. No one needs 100 pairs of socks. Sort a drawer, make like piles of items, then aim to reduce 50% or more.
You've got to think of this as an opportunity instead of a chore. I really, really think you are going to feel GREAT as you go along and make progress. And isn't that better than how you feel now?
We just went through this. Decided to move/get the house ready for market last March, moved into a 2BR+Den condo in August. We had been wanting to move for a while, but family circumstances interfered for a few years, so once that was resolved, we were ready to move full speed ahead.
It’s really important to know where the new location will be. DH and I had long agreed we wanted to stay in the immediate area, and stay in independent living for a while, so found a new construction 55+ community we liked–that choice is a story for another day.
While we were in agreement on major aspects of the move, we did have conflicts in details that caused problems. I’m a shopper and wanted take our time finding the new home, choosing a realtor, and optimizing what we did with choosing what to keep and how to dispose of the rest. He is happy to choose the first acceptable option. I tried to be as supportive as possible, but those issues and some issues with our new home did cause conflict.
As with lots of folks we’ve met in our new community, we feel we gave and threw away so much of our stuff, but still wound up with more than we have room for. The hardest things to part with now are going to be family pictures and portraits, and the few pieces of wall art.
Everyone I told about our move either said they had done it and it was hard, or they just won’t do it because of the difficulties with stuff. They’re happy to have their kids do it, but we didn’t want to saddle our only with the burden.
A major saving grace is that we were highly motivated to leave the old house, and we did set ourselves some deadlines that helped move us along.
I strongly recommend “The life-changing magic of tidying up” by Marie Kondo. It makes the process of deciding what to keep and what to get rid of so much easier! Moving or not, I believe it’s a must read ?.
On the clothing/t-shirt front: we just had a bunch of t-shirts made into quilts. First of three has arrived. Such a wonderful way to preserve the memories, but get the shirts out of a drawer or box or closet.
And in a nod to @“aunt bea” , I figured out to use some of the sides not a part of the quilts to make “flip top” bags to replace the old tissue paper protecting our holiday ornaments. Moved said ornaments into cup/mug savers that had been sitting around.
Rest of the unused sides will head to local animal shelter. Big win all around.
You really need to know if it is a teardown before you waste time on cleaning IMO, but start chucking stuff out now. Our 10 yr move was more work on cleaning, painting and redoing floors (all ourselves) than just decluttering, throwing and selling. Then start on a room at a time, and decide on garage sale items (this was worth doing IME). People WILL buy good used stuff.
I have begun this process as we anticipate a move within the next year.
I noticed that this Christmas felt more like my working in the corporate mailroom as we probably had twenty boxes delivered. I saved every box, threw each in the porch, and the new rule is the only way to get ride of a box is to fill it with stuff for the donation center. I hate seeing those boxes on my porch…so, very motivating for me to fill one and get it outta here.
Yesterday’s theme was picture frames. I had a ton of pics, in old frames. Took the pics out, filled two pretty large boxes and out they went.
Next mission is never-used dishes (themed mugs, glasses, etc.). I find picking a theme easier…seeing 50 frames all at once makes it way easier to get rid of 48 of them. And no one needs more than one German beer mug.
We went through this, moving from a 4BR house we’d lived in for over 30 years to a 2BR apt. I wish we had given ourselves more time to go through stuff because it was exhausting physically and emotionally.
We started slowly 9 months before we moved. At that time, we didn’t even know when we’d put the house on the market, so we didn’t do much. We went through the kids’ sports paraphenalia, toys and games. What we didn’t keep either got donated to Goodwill or got tossed in our weekly trash.
We started back up again about 6 months before the move. We went through our clothes and got rid of/donated alot. We went through books and literally donated 100s to our local library for their book sales. We took photos of things in our adult kids’ rooms so they could decide what they wanted (they didn’t live locally & didn’t go through their things when they were home to visit as I’d asked them to do).
The hardest, and most time-consuming, were the personal/sentimental items. DH kept alot of stuff, and he had to go through things several times to whittle it down to a manageable amount (this happened with books too). We both wish we’d had more time to go through these things because we probably got rid of some things we wish we still had.
We did get a dumpster toward the end to get rid of some of the bigger items and the stuff we decided to junk. We had stored this stuff in the interim in the basement til we got the dumpster.
We got rid of enough that we don’t have a need for a storage bin. And we still have stuff that’s still sitting in boxes in a closet 16 months after the move. We could probably get rid of more, but we have little will to do that right now.
We have been here 13 years and I spent the last year preparing for a move that will hopefully take place finally in March. I am motivated because I really, really want to be in our new state asap and have been planning for the last 2 years since the kids were about done with HS.
I have been through the entire house, including years of toys, papers, and kid projects/cards/artwork. Each kid has a tote of things I am keeping but pitched so much.
We had moved homes with wine and champagne glasses from our wedding registry twice. We have discovered we are beer and cocktail people so I finally donated instead of continuing to store them for no reason.
Try not to think too much about the whole project. Just jump into whatever area, drawer, closet, etc that you can handle.
It will start snowballing and get easier to sort. If you are feeling sentimental, tackle something like shredding papers.
I agree with the Kondo book. Lots of things I felt obligated to keep were either high maintenance, not used, or not loved. It felt good to stop dealing with them and pass them to someone else.
@shellfell – your description seems pretty accurate for how it often goes down. With respect to memorabilia, what’s a reasonable amount for each 50 something year old to hold on to? 3 boxes? 5 boxes?
For my H, the struggle will be books. We have 4 large (barrister) bookcases filled in our living room, plus a couple smaller bookcases spread around house, and another couple hundred books in the built-in shelves in our family room.
Our current living room feels so dark b/c the bookcases are dark wood. I’ve told him for our next house I want to take one of the spare bedrooms and have floor to ceiling bookscases built-in on the longest wall that he can completely fill. We can even have them build a little sliding ladder to help with access. I am ready for a more modern, pared down feeling in our next living space with a lot fewer things so I’m hoping we can keep bookcases out of it. I’ve also seen some interesting designs with dining room/libraries that could work.
I agree that the best thing to do is just start! But first, a talk with the DH about not filling up spaces that you clear. I think it is helpful, before you start, to know what you are going to do with things. For example, clothes and “household items” can be put into the metal charity drop boxes that are in many store parking lots. So have a corner ready with trash bags, and anything like this goes into that corner.
Marie Kondo’s book is helpful, although IMO her process is overwhelming and takes big chunks of time commitment. But the reasoning is clear…only by gathering up all coats, for example, will you see exactly how many you have and easier determine which to keep. Her method also does give a nice process to to sort through emotions and say goodbye. And she has some great practical advice such as to not keep instruction manuals. I personally find it easier to do one area at a time…such as a sock drawer, or a bookshelf, or a kitchen drawer. And to make it a habit…as you go about your house and use things, determine if you really need the multiples.
If you start somewhere that you use often (such as your closet), feeling the mental benefits of having less stuff can be very motivating to keep going!
I had to sell my parents house (50+ years, not organized at all) the same month my IL’s house was being sold. We looked at a LOT of memories!
Regarding your kids artwork, etc: DO you have any of that stuff from when YOU were a kid? Do you look at it?
I found that I had no interest in my old art projects my mom saved. The report cards and school handbooks were fun to go thru. But honestly, it got easier and easier to toss stuff, once I allowed myself a few “gems” to keep.
I also found that it got easier as I put more and more things in the Donate pile. I did borrow Marie Kondo’s philosophy as putting something back out into the universe that can be used by someone else, instead of it sitting in a box in my basement.
I now find that unnecessary clutter makes me anxious. My DH is still a “collector” so we have to keep his things in a specific place. But I got rid of 90% of my parents things, and while I can get sentimental about it, you can’t keep everything. Just like I had to sell their house and can no longer visit it, I can’t keep all their knick-knacks etc.
I DO NOT WANT my kids to have to go through what I went through. So anything in the attic has to be labeled clearly. I even have a couple that I am saving for me but they can “TOD” (toss on death).
I really don’t want to do any “death cleaning.” I swore that in our new place, we will have only what we need. Friends keep bringing us gifts of tchotchkes because they think our house has too much empty space; off to Goodwill these things go after we had some time to “enjoy” them.
Here is our story of moving after 18 years. We were lucky that we were able to buy our current house (House2) while keeping the original house (House1). House2 needed a lot of work to make it habitable for us. It needed a kitchen redo, new siding, a few new windows and skylights, new paint and carpets upstairs, and oh, the rats had to vacate the attic, lol. So while the work was being done at House2, we started moving stuff out of House1 little by little, taking only what we thought we needed. When House2 was almost ready for us, mostly furniture was left at House1. We then thoroughly cleaned House1, painted some, replaced the dishwasher and the dying fridge with state of the art KitchenAid, got rid of all “gold” doorknobs and hardware, hired a contractor to put a frameless enclosure into the master bath (instead of the brass-framed one). Then House1 went on the market. Our furniture was used for staging (making the realtor happy that he did not have to get a stager in). The market was kind of slow by then, so it took about 10 days to sell, and another month to close. Meanwhile, we slept on the new mattress on the floor in House2 and ate at the counter, which was fine for us.
Because we had the luxury of several months to go through the insides of House1, cleaning and culling stuff did not seem like such a chore. Cleaning the garage and Mr.'s shed was the epic finale though… Let’s say I have dump receipts pinned in the garage showing that we got rid of a ton of junk. A real metric ton!!! Never again.
So long story short: you eat the elephant one bite at a time. Get a dumpster and start filling it, little by little, while making periodic runs to Goodwill with no longer needed useful stuff. Attack one area at a time or one category of stuff at a time. Good luck!
I had to do this. First with MIL’s house which was in the family for a century. Because it wasn’t so personal, it wasn’t that bad. Then we got to our family home of 20 years. Whole other story We get attached to junk, or I do, anyways. So…the tortuous task began…
As @thumper1 advised, a dumpster is most useful, That a medium sized boxes of bins to hold donation items. Sadly for us, most of our things were not fit to donate. Shameful how we held onto that junk all of these years that Salvation Army would not take. Not much gently used thing in there.
Of course, the sentimental stuff, and if you have hoarding traits in you that I certainly do, it’s very very difficult. I had plans for each room to look streamlined and fresh, and just about everything had to go as our furniture was junk. It’s amazing what the eye overlooks in the familiar.
Had a conversation with my MIL recently about her desire to downsize a bit, and all the “valuable” things stashed in her 2 BR rental. I asked her what she meant by “valuable”, and whether she meant that these were things that she felt could be sold. Nope. They are all things she feels should be passed down in the family. This is a woman who left Cuba in 1964 with her young child (my DH) and the clothing on their backs. All of the “valuable” things have been accumulated since then, and perhaps that initial loss of home and objects make everything that much more meaningful for her. Some of my MIL’s objects were quite expensive (sterling flatware, Wedgwood china, etc.) when acquired, and all are quite lovely. She is much more interested in creating a formal and attractive home environment than I am. However, there is only one grandchild (my DD) who will be stuck with all of it one day. My poor kid will end up with stuff from me (including my "family stuff’) and DH, from my MIL, from my SIL (not married, no kids), and my FIL (long divorced from MIL and now in a nursing home so the stuff got left with MIL).
When MIL passed on the Wedgwood to my DD two Xmases ago, my DD took it off to grad school and uses it as her everyday china. Lots of your “too valuable to just toss” things aren’t likely to sell for much, so I say chuck the everyday items, and use the “too valuable” things now. Enjoy them now. And, if you break any dishes or crystal, or hideously stain any of the linens, that just means one less thing to pack, move, or worry about.
