Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child.
Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to use it. When the father died, the stuff in the shed was mostly junk to be sorted into scrap metal or put in the skip. A very few useful tools, a bunch of valueless obsolete tools, and a little antique/collectable stuff. The mother’s stuff was useful or precious to her, mementoes and knick-knacks. Plus some hoarder mentality that made sense given her background. Mostly valueless stuff to anyone else. What value is a drawer of your smalls?
I want my parents to pass their problem down to me and my siblings. I think forcing parents to tidy up or downsize can be cruel. Why be selfish and needlessly make my parents sad?
Back in school, when we were about 17 years old, another kid told me
that his Great Uncle had died, and caused him much stress. He'd never
met this distant relative, so I enquired, why was he worried? Great
Uncle Ben-Ali had named my school-friend, who he'd heard about only
through a grandparent but "taken a shine to", as the sole heir and
benefactor of his estate - 5 acres of harsh scrub land about 200 miles
into the mountains of Morocco containing a shack and two donkeys. He'd
received a letter, which was very specific that he was now responsible
for the welfare of the donkeys.
Today, this would probably be the start of a great scam, but this was
in the 1980s before people "had internet". Many people would have just
ignored the whole situation, but my friend, true to his conscience,
enlisted Arabic translators and sent letters back and forth to North
Morocco for months. Eventually the fate of the donkeys was secured.
It was agreed that Ben-Ali's neighbour, whose land they had already
wandered on to, would have the donkeys, and the shack would go back to
the village/local-government.
The article you linked I agree with almost fully, nice work.
The only part I have issue with is when the teacher says “we fix things by "switching them off and on again"” as if that’s a bad thing. I see and agree with your actual point, but a power cycle is generally step one for almost all debugging.
> the teacher says “we fix things by "switching them off and on again"”
as if that’s a bad thing
TBH, as an electronics engineer and computer scientist it's the first
thing I do too :) I think my point in that article was that we
shouldn't teach that it's the _only_ recourse, and after if it still
doesn't work then just replace it.
It's still one step better than the wisdom of my Grandmother's
generation:
"If it doesn't work bang it once on the top. If it still doesn't work
bang it hard on the side twice. If it still doesn't work, call a man."
Chip creep was the behavior for chips to walk out of their packages due to temperature cycling, percussive maintenance helped reseat things, sometimes enough to make them work again.
My dad always talked about lifting the front edge of a component up 2 inches and then letting it drop - he called it the "2-inch test". He said that either it would reseat whatever was flaky, or make it super obvious that it needed to be reseated.
> but a power cycle is generally step one for almost all debugging
If you're not the sysadmin and the debugging relates to a production server, stop power cycling it and causing it to fsck on the way up while I'm trying to actually fix it tho lmao. Bonus points: you're frying all the information I need to actually see what is going wrong, now I'm digging in logs and monitoring graphs hoping to catch a clue
Definitely not something that happened repeatedly this morning, haha
And an altruistic gift for friends and family: take away their useless rubbish.
Tell your aunt you need some wires from that old Pentium computer she has, and take it to be recycled.
“Drop in” at your friends on the way to the dump with half a trailer full of rubbish, and ask if they want to fill up the other half for free.
When there is a book market on, visit your friends and take away their old books to go to the market. Boxes of books they don’t really want but which are too “valuable” to throw out.
Tell your friends you are doing a metal recycling run, and does anyone have any old metal that they want gone?
One friend I took 3 or 4 trailer loads of stuff away, mess which was really depressing them, and it has really cheered them up over the long term.
Yeah, we had a lot of construction debris once, and rented a 30 cubic-yard dumpster (one of the big ones). After we tossed what we had, we told the neighbors to bring all they wanted. It was really helpful, especially since there were definitely a few that were down on their luck.
It was an awesome way to build good-will, since the price difference between a 10 and 30 cu.yd dumpster was ~10%. Obviously most of the cost is in the truck roll.
We also did the opposite once: we were demolishing a small vacation home, so we told some of the locals to pick through and take what they wanted. It was funny seeing our kitchen.. but in a different house.
This is great! I can recommend everyone doing this - it's weirdly satisfying to help out in other peoples places and not as much a "chore" as in your own home for some reason.
You can clean up, move stuff around, throw things out, get them a better vacuum, set up wifi, get them better lighting, decorate stuff, or whatever you're good at.
It's the same psychological mechanism at play when you can quickly give good advice and plan in other peoples lives but it's harder applying in your own.
I recommend trying to "optimize" your friends or parents homes if they are down / getting old - for me it's about getting rid of or organising their stuff stuff, making it easy to clean, set up good lighting etc. Always respect peoples history and stuff and history of course.
I've found books surprisingly hard to get rid of. Local recycling center doesn't take them, and they are pretty heavy so you can't set out a big bin full of them for trash collection. Used bookstores are extremely picky about titles, authors, and condition. Listing and selling on eBay is not worth the time for the tiny amount of money you may make, and most of them don't even sell.
I mostly just end up throwing them away a few at a time.
The unfortunate fact is that although we romanticize reading, most books don't have much trade value. And if it's already in the Library of Congress, it's as good as archived.
Still, my household(multigenerational) has too many books, and this is mostly an artifact of a childhood that gave me plenty to read. We even still have the incomplete Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia picked up from when the school library dumped them.
It'll be the "great book downsizing", for us. Someday. Occasionally I look into scanning the ones I have sentimental value towards, and there are services to do so...but really, that would just displace the problem into "digital junk hoarding". It's hard to let go of things, especially in the gradual way that fits with our waste stream system.
The best tactic I've had to deal with it is to first make an explicit division of space (no piles allowed, at least have a tray or tie the bundle) and then use the divisions to create a ranking mechanism. You don't have to let go of things immediately, but whenever you have a day where you value space over stuff, the low rank stuff can be taken out with minimal ceremony: "thank you very much".
I have a big cinderblock set of bookshelves in the back of my garage. It's where the not quite ready to go out yet books go. I did some book downsizing during the pandemic. This summer I'm going to try to get some more books and a fair bit of clothing out of the house.
That surprises me. I've always been able to donate to my local library for their annual book sale. I've also seen donation containers in various parking lots around my area. Books are one of the easier things for me to get rid of.
>Listing and selling on eBay
Yeah, unless something is a big ticket item, eBay isn't worth the effort. You used to be able to outsource it to someone for a cut but nothing like that seems to exist any longer.
This is probably why a lot of book exchanges[1] have odd books. I remember sitting in a bar which decor were bookshelves with old books, I found a book about DOS 5.0 which actually amused me.
Your comment is cathartic to me for reasons I cannot explain. I hope, for my sake, that everything you mentioned really is something you're doing often. I love the idea of constant forward progress in downsizing not just your own possessions, but that of the near and dears too.
Oh, I definitely try to help, although it is very very important to be respectful.
One friend showed me a bag with a heap of kiwi fruit fluff they had collected a decade ago. Nothing to see here.
One friend had too many tables, so I thought it might help them to grok the absurdity of that if I gave them a bunch more tables (tables which someone else was discarding): that didn’t work because they now have tables stacked up on one another. Nice enough tables, but I feel bad. Also it is very likely I will help them move . . .
I am semi-retired, but I still need to take care I am not wasting my time.
The free trailer load to the dump is fun mental jujutsu because dumping stuff isn’t cheap: someone who just can’t pass up a bargain trying to choose stuff to throw out for free! Needs a believable reason why it is “free” e.g. neighbour already paid me, or work is paying for it.
I haven’t done the book one exactly, but I have done similar.
Careful with this, it's the thinking process which leads to hoarding behavior if unchecked.
Have you already refurbished a couple tables just for fun? It might make sense to flip some furniture as a hobby.
If you haven't, this is a recipe for being that guy with too many tables, whose friends drive by with a half-filled trailer and ask, politely, if maybe they want to throw something away today.
I think I understand your feeling. The thing that makes me most empathetic with my family and friends is visiting them at their house and witnessing their struggling with stuff. It looks like a physical equivalent to the emotions and feelings in which we often find ourselves entrapped.
A light dose of psychedelics does wonders for me in this regard. I’ll suddenly look at my place and see as if for the first time that thing that’s been laying around for weeks. “Oh, I put it there because I was anxious for this and that. Of course that’s not its place. Let’s move it where it belongs.” I love my mostly empty house, there’s so much space to move around and breathe.
>constant forward progress in downsizing not just your own possessions
Or at least keep it in a steady state past some point. I've been in my current house for 25 years and I find that I need to allocate time now and then to go through and clean out some clothes, books, electronics, etc. Especially with a fair bit of storage space it can be tempting to just toss something in the attic because it's easier than getting of it--especially for bulkier items.
I helped a friend move out. They loved to buy stuff and never use it. Anyone who came over to help left with some decently priced trinkets. I left with an instant pot, sous vide wand, console table, a bag of small electronics, expensive markers and pens, and other stuff I surely forgot. I couldn't believe my good fortune and felt I had to compensate them. But they refused. We had performed an extremely valuable service just removing the items, the value of which was immaterial.
I'm in a high foot-traffic urban area and anything that's too cumbersome to sell locally (I don't want to haggle over a $5 item) we just put outside on the sidewalk. Almost all of the time, it finds a new home.
Yup, I never turn down leftovers or anything my parents want to give me even though at least 3/4th of it goes right in the trash or recycle. They need help letting go and I'm here to take it off their hands.
I've been doing this with my parents, but for stuff I want. They have a lot of old computer stuff that they don't need. I've been taking some of it each time I visit.
It helps them declutter and lets me make sure they don't throw any of it away. I can always dispose of it later if I decide it's not useful.
My mom passed away unexpectedly and in her sleep last year. She had been depressed for half a year prior because she had lost her spouse to cancer. She had not yet gone through their items.
So between the household results of half a year of depression and two lifetimes worth of stuff it was so overwhelming that I only believed we could get through it all because there was no other outcome to believe was possible. My aunt has experience with this and she flew home to help. It took us about a month.
And now I have half a basement room, not even 5% of the things they’d had, waiting to be packed up and shipped to me. It was all stuff that at the time I could not imagine getting rid of.
Now, I know that I will have a ton of re-sorting ahead of me because after a year has passed I doubt I’ll want to keep all of that stuff.
Maybe but this is different. Computers are a hobby for me and this is hardware and software I used growing up. It's not like I'm taking stuff I have no interest in.
My grandmother was an incessant collector. She collected anything in the shape of a chicken or with a chicken on it, and her house was lined with shelves of chicken nick-nacks. But she also had an impressive wind-up toy collection, a collection of cherubs, a collection of supposedly collectable porcelain dolls from QVC. Probably a few others that I've forgotten.
In the last few years of her life, she became very concerned with the work her children and grandchildren would have to undertake to clean out her house. She went through and added a note on a sticker on the backs of things for who she though should get them.
But in the end it was easy. My grandmother created an order of magnitude more grief for herself worrying about cleaning up after her than actually existed. And I wish that she hadn't had that burden on her.
Most of her children and grandchildren didn't have any sentimental connection to all of the things, and those of us that did went through and grabbed what we wanted. Once that was done, we called Goodwill and they came and cleaned out the rest.
Seriously could not finish the opening story. I understand a small tinge of disdain for the effort required, but surely deep down a sense of gratitude and nostalgia should be mixed in no? Do people really not have no love for their parents they inherited the belongings of? The fact of the inheritance occuring is a hint that we're already filtering for kids who did not have an amiable relationship with their parents, so assuming that, i cannot understand how resentment can "slice through" your feelings of loss. Perhaps it can be mixed in, sure, but if it fills your heart so much as displace your sense of loss, I cannot imagine a more selfish and ungrateful attitude towards one's loving parents.
Why can't you love someone, but not appreciate a new project they've given you that creates hundreds of hours of unpleasant work?
Sure, you might bear it willingly out of that love, but you don't have to like a new tedious, dirty, frustrating project just because you love(d) the person who left it to you.
To take it a step further, the junk is usually a result of your loved one's insecurities and fears. It's largely a reminder of a burden you wish they hadn't even had to carry. Now that you have to carry the results of it, it makes sense just to want to be rid of it all.
Indeed! I've got my own projects to be dealing with!
Honestly the way I see it my mum knows me well enough. If I'm instructed to do anything like a tidyup it will be done quickly, efficiently, and without emotion.
Take a picture of your nostalgia items and bin them, the emotion is in the memory anyway. You'll look at it just as infrequently but at least it's only taking up bytes now.
Extract the useful-to-you stuff and get someone to cart everything else away with a "you get everything for £500 if you take it ALL away" deal.
If she doesn't want this I imagine my sister will be in charge, haha.
I think you’re reading too much into the language of that one sentence. But also, if you’ve never felt true loss before, anger and resentment are absolutely a part of the grieving process. It’s very natural to feel anger when coping with the loss of a loved one.
My partner has inherited a big project and collection that meant everything to their Dad. He would always say, I want this taken on etc. But when push comes to shove, the prospect/reality of inheriting someone else's hobby/business, which requires years and years of work with no return just feels more and more bizarre and absurd. But you feel indebted and horrible not carrying through with wishes.
Never mind a pile of junk. You can just inherit a big pile of problems.
It depends what kind of relationship you had with the parent(s). I'll give you an example: I've not seen my mother in half a decade, I've barely seen her in twelve years. Perhaps that's for the best, after all, she did just leave my father and I over twenty years ago to pursue a man twenty years younger than her from the other side of the world that she met in a psychic chatroom. When I have spoken to her, as recently as last Christmas, we only argue. I've tried extremely hard.
Well said. The best strategy is to always just say "Yes, thanks!" whenever they offer you something they do decide to get rid of. My grandma used to bring boxes of junk to family reunions and put it on a free table. My sister and I would always be sure to take almost everything. She felt better that it was getting "used" and we just trashed/donated it as appropriate.
People forget that they kept this "junk" for a reason. When you tell them to get rid of it or call it junk, you are insulting them, not their possession. It doesn't matter that you think their reason is silly. They would think a lot of your stuff is silly too. It is so sad that we've lost (almost ?) all ability for empathy. We have become so selfish and it is sad.
I don’t necessarily look forward to this, but I imagine it’ll be very satisfying sorting through my parents’ stuff and finding all the little gems.
Of course 80% of it is junk, but 80% of everything I save is junk too, so I can hardly blame them for it.
My dad recently threw out a lot of his old school stuff that we’d gone through and looked at a few times during various instances of cleanup over the course of my life, and I think I was more sad than him.
I imagine he has all that stuff somewhere inside his head still, but to me the only tangible remains of the time when my dad was a boy/young adult have disappeared.
> to me the only tangible remains of the time when my dad was a boy/young adult have disappeared.
My parents, when they were young and carefree and enjoying life, used to make mix tapes. Loads of them. There was something almost magical about being able to listen to them in my old car, and experience a little window into what they used to listen to etc.
Sadly my car went to the great scrapyard in the sky and now I hold onto a plethora of cassette tapes I'm unsure I'll ever listen to. Silly really.
I'm also sorting through my parents things (the article is timely), here's a drive-by suggestion: pick up a Walkman on eBay.
My folks have a rack of VHS cassettes of their performances in plays, which they ripped to DVD at some point. I haven't started watching them but I'm lucky to have them.
Get a cheap tape deck and digitize them. They are just containers of information that will otherwise wear out. After that, get rid of both and enjoy the contents any time.
My parents recently died but before they passed by siblings and I were invited to help them declutter (it was Covid and a nursing assistant was coming to live with them). It took five trips to get things down to normalcy but the benefit I saw was that we got to talk with them about their mementos.
Doing it while they are alive is important because you get to here to story behind it. Without that it’s just unlabeled and soon to be forgotten junk.
One of my parents is a hoarder and has filled up a 2500+sqft house with junk. It is so bad that there are aisles carved through the house so that they can get through it.
My siblings and I have been begging and pleading with them to sort this out for the past 20 years. We have offered to help. But they haven't, as said parent is "throw themselves in front of the car if we try to leave with anything" emotionally attached to this stuff and somehow maintains an inventory of everything, including how they bought it and how it made them feel.
Now they are getting old and infirm and are barely able to afford the house that they are renting, let alone put in the effort to clean it up. My siblings and I are going to be stuck with a quagmire where they only solution is to pay a professional to come over and clean out the house, and that will not be cheap.
I feel your pain. But they won't change. We cleared a house in a week, that belonged to a hoarder. It can be done. And requires a week, rather than years of pestering and agonising yourself.
Our neighbour died and the kids just paid not much for house clearance, which was a side line of the funeral parlor. For them it's a gamble as to whether they will find something of worth to make it worthwhile.
I have another slowly dementing relative with mobility issues. They need space, but will not give up piles of plates, and four knive blocks that litter their precious kitchen space. They don't even cook. It's impossible, and when I dare to help, it is just met with derision and scorn.
I chucked ten back issues of phone books/directories and have never lived it down.
It's important to note that anything too big for a vacuum cleaner to pick up off of carpet can, with a moment's practice, be picked up with a broom and a dust pan. Don't try to separate everything into boxes and trashcans by hand. It takes too long and it's hard on your back.
Importantly, if trash is a bulk operation, then the cost difference between keeping things versus throwing them out becomes more pronounced, earlier on.
I'm sure most of us have that experience of figuring out that our stuff isn't going to fit in the truck and/or car and all of a sudden things we really intended to keep become negotiable. Problem is that there are probably three other things you'd be more willing to part with, but they're already in boxes in the truck.
Thank you for this perspective. I agree, my parents have a lot of bad habits one of which is holding on to things that may be of value at some point for way too long. I help get rid of extra things occasionally but whenever I push too hard I can see the stress and anxiety it causes them. They've been through a lot, if having more things than they need soothes them, so be it!
I was having a tangential conversation with my parents this morning.
They're getting on, and are looking at selling a treasured holiday property in a warm country - I originally thought it was due to not feeling able, or wanting to, visit - but it's because when they die they're worried about me and my brothers having to sort out marketing it and paying the inheritance tax.
I pointed out that's not a burden, it'll be fine, we're all adults and can sort things like that out - only sell if it they want to spend the money on visiting other places, or doing other things, not because they worry about being a burden after they're gone.
Yeah I “de-thatched” my parents basement by filling up an enormous dumpster of shit. Literally things like “oh here are 9 CRT monitors that will never be used” etc. objectively it improved the basement and usability at zero opportunity cost. But it didn’t make them happier at all. My conclusion was better to let them do as they wish. I fortunately don’t have to live amidst the debris. (The basement has since then swelled to full capacity and spilled into two disgusting permanent tents outside).
You stumbled upon one issue some people have. You can declutter but they use that opportunity to refill and somethings grow even further. Sometimes it is best to leave in place. Unless you get to the root of the issue of why are they keeping it all.
I have this issue currently in my home. My wife does not want to go through anything but will not let me touch it either. "no dear my shoebox sized matchbox cars collection is not worth anything to me and I am not going to play with them lets get rid of it". I leave it be, as is, as it is at least in easy to get rid of boxes now. That was at least a step forward. My parents have filled every possible storage area in their house top to bottom with stuff. Some of it has not seen the light of day in 40 years. It is at least 'neat' but it will be an interesting challenge to pull it all out and sort it. I leave that one be as they have filled the storage areas and they have no more room to still be neat and tidy but grab more items.
I have the same situation with my parents. Their home is storehouse of stuff that my mom bought, mostly with the intent of giving them as gifts as special occasions come up, with paths carved through to get from one room to the next. She knows it's a bit much, but won't let anyone throw anything away. Some day going through it all will be a chore, but I don't think I'll find it difficult to sort out the keep/donate/trash piles.
I've been worrying lately about leaving too much stuff for my kids to deal with, but so far it's mostly things that they left in their rooms when they moved out. I'm trying to keep from acquiring more stuff.
Sometimes, the sentiment is nice, but this 'cruelty' is often times necessary. When your parent's health is in terminal decline and your family can't afford to hire a caretaker or your relative made poor life decisions and needs to live with you for awhile, downsizing and relocating may become necessary if you have to step up and take care of them, assuming there is a healthy relationship. Of course, trying to keep all of their things would be nice, but storage and extra space in the house are at a premium. The essentials and emotional items should be kept, but a lifetime of objects and memories cannot be kept in tough times in small quarters. Sometimes we don't have a choice when being cruel.
I have had to deal with this. Sorting through an entire lifetime's worth of knick-knacks, papers, Christmas cards, plaques commemorating achievements and milestones that probably wouldn't even make sense to a twenty-year-old, all of it.
Sure, it was hard. It takes time.
But so did changing my diapers. And dealing with infant-me crying through the night. And watching toddler-me be picky and waste food, which is a big deal when you get most of your groceries from a charity. All the scrounging and saving for Christmas presents, all the hours spent answering every question that I had as a boy, all the trips together to play in the snow during the winter...
What's unbelievably crass is the idea that children are obliged to respect and sift through gigantic heaps of stuff just because their parents had some emotional connection to some small parts of it - because most of it is guaranteed to be absolutely useless junk they did not actually value but merely couldn't bring themselves to throw away because of hoarding instincts.
The idea that this obligation is some kind of way to repay for what the parents did for the children is completely absurd and idiotic. It does nothing for your parents.
If you want to repay them, spend time with them. Do something for them which they actually experience.
When your parents are dead, sorting through their stuff out of a sense of obligation is basically self-castigating for your failure to do the above. Sure, if you enjoy it, if it helps you deal with the loss, do it. But not because you feel you have to.
> The idea that this obligation is some kind of way to repay for what the parents did for the children is completely absurd and idiotic. It does nothing for your parents.
Thank you for saying this. I can't believe the points people are making here. Your parents are already dead at this point. Of course it does nothing for them. Taking care of them while they're still alive does something for them, but once they're dead nothing can ever affect them again.
I think the 'what is being done for the old parents' is them not having to confront and part with their stuff while they're old but alive. By doing this after they have passed, they get to bypass this possibly mentally taxing task. The value add is debatable. I personally love to get rid of stuff, so it's hard for me to imagine how much of a burden it is. But the point makes sense.
You don't have to sort any of it. You just have to not make them sort it. You can just pay to have it hauled if you don't want it. Or sell the property as is or forfeit the property to the state.
I have to say, you described my mother perfectly. I was the last of five to go to college. I came home for Thanksgiving my freshman year and she said; "I am glad you were not like the others, calling me and writing me all the time. I raised you kids to go off in the world like I did."
Having done both sides I'd say the kids are getting the better deal :-) Palliative care for a parent is draining and can take years but it utterly pales compared to how much effort raising kids is. Doing both at the same time is not recommended!
For some reason you've just reminded me just how much archeologists love midden heaps. I guess pretty much everyone gets to be an archeologist of sort at one time in life.
I see it in a slightly different light: it's a gift they're giving you. In the cleaning, sorting of junk, I've found countless treasures of my dead relatives. Handling it helped me process my grief, reminding me of the good times and the bad. I leap at the opportunity to help clear that stuff out, because it's a powerful grief ritual.
Like the folks in the article, most of what my relatives considered valuable wasn't, by and large, I only kept little worthless trinkets. Like folks in the article, some of my cousins got weird and fought over the stuff, but for me, it's just stuff, and I've got too much of that already.
I agree. My parents should enjoy life to the fullest all the way to the end. Wasting their golden years cleaning up, planning for death, and likely emotionally parting with a lifetime of possessions is not something I'd like to foist on them. It will be time-consuming and painful for me to do, but so what.
Having cleared out 3 parents and a grandparents house, it gives a very stark vision of the destiny of my "stuff". Simply, the bulk of it is going into a landfill.
I have no children, I don't think anyone is really going to be interested much in the pictures of my cats. Or my family. Or my parents. Or any of it.
So, long term, it's all for naught. No museum for us, no trust to maintain an estate for strangers to pay tickets and walk through to take photos for their homes.
But that doesn't mean tossing it away now. Or ever. I'd like to hope I pass surrounded by my home and memories, rather than a sterile empty box already conveniently cleaned out for whoever becomes my estate administrator (whether it's a friend, or some complete stranger).
That said, if you have a collection of anything you deem of value, and you care that it does not end up in a landfill, you'd be wise to distribute it yourself while you can. Otherwise those years of Slurpee cups, Pez dispensers, collectible cereal boxes, etc. will not be cared for properly.
I see this all the time on vintage computer forums. Someone with an estate of stuff they "think" is "worth something" and want to dispose of. Meanwhile, there's always some young Indy posting "that belongs in a museum!" and "don't sell it to those vultures on eBay, they'll just part it out!".
"Well, perhaps, but if it's not out of the house by Friday, it's going to a landfill."
When clearing out an estate house, most people don't have a lot of time to do it, much less deal with it properly. It's one thing if your loved one is nearby, but quite different if you live far away. I had to clear out my fathers house. I live on the West Coast, he lived on the East Coast. There were a lot of mementos in there, things that have been part of my entire life. I even found the TRS-80 that I cut my teeth on in high school, but boxing it up, shipping it home, just wasn't practical.
I had a service come in, we cleared it out, I took the important papers and a few nicknacks. The rest they hauled off to auction, and that was that. I was done in 2 days and on a plane home. Just a stark reality.
So, anyway, keep your stuff. Enjoy it. Get more stuff if that suits you. Clutter is its own thing, and thats different. Just know that at some point, someone is going to come along and most of those things will be meaningless to them, and they'll treat it that way.
Another example. There is a house in Pasadena, the Gamble House. Craftsman home to nth degree, very well preserved. Visitors look upon it in wonder today (I certainly did). The key point is that it's not like this was the only house done like this. Several houses were done, by "important figures" in the field: architects, artisans, etc.
But, in the end, those houses were sold to...people who wanted a house. A roof, kitchen, bed and bathrooms. They weren't looking for a museum, or an art piece. Many of those houses were torn down, remodeled, etc. "OH NO!" some may exclaim, but, that's just the truth of it. Like movie makers crashing classic cars, people view things differently.
I have some things like a fairly big laserdisc collection and some vintage (1980s era) computers and probably various other things that are presumably worth something to someone. But it's honestly not worth my time to pay matchmaker between the stuff and that someone.
Totally agree. I don't want my parents in their golden years to worry about having to "clean up" or becoming a burden after they're gone. I don't want them to have to think about that at all, I want them to have fun and do what they want and spend their time and money how they want.
I'll be quite happy to spend a modicum of effort sorting through material possessions when the time comes, if it means they get to spend just one extra minute creating happiness and joy with their grandchildren.
I don't see what the big deal is to be honest, just a harmless hobby to collect random trinkets, it gives people joy, and you can just get rid of it when they die. I don't see what the harm is
Buying random trinkets that are mass produced in a factory overseas and shipped across the ocean is not ideal.
When you fill your house with it, to the point where you're a hoarder and can't see your floors and walls, that's a health hazard that attracts dirt, rot, and pests.
Alternatively, one really should stop to think about what they care in life at least once or twice each decade.
Lots of people never do it once in their whole life. There's a world of optimization levels between "randomly doing things" and "min-maxing life". There's a huge-ass chunk of people who never leave the 0-optimization level of randomly doing things.
The son in the article, nine months into the process of clearing his parents' house, estimated he is one-third done. That's a lot of mental and physical work he inherited, or alternatively signed up for.
I cannot believe it is necessary to be so persnickety about it that it causes you stress and bitterness. Give your siblings a day to grab anything they want, then rent a dumpster and a wheelbarrow and go to town. Throw away everything you can force yourself to, one room a day. Dad's dead, he won't care. If it takes nine months, you're doing it wrong.
In that case it's a good argument for you to buy a smaller house, but if you accept that it's a matter of preference and not something that can be generalized then it's not a valid argument for other people.
Yeah I think this war on consumerism and boomer lifestyle is a bit exaggerated, and I mean, if you take away all the benefits and rewards you have to take away some of the demands too. I can recycle and share and rent and downsize if I can also downsize my working hours accordingly. A bit weird that the middle class now wants to get rid of the carrot and just have a bigger stick, that doesn't really add up for me.
I think you'll find for the generation being discussed they likely didn't buy "a house as big you can possibly afford". Their houses were sanely priced, decent sized accommodations before the property market went bonkers at some point in the 80's.
My father hoarded all manner of stuff in the garage. It took me days of work to clear it out. And yet I basically understood why each thing was saved.
That chunk of metal was used to repair the car when the front quarter panel rusted from salt. That brass got brazed onto that fixture. Those were the washers for the kitchen sinks. That leather chunk repaired his briefcase. That stuff was used to fence in the garden. That stuff was used to stake the tomato plants. He held onto furniture from my room until I was out of grad school and needed it. etc.
We flat out didn't have the money when I was growing up to just buy stuff from a big box store (and they didn't really exist yet). If we didn't have the material, it didn't get fixed.
A lot of children didn't grow up like this. None of the younger generation in my family want any of the furniture. They have the disposable cash from their parents that they can buy something "new". I would have killed at their age for the stuff I now throw out. C'est la vie.
> I want my parents to pass their problem down to me and my siblings. I think forcing parents to tidy up or downsize can be cruel. Why be selfish and needlessly make my parents sad?
Lots of people downsize before retiring because they don't want to be encumbered by a bunch of junk. It's a lot of work to live in a house surrounded by stuff. It's work to maintain the stuff, it makes it harder to clean, you have to have a larger living space to house it, etc. All of these things are harder on the elderly once they can't move around or do physical work as easily anymore.
It's also not just parents to children. Parents don't typically pass away at once. Often enough it's one spouse leaving a pile of their things for their partner to live with. That can be a weighty reminder of grief and once they pass getting rid of any of their things can be too emotionally heavy to cope with.
This attitude of acceptance is probably the most helpful attitude the vast majority of the time, but I was lucky enough to have parents that radically minimized their possessions in their early 60's and moved into a retirement community, and it has first and foremost been a favor to them. As they've aged a few years, they're just enjoying a wildly unencumbered existence with the bare minimum of regular maintenance chores. They're focused on spending time with the people they want to, not puttering around the house. You're right that this kind of mindset can't be forced on senior citizens and it bespeaks a certain level of affluence, but it is a wonderful way for the elderly to live. I'd encourage children to lay the seeds with their parents before they're elderly and more resistant to change.
A NiCd-powered cordless drill would be my first thought, clearly obsolete since the widespread adoption of lithium battery tools and the rapid degradation in NiCd cells over time. A radial arm saw also comes to mind, replaced for most tasks by the more portable and generally safer compound miter saw. Tools made before modern safety devices, such as table saws without anti-kickback fingers or riving knife. Some tools rely on wear parts like specialty blades or belts that are no longer available. Analog multimeters and fixed-resistance soldering irons.
I've inherited my share of obsolete tools, including but certainly not limited to the above examples.
I inherited a high quality NiCd cordless drill from my late grandfather. I was able to cheaply buy some new cells online, solder them in, and it's good as new! It has a multi-speed gearbox with a ton of torque... useful, but not a common feature on a drill.
I like the connection to previous generations, and remembering these people by using 'obsolete' tools passed down to me.
> A NiCd-powered cordless drill would be my first thought, clearly obsolete since the widespread adoption of lithium battery tools and the rapid degradation in NiCd cells over time.
On the other side, as long as it's something brand-name like Bosch, these things are built to last - and there are still shops around selling new battery packs for them (or you can replace the cells yourself - no fancy BMS required like with modern lithium batteries and no risk of things exploding or going up in blazes if you mess something up!). I'm still using power tools from my grandfather, meanwhile a friend recently complained to me that one of his "new" drills broke less than two weeks in his house renovation.
The thing is, what you can buy in construction stores these days is optimized to last for the two years warranty period aka six or seven times of being used. Keep that "old" stuff, it will likely outlast you. And if you go and buy lithium-based tools, please buy brand name (=Makita) and don't buy knock-off batteries. These are fire hazards.
ETA: The worst thing you can do with NiCd packs is using them while they are nearly empty or squeezing out that last bit of power. That will drive one of the cells into reverse charge and by then it's effectively forever toast [1].
This is probably better described as "not from an algorithmically generated name on Amazon", I think. Makita is great (I have their track saw, it's amazing)--but so are DeWalt, Milwaukee, Bosch, Festool, Metabo HPT (formerly Hitachi), and a bunch of others. Even the relatively "budget" flavors of those (Craftsman for DeWalt/SBD, Ridgid/AEG and Ryobi for Milwaukee/TTG) are solid tools these days; Ryobi still has its reputation from the days before they went neon green, but you'll see professionals using them these days because the battery compatibility guarantee is valuable. Even some of the more ancillary brands you'll see out there, like the new cordless Skil stuff (made by Chervon, who own the EGO line of garden power tools) are quite reliable; I have DeWalt and Makita stuff in my shop, but Skil's 12V tools live in the house and are fantastic.
More important than the brand name is usually the product tier, which is related but not distinct from the brand. Most of the brands above sell cheap tools, often as part of a set, and they're value-engineered until they scream. A bottom-tier DeWalt and a bottom-tier Makita and a low/mid-tier Ryobi probably aren't that different in terms of reliability, nor would the higher tiers of the above. (With some occasional exceptions; the DeWalt oscillating tool they currently sell is the best one I've ever used from any brand, with affordances that I appreciate more. Apparently they've sold particularly good ones for a while. But a drill's a drill, mostly.)
Power tools above the basement-tier have just all gotten really good in a relatively short period of time. Lemons exist for sure (though every time I hear about somebody breaking a drill during something as relatively easy as a house renovation I find myself asking whether they'd bought the cheapest one they could, as before), but overall? We're at a point where you can even make a decent argument for a Harbor Freight blue-flavored cordless set. I wouldn't, because old habits die hard, but you could. And whatever you buy is probably lasting two decades and not costing you a whole heck of a lot.
Agreed about the batteries, though. Don't buy cheap batteries.
I still wouldn't go for HF tools (or any store brand... Tool Shop, Master Mechanic, take your pick) for anything I want to keep forever. You just can't get parts for most of that stuff. I only get HF or MM if I'm buying the tool for one job and need to fit in the budget, otherwise pretty much everything else I've got is pre-owned DeWalt et al. (The warranty-period breakdown is no joke, but a lot of times if they survive much past that they can be good for a while.)
I'm also still not totally sold on cordless tools. I've found corded tools generally much easier to repair. Extension cords are cheaper than batteries, and for my typical applications they're essentially interchangable.
I get where you're coming from, but their modern tools are pretty much in line with everyone else's--bear in mind that there isn't much of a cost savings from them, either. The Hercules portable table saw with a rack-and-pinion fence is a good example. A friend has one, I've calibrated it for him and gotten up into its guts. And it's built pretty well! But, by virtue of being built pretty well, it costs in line with what a Metabo HPT or DeWalt model does on sale, while having a slightly smaller table. Similarly you'll see pretty equivalent motors, bearings, etc. in those as in mid-range "name brand" cordless tools. I'm sure they shave here and there, but it isn't anywhere near what it used to be, and for light use they'll be fine for quite a long time. (Plus? Good return policies.)
There are few tools I wouldn't rather have cordless, though. Corded drills don't step to an impact driver for screw-driving (the only corded drill I have is a low-speed drill/mixer). Cords on an angle grinder or a jigsaw or the like get in the way more than they help. About the only corded hand tools I have are routers, and I wish my track saw was corded mostly so as to be able to pair the dust extractor with it (but I use the track saw outside a lot too, so it's a wash). All the corded tools in my shop have been retrofitted with either a Festool pigtail or a NEMA L5 locking connector to not have to deal with cords on the tool, and that helps, but it's still not great.
Cordless is a dream on construction sites without electricity though. No more danger of tripping over a cord and suddenly you have at least two injured people... a colleague back when I was working in construction had a nasty incident involving an angle grinder and some poor sod lugging a heavy bag of cement who tripped over the cord where the angle grinder was attached to.
Analog multimeters can surprisingly be useful with more complex or short signals. Sometimes providing significantly better results than digital equivalents.
Specialty tools that fit vehicles you don't have. Specialty tools for operations that no one would perform by hand anymore. E.g. a cylinder honing tool.
Whitworth wrenches, sockets, taps, and dies. My dad had a British motorcycle shop around 1980 and I'm pretty sure there is still some of this in his tool boxes in the garage.
Homemade jigs whose purpose you can't even figure out.
I think the dominant category would just be extra or broken or cheap tools that aren't worth hanging on to. For some reason I have like four stubby Phillips #1 screwdrivers. Cheap hatchets with broken handles. Mushroomed lead mallets. A whole drawer of dull drill bits.
Ooh, those are good. I have a few homemade (or home-modified) specialty tools for my old cars, and some I'll certainly never have use for again.
Those are one reason I've never yet had a British or German car, though I do have one with a British-derived engine and a German fuel injection system. (I'll have to remember to pass on all the custom tools when I get rid of the car. The chances are slim to none that I'll ever own another one.)
A eggbeater drill is as obsolete as it'll ever get. Good ones are worth hanging on to for those occasions when you need to drill a couple of holes some ways from the nearest outlet. Plus, kids love them and will happily spend a ridiculous amount of time drilling holes in scrap.
They also work in tighter spots than an electric drill. There's usually less bulk off the axis in at least one direction, generally opposite the crank. If you're in a corner, you're usually boned though.
The drills that are guaranteed to be trash in 20 years are the battery ones. I have a set and love them for when I need to drill more than a couple holes, but I have no illusions that I'll be passing them down to anybody because the batteries will be unavailable.
Oh no, Dad's old all-steel table saw that was designed and built to be repaired, and which has the same tolerances as a "precision tool" today, doesn't have bluetooth to pair with your iPhone? Guess you'll just have to toss it, then.
Unfortunately it probably also doesn't have all the safety features like a riving blade, either. That doesn't mean it's useless, but it does mean it needs more care to use it and novice woodworkers shouldn't rush in blindly.
They are. A proper one goes up and down with the blade. A saw without an in-built provision for that is a surprisingly tough retrofit [0].
A riving knife that doesn't go up and down with the blade is just a pain in the ass that gets removed the first time you aren't making a through cut and rarely gets reinstalled.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4CuchotcM_4 If you've never seen the inside of a Unisaw, there's a lot of parts in that video that weren't there when the saw left the Delta factory. Even if you mass-produced a kit, it would require reworking some of the original parts, possibly at machinist level tolerances.
Someone in my town started a tool library. It's a collection of tools that people can borrow and then return. At the moment it's just in a storage locker. Some tools can be obscure and rarely used like a toilet wrench for the "spud nut" for the gasket that's under a toilet tank.
I've seen the guy from "my self reliance" (Youtube) use manual hand drill in the building of his remote cabin. No power for electric drill. A battery operated drill would probably fail rather quickly boring through a log with a large drill head. If I remember correctly, proper wood working chisel sets are still very highly priced. And the antique ones can be of higher quality.
"Highly priced" should be taken in context, for a retired person who has no other income it's worth to go to the effort of selling them on eBay or the like. For the type of crowd on HN who probably have relatively well paying jobs, probably not.
He prefers 80+ year old American chisels due to quality of steal. "The older the better".
But anyway, just to confirm, I did an ebay search and top of the line Japanese chisel set is listed for $8.5k.
I was thinking "highly prized" but wrote "highly priced", but I think it can stand.
Look at what gets put out at jumble/rummage sales and charity shops. In addition to what others posted, I see a lot of rusty screwdrivers (Phillips and slot) which everyone already has (and most of the time you're using Pozidriv or Torx anyway) and rusty spade drills.
Every once in a while you spot a good one before someone else does (pincers, a good vintage cast-iron hacksaw frame for €5, a pristine sheet metal clamp for €1), but most of it is crap.
Which does make me wonder where all the good tools go.
> Which does make me wonder where all the good tools go.
Now I'm imagining tool companies sending people around to garage sales and estate sales to buy up good used tools to landfill them so that they can sell not so good new tools.
Snapped up by collectors if they are desirable enough, check out the going rate for pre 1960s hand planes or vintage Snap On socket sets in obsolete sizes!
A brace and bit can be really useful if you're working with very soft or delicate woods. Also a bit and brace is fairly cheap, but good bits for them are lot pricier.
I’ve done this twice for parents in this year alone.
Yeah, sure, it’s a gift I can give. But also, it took valuable time away from other care I could have given, not to mention the time it took away from my own family and work.
Overall, it’s a consumption problem that everyone should address routinely. We as a society would benefit from editing our own lives from time to time, and make this burden less for all parties involved.
> Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child.
This is contextual per family; but absolutely not. There are parents who make it known to their children that they were never wanted so when a child goes no-contact, the onus of cleaning up after them post mortem can be handled by someone else.
Synopsis of "The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning" by Margareta Magnusson.
In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming.
Swedish garages are never used for cars. Their only purpose is to hold a whole lot of trash that "you may need some day". I've visited lots of houses when I was on the market, nearly all of them had a garage or basement completely full of what to me looks like trash (as the article says, to the owners, it's old stuff that has some sentimental value, of course).
A bunch of American garages are the same way. There are lots of 2 car garages in suburbs that only have enough empty space for 1 car, if any at all. I suspect that this may be more of a widespread phenomenon than I had realized.
Growing up, I'd hear of all of these big tech companies that got started in some guy's parent's garage. I considered my parent's 1 car garage: mom complained when she couldn't put the car in it, and the rest was filled with tools and the lawnmower. No way a company other than a car shop could get started there.
I think a part of the issue lies with the fact that most homes built in large suburban developments of the 21st century don't have basements. My dad kept his tools and camping gear and other less used stuff in the basement. I have to sacrifice a parking spot and still usually need to move a bunch of "stuff" in order to use my table saw or work on anything larger than a bench top.
You forgot the semi-official extra storage that many houses come with, especially I guess in the northern half: the sauna. :)
Apologies to any sensitive readers from Finland.
In my case, no sauna and previous owners redid the garage into hall/utility (laundry) room/big bathroom and a small unheated workshop. Guess where the clutter lives, heh. :/
Btw, “sparks joy” was invented for the English translation. The Japanese was IIRC “tokimeki”, so I’d say that is a clever localization but is too specific about the kind of emotion sparked.
Kondo’s Japanese books also have a lot more specific advice about trash disposal in Japan, which can be difficult, leading to hoarding because you don’t want to figure out how to do it.
Japan has some high productivity systems for sure, but in things like trash and childcare they’ve instead chosen to have very complicated processes you have to get just right, and instead of improving them they just have all of society shame you if you ever get any of it wrong.
I've often seen that when old houses get torn down, everything inside gets dumped into a skip that later goes to a magical place that does magical things with it.
I'm quite sure similar services can also be used by the average person. You simply google for these magical words '産廃業者 $CITY'. Most* things can and will be handled by your local 'industrial waste' disposal person. Industrial here stands for non-consumer, not stuff-in-factories.
* Except hazardous materials like asbestos, used paint and assorted chemicals which require another kind of disposal service that the city council can point one to.
Even if you follow Kondo's methodology, your late parents' things are almost certainly "sentimental items", which Kondo explicitly states to leave for last.
When FiL passed away there were multiple buildings on their 50 acres full of stuff. Both he and MiL were only children. Everything over 200 yrs had flowed to them.
“Priceless heirlooms” weren’t of interest to anyone. Auctions led to junk dealers. There is a hopelessness in realizing that lifetimes of activity were of little value, that nobody even knew what many objects were.
I felt like the girl in the movie Labyrinth when they weigh her down w worldly possessions. There’s no way to train for it. It’s like the Kipple of Philip K Dick.
Oh yes, we had a few of these accumulators on my wife's side of the family. It's like the depression created an entire generation that couldn't bear to throw anything away.
Five giant boxes of rags. Every tax return back to 1942. Every disposable coffee cup sleeve. Presents, never opened. Dresses, last worn in the 1980s. Every little white table-shaped thing that comes in a takeaway pizza box. 20 of the same wrench, all rusty. The old front door knob, long since replaced. Unopened, in-box power tools from the 1960s. Boxes of their own parents' stuff they never sorted through. 72 boxes of piano sheet music. All in a tiny post-war 3 bed family house. It took us 2 years to get through it all.
Poverty does that to the brain, if you weren't aware.
I have the same hoarding mentality, despite being extremely wealthy by my parents standards.
My mum still keeps everything she gets her hands on, part of the reason is because reacquiring once discarded may not be possible. So better to be safe.
While you get pretty good at using things to fix other things, these days everything seems to be single-use molded plastic with clips; once broken it often has no chance of being fixed. :\
Some hoarding tendencies seem to be genetic, too. My father was a medium grade hoarder. He lived through the depression (born in 1922), but lived on a farm and said he didn't want for much. He was "poor" by urban standards, but didn't know it. Never went hungry, had enough money to buy what they didn't grow.
His garage when he died was packed to the gills with ... stuff. Mostly tools (he was a mechanic) and things he dabbled with, but almost none of it quality in any sense. Enough to where he built a little outbuilding/shed and kept shit there too.
I'm not to outbuilding level, but I have the same tendencies, and I'm very well off by most standards. I'm working on it, and now that I've gone through my father's death and had to deal with that, am focusing on not having my son have to do it.
It's not even poverty as much as material scarcity. That may seem like a distinction without a difference in the capitalist Western context, but the distinction becomes clear in different systems.
My mother grew up fairly wealthy in a socialist economy, with a level of comfort and stability that doesn't match much of what we consider the experience of poverty. But material consumer goods were more difficult to come by and replace than in the 1980s US context that she later immigrated to. that mismatch has been apparent in a hundred conversations where she's unable to answer "why do you need to keep this" but also unable to discard the item.
This kind of hoarding runs on my mother's side of the family. My mother's mother lived through the depression and saved _everything_. When she was put into a nursing home we had to get the house ready for sale and there was quite a flurry of junk to throw out.
My mother is a little bit better, but she definitely saves more stuff than necessary. Not to quite the scale of her mother, but it seems like a learned behavior.
> All in a tiny post-war 3 bed family house. It took us 2 years to get through it all.
Did it take you 2 years because you thought some of it would be actually valuable?
Seems like a weekend job with a couple of buddies and a pack of beer. Buddies are also great for this, because they don't have any emotional attachment to the junk.
It takes time because maybe you want to go through it all, to either learn and understand more about your parent(s), or to judge for yourself what is "valuable" and what is "junk" - both very subjective terms (with exceptions of course).
It's easy to say "toss it all out in a weekend" when it's not your family's stuff.. hence your point about getting friends to help. :-) But sometimes efficiency and speed isn't the point.
My SO is going through something similar and it's a very emotional and meticulous process, where you don't want to miss out on a chance to learn about your family's history as you sort through it all, particularly if you don't have much family left.
I feel a bit that way about my life’s accumulation of books. I suspect that the vast majority will end up getting donated to the library book sale after I die (plenty of worn and ancient paperbacks). I have made a point of pre-segregating the books that will likely have a notable resale value, but those are not many. Perhaps when I’m older but not too old I may spend some time trying to connect some of the specialized sub-collections with individual collectors who will treasure them as I did.
I bought a used book online, and it had a person's last name and a book club in it. I was able to trace it back to a woman in the Carolinas that died without family. Her obituary gave a bit of her life story and I treasure the book all the more because I know a bit about the woman and how she loved reading and gardening (it was a gardening book).
I have a book which has some diary entries written at the ends of chapters. It seems that the diarist's wife wanted them to move from the farm they lived on and the diarist was reluctant to do so but was going to acquiesce out of love for his wife.
I'd check if they can be donated first, rather than leaving that burden for your next of kin. The phrase also works the other way around: One man's treasure is another man's junk.
When we had to clear out the apartment of MiL, she had a sizable collection of books, and a bunch of clothes and shoes that had only been worn once. We tried the library and a few different charity shops, but for most things they said no. The books went in the trash and the clothes went in a clothing recycling bin - which I guess means they also ended up in the trash.
Hopefully all of my (by now many) physical books will get donated to the village library from where my mother grew up and where my parents live right now. I remember I borrowed a David Copperfield translation and never returned it, that happened about ~30 years ago. I still feel guilty about it from time to time.
Based on personal experiences trying to give away my collection of 2000's scifi/fantasy books, it's hard even to give them away.
The physical book market is shrinking and a significant portion of new readers likely use ebooks/audiobooks instead so there's just far less demand for physical books.
I think it's going to be very hard to even give books away in the coming decades, I can see the vast majority going to recycling.
County jails. Having spent time in county jails, a lot of them have few or no books and people in them are desperate for something to read as jails tend to have literally nothing to do except stare at the walls (no TVs, radios etc). They all happily take book donations. Doesn't matter how weird or esoteric the books are, someone will read them. I read over 800 books in jail, and because beggars can't be choosers I read some weird and wonderful things.
Book charities won't send to jails, only to prisons, because they say people aren't held long enough in jails, even though I know people who have been waiting 11 years for trial so far.
Did you try a used book store? They'll at least take them off your hands for a nominal amount, even if they then throw most of them away. Half Priced Books has this business model.
Used book stores--such as there are these days--tend to be very selective about what they take. So you haul in a box or two and they'll take a relative handful off your hands.
My local library will take books for their annual fundraising sale. But I suspect most end up recycled or tossed even so.
Here in Ithaca, NY the "Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library" has a book sale of donated books twice a year. Each sale goes over several weeks with prices declining, with the last day being "$1 for a medium sized bag full of books".
After the sale a large dumpster is parked out front and the volunteers fill it with things that didn't sell, to be sent off for disposal (recycling, I think.)
I'm also kinda worried about my parents bookshelves. Some of it has probably bit over minimal resale value like book series still collected. Many things albeit interesting for period not so much actual value...
I wonder how it will end up, let the people pick interesting stuff and then leave some value there and have someone buy it in bulk or get all of it and save the cost to recycling and processing it.
I thinking it was the Canadian sitcom "Kims Convenience" that had the excellent line from the father when he was cleaning out his basement with his son:
"We're putting things into two piles, one we're throwing away now and the other you throw away when your mother and I have died."
First thing I did was take a bunch of photos. One of the things that had meaning wasn't the individual items, but the assemblage of the whole: the choices made in the arrangement of tools in the workshop, projects being worked on, the "look and feel" of the house. After that I felt I could "disassemble" things without losing too much: in the process getting rid of cruft and keeping other stuff.
A big part of the job was "reverse engineering" the things the deceased knew but I didn't, and I could no longer ask about. That random key? Can it go out, or is it irreplaceable and belongs to something that matters?
In my mind the best thing a person can do to ease the clean up is leave current documentation. Little things like labeling keys and making sure documents have dates. The things in your head that others can't know.
The article itself illustrates the photo-aspect of it. There are some very touching photos of personal items in the article. No doubt the photos themselves (especially artfully shot) will give some of the same emotional fulfillment.
If you have a decent photo of the side of the key, you can make a pretty good guess at the bitting code, which is essentially the instructions for making a copy. Here's an example of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoRyv4ANhM4
Admittedly I was only thinking of like safes and lockboxes, stuff you could probably open without the key anyway given a bit of time
I doubt there's any forgotten houses or cars in my family's junk collection in any case and I have no use for old bike locks and padlocks, they'd binned anyway whether I found a matching key or not
I get this if one of your parents was a bad painter and filled the house with huge framed canvases. Otherwise, I'm just looking for stuff I want, and anything that I know was meant for posterity and few people would care about (my father updates a family tree, for example.) After that, call a professional and sell the lot to them i.e. the thing that these people mention not doing.
You may "lose" your parents if you don't have all of their stuff (I'm not sure what that means, but the article keeps saying it), but luckily, the odds are you won't have to live without them for more than another 20-30 years.
If that stuff outlived your parents, that means that it served its purpose well. Let somebody else buy it off ebay from an estate liquidator so it will create more happiness in the world, rather than hoarding it, which is the impulse I really suspect these situations are feeding.
I have brought up in hypotheticals to anyone who might be lumbered with them after my untimely passing the best ways to liquidate a lot of board games without getting pennies on the dollar. My only actual worry about my (physical) estate is that my heirs may get ripped off while dumping it.
I can't really think of much I'd want from my parents house. Maybe a few items with family history. But mostly, it is like you said -- they've mostly got their stuff for a reason, and if it serves them well for as long as they need it, then it has already met and likely exceeded expectations.
On the other hand, one step removed I think it makes more sense, because you have maybe less direct contact with the person -- I've got a microscope and and oil stone from my grandfather, which have some significant sentimental value to me. These were almost certainly obsolete when I got them, more than a couple years ago (Well, the microscope at least. An oil stone will last you a while). I think I value these because he was a very precise, but also very down-to-earth guy. That's my summary, having had limited time with him. My mom would not be able to sum up his whole personality in two items, because she has a much more full view of it. But, despite knowing that this stuff holds only the slightest outline of his personality, it really does mean a lot to me.
I generally don't need to be reminded of the things I did as a child. Anyway, what am I going to do with these things, put them in my closet to burden my heirs?
If I see something useful that also reminds me of my parents or my childhood, all the better. But it has to be something that's integrated into my life, not something that I'm attaching to my life because I'm afraid to give anything up.
edit: I do have to say that there might be a subtext in the article that I agree with. The useless stuff that your kids will have to deal with after you die is probably also useless to you now, so you should deal with it now.
Oh, I had tons of them. When my parents decided to move out of their house, I had a blast going through the stuff and remembering things. Still, except for my LEGO bricks, everything went into the trash.
I don't. We moved too much. Aside from computers and video games, there wasn't really any "stuff" that survived all those moves. Even less survived 13 years after moving out. My parents were always pretty ruthless about culling things.
Generational differences in tastes will take its toll on some of this more than other bits. I don't know anyone under the age of 40 who cares one bit about fine china and china cabinets. As more and more people who collected china die off, there's a bigger glut of it. Collections that took a lifetime and thousands of dollars to accumulate end up going for pennies at estate sales while the cabinets end up in a landfill. Pianos seem to be going the same way. Probably grandfather clocks too. There are some younger folks who are interested in these things but not enough to sop up the ever increasing supply coming in from estates.
Oh no, this reminds me that I have a box in my basement with my grandparents' wedding china that they got in the 1940's or something. My dad gave me the box, and I'm not allowed to throw the thing away as long as he lives.
But it's completely useless. It's pretty, but you can't ever use it. It's not dishwasher safe, it's extremely fragile, and I cannot imagine ever hosting some kind of event where it would be appropriate to bust it out. Hell, I don't even know if my grandparents ever used it, or if it was just a thing that you "should" collect, and therefore they collected it.
It feels like a waste to just throw it out, but I realize you're right, there's not gonna be a market for things like this ten, twenty, years from now.
> ...there's not gonna be a market for things like this ten, twenty, years from now.
You never know. Vintage fans are a thing, after all (1940s and 1950s are quite popular). When the time comes, ask around - there might be someone keen. Worth checking with family too - there might be someone who'll love and use it just for that connection.
It will move down market until supply and demand equalize.
There's a plethora of china cabinets and hutches right now. They'll be used as storage. And when the supply dries up (because 90% of them will have been thrown away or destroyed in hard use) people who want one will spend $50 on them. Metal cabinets that held various sizes of card stock went through the same thing starting a couple decades ago.
The point of the parent poster was that the market is going to be completely saturated when the boomers die, because there's way more boomers with stuff like this laying around, than vintage fans who would appreciate it.
Pianos don't age well. Antique pianos either need an incredible amount of money spending on them to restore or they are furniture at best. Most pianos were cheap when new and are worth negative money once they are old.
I sold some shares (stock)in 1993 for around $8000. I bought the best PC I could get with about $3500 (a 488DX66 with 8MB RAM...). I bought my wife a 30 year old Yamaha U3 upright piano for about $4000. (It was built the same year I was born).
We still have the U3 (I just looked and they are worth about $7K now). I think it is overdue for a tune but it still has that beautiful near Grand piano tone.
The PC and the next one and the next one I bought are all in in landfill or melted down somewhere.
I feel like having the fine china in your house is a flex, like you're saying "my home is so big I have space to fill it with a bunch of dishware I never use." From my vantage point today it seems as if status symbols were a much bigger deal back then. I considered getting rock countertops for my kitchen at one point, but I realized that a) I don't actually care if my countertops are plastic and b) none of my friends care either. Same with fine china- it wouldn't actually impress anyone very much. The biggest flex you could make in the present day would be to tell your friends that your college debts were paid off.
I bet house price inflation is a factor. Pianos, china cabinets, and grandfather clocks are all a major pain to move and aren't worth owning until you have purchased your forever home.
"Why" - people apparently thought that owning that sort of thing was a sign of being "grown-up", and you were supposed to do that if at all possible, to show that you're a respectable person.
But in reality, those reasons are nonsense. Relics of a past age.
Also, convincing the entire population that owning a large set of useless expensive things is essential to a successful life is a good way to sell a lot of stuff and keep your China cabinet factory in business.
My father's family lost everything in the Great Depression. His earliest memories were of moving out of the mansion into successively smaller houses. My mom is the daughter of refugees who often went hungry in their early years in the US. When I was growing up in the 80s, we lived in relatively wealth, but I thought we were poor. We had economizing rituals that are laughable in retrospect: we'd save everything including used tin cans, we would share a single teabag for making tea at breakfast, nothing ever got replaced if it could be fixed (Dad still keeps an 1980s-era microwave working, although over the years he's had to replace half the components on the main board).
My parents' house is now probably worth millions. They had careers and have savings and are living out a very comfortable retirement. There's a house full of stuff that I'll have to deal with one day. It will be hard, but I will try to look at it as a meditation on the challeneges they went through and how they coped.
I expect one of the hardest parts to be books. I was raised to think of books as practically sacred. Every inch of the house is stacked deep in books: art books, science books, old books, mass market books ... Libraries might want 1% of them, but they'd sell the others at fundraisers for a nickel or maybe just send them off to be pulped.
There's also my dad's old computer stuff. I think there's a PDP-11 rotting in the garage. When I was a kid, there was a big old analog computer out there. I suspect these will be re-homable.
Recently had this experience. It helped me to consider it this way:
An old stage theatre has finally closed, after nearly a century in operation. I had the task of emptying the prop room. Going through it, I found very recognizable things from shows I knew and loved. Also some things I maybe remembered, but not sure what script it supported. And lots of stuff, no idea why it was there or what show it was in.
Anyway, it's just props. The actors have done their lines, the shows long finished their runs, the audiences come and gone. The important part, the only part that really stays with us is the memory of the performances and how that changes us.
So sure, keep a prop or two if they are particularly commemerative. But don't worry about the rest. They can move on to another performance in another theatre elsewhere, or even the bonfire if that's their fate. Others should have them if they find them useful for their audiences.
I feel like these days, stuff is incredibly cheap and therefore it's very easy to accumulate a huge amount of it. Sure, we have out sentimental items and useful tools we use everyday. But a huge amount goes un-used, sitting in boxes, closets, attics and garages waiting to be thrown away.
I try to "live small". My apartment is relatively small. I'm still wearing clothes from high-school. I still the knife, fork and spoon I bought when I moved out on my own. When something breaks I mend it, replace it or turn it into something new. I'm not a hardcore minimalist, far from it. But there is great joy in having enough.
The difference here is that until recently things used to be well made and built to last. It's easy to buy a bunch of junky tools etc that might last a few years but it sometimes amazes me how people don't understand that owning a few good quality tools that will last forever is vastly preferable to giving them away.
Same is true with a lot of other things, but of course this is only relevant if you're going to use them.
Alao furnitures. Though they are out of style I would totally accept the well made furniture my parents own than the shit we tend to buy nowadays at ikea and similar that don't last 2 moves. Problem is partner would probably not accept it.
I live out of a carry on bag mostly. My stuff is pretty minimal but the heaviest things I own are the books. I have some really weird old ones too, like one for learning german from 1939 and another on how to survive an atomic bomb from 1946. Just weird shit that's hard to find and hard to let go of.
I tend to like doing book trades though so it pays off on my travels.
at one point I was moving a stack of books and realized I'm essentially moving thinly sheared off logs around. It was quite a visual to imagine me moving stumps of logs around the size of small UHaul boxes. That's essentially what that quantity of books felt like when divvied out into small cardboard boxes to push the load into bite sized chunks.
After having to deal with all the stuff my parents left behind I swore to myself that I would not do the same thing to my kids.
It's easy to say "just throw it out" but so many items have nostalgia and memories attached. Yet if I hadn't had to sort through it all, I never would have missed that stuff.
For me, often the amount of time I've hung on to the item becomes the reason I keep it longer, rather than the item itself. "Oh wow I've had this trinket since the 5th grade. It's not really significant to me anymore, but it feels a little sad to get rid of it now."
My dad is getting older and even though he doesn't say it I can tell he's contemplating his own mortality. He recently asked me if I'd like to take the old Vic-20, C-64 and Apple 2e off his hands. We have a lot of very fond memories we made together with that technology and it played a part of who I am today. But frankly I don't have the room nor do I have the time to do anything with that stuff. It'd just sit in a box in my garage.
I was surprised at how cheap it was, actually, once I went ahead and bought myself an old C64. These things aren't remotely at "collector level" prices yet, and they might well never be. They're still usually cheaper than the sticker price back when they were new, and with inflation that's not very expensive.
I have the impression people are selling more to "make sure it ends up with someone who can appreciate it" than to make a profit, and that's a good example to follow in other niches than vintage computers I think.
Not sure about ebay but you can't sell on amazon any longer without them knowing everything about you. I used to sell but am no longer allowed. Not worth it.
I wish I’d archived the contents of the floppies from my old 8-bit days. They would fit on the smallest SD card* now, and I would have like to reminisce and laugh at myself for things that were hard for me at 12.
> if I hadn't had to sort through it all, I never would have missed that stuff.
That's the thing I hate most about doing deep cleans. I end up emotionally drained from nostalgia. If someone else had thrown away all the mathoms while I was on vacation, I'd never even notice they went missing.
My strategy from moving frequently was to leave things I don't use in the boxes, and if they're still there when I move again it's time for them to go. Now that I've settled down I set a period of time instead. This had the side benefit of helping me figure out the few mementos I really care about so I start taking better care of them.
What's hit me the most are a few keepsake items. I have a watch handed down, worthless. I have a old cigar tray from Cuba. I have some fine dishware we pull out at christmas and i say "this is from your grandmother when she lived in Cuba".
However, I sold my grandfathers STHL chainsaw, and that guy still uses it.
Where I live we have 'council clean-up' days. It's a designated day once per year you can leave a reasonable amount of rubbish outside your house including old furniture, tools, utensils etc etc. The good thing is it's widely advertised and if you sort your stuff out properly and lay it out in an organised manner, lots of amateur collectors will come and take it away to re-sell or re-use leaving only a small amount of true rubbish for the council to actually pick up (3 days later than the advertised day).
I am fortunate to live in a country where there are lots of people below me on the totem pole. There is a delighted recipient for literally everything we have outgrown.
Pretty much everyday is council day here - you can leave whatever you like, whenever you like, by the kerb and it'll be gone by lunchtime. While it's painful to see so much need, it's gratifying that everything finds a new home where it will be used.
[broken stuff is especially in demand - it can be fixed and reused - there's an active trade in collecting broken appliances. Large stuff, like furniture will be collected by charity organisations.]
> you can leave whatever you like, whenever you like, by the kerb and it'll be gone by lunchtime.
I used to live in the SF bay area, and a good amount of items would be gone as you described. Items I couldnt sell on CL likely ended up on someone else's CL account who had more time to sell (I was moving) .
I suspect a surprising amount of stuff put on the street ends up with hoarders.
If I am putting stuff on the street, I try to trickle it out over the day, to spread the love, and hopefully avoid it all going to one person. The best is when it goes to someone who obviously needs it: perhaps a recent refugee immigrant, or a broke-arse single mum.
Picking up “valuable” stuff is a vice, so I try to only collect what is immediately useful to me or friends. It is however surprising the junk that people will take.
Me too with a sad twist: no matter how often I put a sign on my council kerbside collection e-waste saying "works" some metal scavenger on a copper hunt cuts the powercord and moves on. They're trashing value to extract the one bit they care about.
Value is a word which is used in two senses. One is yours: what $ can I get for it. The other is use-value: the object can be used to perform it's role.
What they do, to extract $ value, is destroy use-value. The use-value didn't interest them, but waking at 4am and driving round before anyone ELSE sees the copper and takes it, interests them mightily. Consequently, anyone who is interested in finding things, finds broken things, not useful things.
In Amsterdam we have a Facebook Group called "Amsterdam Deelt/Geeft (Shares/Gives)" with 40k+ members. Almost anything you put up there is picked up within 24hrs by a very happy new owner!
I must have given a way over 50 items through this page. It is really nice that you can see the happiness of the person who will benefit from what you don't need anymore.
We went through this ten years ago with my wife's dad. He had a lot of stuff, but he had a lot of hobbies...there was relatively little "junk," and he used a lot of it until just a year or two before he passed. Some of it went to fellow hobbyists. Some went into storage. The stuff we just couldn't deal with were sold, along with the house, to a professional flipper who conducted an estate sale, hauled the rest away, and remodeled and sold the house.
My mom was smart, for the most part. My parents weren't really big into accumulating stuff, beyond what people without many hobbies accumulate over the years. Twenty years after my dad passed, my mom downsized before she sold the house and moved into and independent living community. We got professional help downsizing further when she moved from independent living to assisted living, and finally got rid of almost everything else when she went into memory care. As much as she'd gotten rid of, she still had an amazing amount of stuff. It was a little easier doing it in stages, I suppose.
I watched a friend have to deal with this. There’s just so much to sort through or get rid of.
My grandfather left dozens of model airplanes behind. No one in the family flies them. Most of the people he used to fly them with died before he did. Fortunately, my grandmother is still alive and we’ve found people who would appreciate the planes.
We could have just burned everything but we have emotional ties to these things.
If you are in a niche, plan to get rid of it BEFORE you get old. Please, there are collectors, and stuff!
I just got four new to me toolboxes, from my neighbor who was a diesel mechanic. Perfectly good after a bit of sanding and oiling. They're awesome, from the 80s, well made, and they'll keep me going for a long time.
My father, a prodigious collector of oddities has done several wholsale removals of collections.
One comes to mind in parcticular - every single novel, novella, newspaper clipping and piece of paper of "E Phillip Oppenheim", a turn of the century paperback novelist who wrote hundreds of books and stories. Some guy drove out, gave him a nominal amount (a pittance for all the work done), but another avid collector.
Somewhere Indiana Jones of the paperback detective world is screaming "This belongs in a museum!"
Curators wish to save things in museums and are surely the epitome of hoarders, for whom almost anything can be valuable, but however who can’t even accept extremely valuable collections because the museum is already bursting at the seams. And proper curation takes, time, effort and resources.
Imagine turning down the collection of someone and rending a hole in their heart and putting tears in their eyes: decades of a collector’s loving care for their particular interest, for a bunch of stuff the museum just can’t accept.
>I just got four new to me toolboxes, from my neighbor who was a diesel mechanic. Perfectly good after a bit of sanding and oiling. They're awesome, from the 80s, well made, and they'll keep me going for a long time.
They'll keep you going until you get a "real" toolbox (just like he did) at which point they will be relegated to holding your assortment of flare fittings or electrical connectors or something and then 40yr later when that stuff too is in a cabinet and the boxes has sat empty for 20yr you'll give it to your neighbor who'll say "wow this thing must be well made, look how long it's lasted" when in reality it only has like 5-10yr of being used for tools on it.
It’s really not that simple. My grandfather had almost a year to find people. Almost everyone he’d known was dead. The others already had too many of the things and were in the same situation.
Chemo stopped him from putting more work into finding people.
There are hobbyist groups for just about anything, but they can be small and hard to find. I’m twenty years, I’m sure there would be three people somewhere who would want the reMarkable I have now, but I’d have no way of reaching those people.
This is sage advice for non-collectors too. My parents had the good sense to hold an estate sale before they downsized and moved in with a relative, they knew that it’s a massive burden to leave children with a house full of unwanted things and I’m grateful for their pragmatism. Of course the real treasures, things that have been in the family for generations, they held on to.
my first Saab i bought was from a guy who ran worked at NASA and in his later life contributed to a rail museum near Hagerstown. I have his original title which bore the NASA Bank as the lender. Very cool stuff! Looked it up and he worked on most of the missions you've heard of today.
Around a decade ago I saw an old guy flying one of those (some biplane replica) off of a racetrack for the runway in a school field and asked him what he thought of these newfangled drones and his reply was "I'll shoot them down!"
My mother is very pragmatic about this. She took me and my brother aside and (to paraphrase) said "You don't need sentimental a attachment to these things. Keep a few bits if you want, get rid of everything else. But this, this and this are valuable and you should get them properly appraised and then use the money for something you need. The rest shift as you want."
As someone who's fairly minimal (and definitely doesn't like clutter) it was lovely to hear and has (somewhat!) relaxed me. I'm definitely the kind of person who would have felt guilty about shifting the things she has chosen to surround herself with otherwise.
Be careful with appraisers. They essentially make money by making you feel like your collection of stuff is worth something and worth insuring. If you get things appraised multiple times over many years, you better believe that they will come up with higher values each year, otherwise you won't feel good about continuing to use that appraiser in the future.
Then when you actually try to sell the item(s), you will discover that they are only worth what someone will pay you for them (minus the time it takes to find the buyer and manage the transaction).
The "good china" that they got for their wedding with the fancy pattern - no younger people want it, especially if it's not in great condition and complete. The silverware is only worth something if they are solid silver - for their value to melt down - not as cutlery or a collectable (and those knives - the handles are hollow).
My dad had a brief encounter with a coma and it really brought the mountain of his belongings to the forefront of my mind. Books, comics, baseball cards, knives, guns, and other collectibles. Where he stores all this is a giant building that looks like a barn.
After his coma I talked to him about my fears of dealing with this and the issues I had trying to reverse engineer his finances from QuickBooks. He was actually very receptive, and it was an opportunity for him to share his thoughts on life and death with me. Since then he's earmarked or given away a lot of things, and the building is much more organized.
If you find yourself in a situation like the article, don't wait until someone died to deal with those things. In my dad's coma, I observed my own mental state; everything I saw was a collection of memories of my dad, I couldn't fathom if he passed what to do with all of it (and my mother would need to move). I had no hierarchy that correlated things that remind me of him and things that were valuable to him. Those things were impossible to know without a conversation.
> If you find yourself in a situation like the article, don't wait until someone died to deal with those things.
You may not have a choice in the matter. My own dad is 75, my mom passed away two years ago. I've tried several times to nudge him in the direction of dealing with some of his stuff, but he's not interested at all. He's not willing to part with any of mom's things because I think he feels like that would be some kind of betrayal of her memory. I hope he'll get better about that with time, but there are still plenty of things that are "his" that he doesn't want to let go of. We had a debate just a few weeks ago about a push mower that's been used maybe twice in the last decade. I told him that he should sell it or give it away while it can still be useful to someone, he insisted that he might need it someday. He won't... he has a riding mower and weed eater for maintaining his yard, and he's almost at the point where he can't use them. My parents weren't hoarders by any means, but they both grew up poor in the 1950s which left its mark on them, and living in the same home for nearly 50 years gives you the chance to accumulate a lot of stuff.
My dad was born at the beginning of the Great Depression. He told me once about being unable to buy thread, not because they didn't have the money, but because there was no thread to buy - all the thread factories had closed. You had to re-use thread.
Now imagine that that was all you had known for your entire life up to that point. And you had no idea that it would ever be different. That would shape you.
My dad was a hoarder, at least partly because of that. When he saw something that he could possibly use in some way, he kept it.
My dad died earlier this month. I'm getting to clean up the mess. It's not fun. I don't like it. I find it rather depressing that he spent so much effort collecting so much that has so little value. But I can understand why he did.
I wonder what effect the narrow, intermittent shortages of the past 2+ years is going to have on what had been the minimalizing generations.
Before 2020: having more than a few rolls of toilet paper and an extra bottle of cooking and olive oil seemed excessive - I have three grocery stores within walking distance!
Now: we always have two month's worth of toilet paper, and are currently glad that we started stocking cooking oil, because the cheapest available is 5 EUR/liter.
Plus all the little-to-major electronics/amateur radio parts that have been really hard to get the last year or so...
I love getting rid of stuff. I've just packed up my apartment again, and my wife and I have under 5m3 of stuff, and that includes a couple of larger pieces of furniture, 7-8 framed pieces of art, a decently-sized toolbox, and a big TV. Most of the time we're away from our homebase anyway, so living out of two suitcases. It really means that our treasured items are treasured, as most have undergone several iterations of this slimming process.
It's not for everyone, and I'm not trying to make some larger moral point, but for me it always feels so cathartic to strip down the stuff and just be left with items that you actually really like
There's something very pressing about moves that pares down the true sentimental value of some belonging. If the item survived multiple moves it either concentrated in value or waned in value and will soon have skeptical eyes glancing over its continued presence in one's life.
I can remember photographs or something being held onto that after the 3rd move I just said "it's not worth keeping this thing around" and so it went. But it first traveled through this diminishing trajectory that was interesting to observe this incremental detachment to the object like shedding a skin I had now outgrown.
If you are always travelling then yeah, I guess it makes sense. The problem I have with minimalism is that it also minimises the activities you can do. Any sport and hobby requires stuff, the more stuff you have, the more activities you can do.
Painting, playing music, going swimming, skateboarding, playing tennis, running, picnic/barbecue, hiking etc etc.
If you don't have any stuff, you can't be active. I just get bored to death when the only thing I do in my free time, is looking at things and eating/drinking.
Some hobbies certainly require a lot of gear, but I think it's also possible to massively overdo the stuff-to-fun ratio. We go for four-hour hikes with our trainers, our badminton rackets weigh almost nothing and take up almost no space, and so on.
> If you don't have any stuff, you can't be active
This is simply false. We're currently on a little island and there are boats and stand-up paddle-boards to rent, we have a scooter and helmets we've rented and go for long drives, there are lots of multi-hour walks we've done in our sneakers, lots of scuba and snorkleing optins, there's kilometers and kilometers of beach to walk along. My only concession to this is travelling with a rash-vest for being in the sun, plus most of my shorts are very happy to get wet / be in the water
It also requires exponentially more stuff to be active year around, and adapting to a full time work/weekend schedule, compared to temporarily with a flexible schedule.
Just the beach walk will require a whole wardrobe of suitable clothes and shoes if you want to do it year around and live in a place with seasons. The scooter doesn't work in the winter.
Renting things also requires you to have a flexible schedule and be outside of the normal work week/weekend, because on a sunday when the weather is nice, everyone wants the stand-up paddle board and all the other stuff at the same time, that's the whole point of owning stuff, that it's there for you when you want it. Renting always means you get it when (most) other people don't want it.
It really depends on how much money you have or want to spend. Skiing frequently is way cheaper over time if you own your own gear. Same with climbing, biking, kayaking, surfing, etc.
Some gear you absolutely cannot rent for liability reasons, like most rock climbing gear.
It also depends on how good you get. I’ve been kayaking for 25 years and whatever I can rent down the street is not likely to work for what I typically want to do.
Being an adult for some years now after the changes in childhood and early adulthood surely is interesting with regards to stuff.
As a kid, you outgrow things so quickly that you often pass them along before they break down, or they break faster due to, well, being a kid. It's natural that things come and go quickly. This rhythm is very different in different times of life. I'm not done pondering it yet.
I have silly items of zero value, that my partner would throw in a heartbeat. I have wires and gadgets rarely used. And books they are not I inerested in. If I dropped tomorrow, my cooking pans and teddy bear would be all that remained!
We had seven days to clear my Dad's which was our family home. Not even enough time to review trinkets and resurface memories. A few useful items went to charity. The rest the scrap heap. And I was limited as to what I could take. I took a multimeter and, a drill, and a barometer. Could have done with some furniture, plants and other stuff, but it was just too bulky to deal with.
My Mum sits on a pile of organised rubbish. And shortly after she shuffles off, the lot will go in the bin.
But then, my family and I have nothing of value. Which does at least save on any squabbling.
Both my parents have and had loads and loads of stuff. My Dad had about five car carcasses. Three sheds of wood. And other junk. It's pretty selfish leaving others to deal with your shit. I know that sounds cold, but it ruins people.
What will happen to the heaps of digital junk stored on flash drives, hard drives, forgotten online accounts? I get overwhelmed thinking about organizing my own electronics files… wonder what my kids will do with it all.
“Oh. This one is encrypted too. I wonder what mum and dad kept on those… Ah well.”
I mean, with digital stuff all the things that may be worthwhile to pass on can be passed on easily way in advance because you don't have to get rid of anything to do so. Online accounts and such will just be forgotten excepting the ones they need to access to finish your affairs (like banking).
The good part about digital content is that you don't have to do absolutely anything with it.
Keep documents and photos accessible, forget the rest.
As we approach multi-generational widespread digital content "cloud" services, we'll see more and more companies allowing content to be easily passed over to the next generation — but just for reference.
I don't need my father’s iCloud photos, but it'd be nice to take a scroll in 20 years.
The cloud services of big tech cos can be counted on to store things cheaply or for free long term, for now. I do not trust them to hold onto anything or preserve access to it for 50 or 100 years. IMHO, people should be their own digital archivists for the really important stuff on those timescales, to avoid the risk of important data being discarded or held hostage by profit motivated companies at some point down the line we can't see coming yet. "The cloud" is young in terms of human life, and the rules we live by are volatile on that scale, shifting with transfers of power and depletion (or discovery) of important resources.
You won't need grandma's YouTube either, but one of these days the videos from your ancestors' early lives will still be there in the hundreds of hours of high quality full colour. The idea that old people's lives were small black and white portraits once or twice per decade and that the past is a long way away, will totally collapse in the next 25-100 years. I keep wondering if that's going to be a big change to society or not.
I try to remind myself to print albums on a regular basis as I am pretty sure my daughters will be as happy as I am to go through old photos albums as the digital stuff will probably be hard to manage.
I've gone through things like digital photo collections with mine and sent whatever they wanted (mostly pictures from their childhoods etc). They seem to prefer storing it all in their phones (w. cloud backup), but I have it all available through a NAS if they ever want it. I suspect that when the missus and I are gone, the physical digital stuff like drives and computers will simply be sent to recycling.
Cleaning out a parent's house is a singular ritual. For me it reminded me that most of the stuff I "value" my kids will not care about, I've worked on putting disposal suggestions into my trust documents so that not only can they efficiently get rid of the stuff, they will do so knowing that it is what I want them to do.
It is the last bit that was hard for me, wondering if my parents would be "okay" with me giving this stuff to a person who is clearly just interested in making a buck of reselling it rather than cherishing it as they did.
A friend of mine has a dad who is known in certain circles (name withheld) and I quote "Mr XYX, the owner of the largest collection of non-running Triumph coupes in the USA". He got a lot of sh*t for what is essentially a junk yard from his city. His house is filled to the brim with model train cars, in the bozes still, and all the EBay printouts of the auctions he won and lost. I do not know what my friend's plans are for all of this when his dad kicks it but I am betting on a lot of hassles around rusted hulks. Although they are strangely photogenic, we took some incredible photos...
The eBay printouts are very useful. You can see which of the models was worth €10, and which were worth €200.
The value will change over time. Probably down, unless there are some very rare models. But it will give your friend some idea (and some terms to search for) when he contacts a local model railway dealer and asks for a quote. (Or lists everything on eBay himself.)
Why is everyone acting like this is not already a solved problem? Heirs are not forced to spend hundreds of hours sifting through their parents stuff... If that is too much of a burden, just call up the nearest estate sale company. They will do it all for you.
Regarding the empathy jab, nice try, but I went through all of this myself when my father died. His affairs were relatively simple and still took almost a full year to resolve. I took a week off from work to drive way up north and go through all of his property and belongings followed by a weekend-long estate sale. It was one of the most physically and emotionally draining things I have ever done.
What I am pointing out is that it doesn't _have_ to be that way, especially if the deceased has lots of belongings. You can go in and keep the things that have sentimental or monetary value and then let the estate liquidation company take care of the rest and keep your sanity. And it just seems like everyone in the thread forgot about this option.
My mother had nothing to go through of note, sentimental or otherwise, when she died. It may seem odd to you, but I wish she did. A lot of things I would have wanted disappeared over the years, and I think I would have given quite a lot to deal with that problem.
I hail from a long line of hoarders - it so happens that the three previous generations all experienced war and associated loss of all possessions.
I know what to do with the mass-produced stuff like furniture, souvenirs and electronics, but I'm going to have a hard time parting with with things my parents made themselves.
Myself, I include the cost of space occupied by each item I'm considering buying. With the real estate prices being what they are it's a great way to limit the amount of new stuff pouring in.
I collect phonograph records, generally from thrift/charity shops. It is always an interesting glimpse into someone's life when an entire record collection (minus anything actually valuable of course) ends up there after a house cleanout. Sometimes a bit of the personality shines through, and if there is a name I can often get more context.
I recently discovered an acetate home recording from the 1940s that had a name on it. I discovered that the family still lived in the area and a little research let me reach out to one of the children to return it to them. They had no idea of the recording's existence, it just went out with all the other stuff.
It's probably a great premise for an extreme cold case murder mystery.
One says "junk transfer" another sees opportunities.
Jewelry likely can be smelted, stones reset in modern settings.
Tools can be refurbished and/or moved into 3rd world markets where things are often repaired.
Ok, trinkets and doilies really are junk, perhaps a handful for movie sets?
Hopefully some bright and hustle style entrepreneurs can find ways to upgrade this junk into the hands that rightfully could use them.
The part I'm particularly hopeful about is more homes coming on the market. Yes they may want for a renovation/updating but think of the multibedrom family homes that grandma is living in housing 1-2 ppl and soon could house a whole family? That's going to be helpful to those currently priced out of the market.
I feel with Millennials not being able to buy normal sized homes and the rise of minimalism with trends like Marie Kondo, this traditional junk transfer may end with Gen X.
I wonder how far back these traditions go? People didn’t have the ability to generate junk until recently. Even the concept of generations is post-WW2.
This only exists because of industrialization and the creation of a middle class who had disposable income to buy surplus stuff. Before that, inherited items were truly precious.
I see it as a % game. A larger % the currently dying generation may have a bunch of useless stuff. The next generation will likely have a lesser %. But it's probably not a big difference in %.
I got it when i saw that dirty green Coleman flashlight. Who'd keep that? But ours was red, we used it at night on our farm and I vividly remember how that button felt and sounded when you clicked it on or off.
My grandparents and great grandparents are dead, so they don't have to live with the embarrassment of having their descendent reduced to being "the sort of person who buys his own furniture," but that's progress. I am keeping some of it, and we all do a purge every few years just in case, but I find it's the photographs that are the hardest to destroy. Something that meant so much to someone else. Like tears in rain, I suppose.
I wonder if digitized objects will hold same sentimental value as real ones. What if taking a picture of a vase or a postcard, or even 3D scan of a toy you cherished as a kid, will help with keeping memories and not agonizing on the decision to junk it.
I stumbled across some digital photos from about 25 years ago while going through my "library". The experience felt very similar to finding some old analogue photos in a box, though unlike with physical photos you'd be unlikely to find them while looking for something that wasn't photos.
Is it just me or is that article written by, and this thread full of, assholes? Your parents are dead and you’re complaining about having to sort through their stuff and deal with their horrible taste in furniture? If you don’t want to deal with it have it all collected and sent to landfill and get on with your life. I’m genuinely surprised at how miserable and selfish sounding a lot (not all) of the people in this thread are.
I would love to be able to just get someone in to clear the house and "get on with my life", but it doesn't work like that when someone dies.
Instead of being able to just grieve I spent all weekend digging through 40 year old bank statements and other crap trying to find all the documents that we need to be able to register the death so we can actually bury him.
And no, I'm not going to just get someone in to clear the place out, because in all the crap is stuff that matters. Some of it will be paper, like his hand-draw schematics from when he worked on Concorde, some of it will be objects like his first camera, or the model of a ship he built when he was young that's in a cupboard somewhere, some will be photos. But all this stuff is buried under all the meaningless objects he filled his house with (how many torches does one man really need?).
The problem with accumulating crap is not the crap itself, it's the way it acts as a barrier to all the stuff that mattered, both to him and to us.
I had been slowling trying to sort all his stuff out before he died, and as we did so we'd uncover little mementos and memory joggers (great for a man in the early stages of dementia). Each one would spark a conversation and his eyes would light up and his voice would get all excited and I'd learn something new about my dad, some new story.
But 95% of the time was just going though tax returns from when he was 30 and insurance documents for policies that expired in the 90s, and pointless objects that were only there because my parents couldn't go into a garden center without buying some nik-nak.
So no, I'm not complaining about all the crap because I'm an asshole. I'm lamenting all the time and effort lost, that could have been better spent with my father when he was alive, and with his memory now he's dead, but which I and my siblings instead have to devote to trying to excavate what's important.
In a way it was good, we'd been planning for a long, slow decline into immobile sinility due to alzheimers and vascular dementia, but in the end he died at home in his sleep, two days after seeing all his kids. He was already getting quite distressed by his memory loss, and would have hated being dependent on carers for everything or ending up in a home.
Go see you parents everyone, you might not have as much time as you think.
I found out overnight my dad passed away. Here's the thing - I might come here and post some thoughts about the big clutter horde at his place that'll need to be sorted out. I'm certainly not coming here to talk about how I feel about my dad passing away. Because.. why would I do that? Who are you people to me? Who am I, or my dad, to any of you?
It would be pretty weird to do the latter, not the former. One is a shareable likely relateable situation with the potential for insight and interesting discussion. The other is a personal matter that doesnt belong on a generic online commenting platform.
I think most people understand this.
You'll have to forgive me that my thoughts are a little muddled on the whole issue right now. My core point is that one aspect of the situation feels quite appropriate to discuss here, while the other more intimate (and central) one does not. The outcome, assuming most other people also feel that way, is that the discussion here is not representative of the grief experienced when a close relative passes away, and shouldn't be taken as any kind of indication about people here 'all being assholes'. And that this is expected and fine.
It's a bit of a cognitive dissonance yes but I do not think they are assholes as you said. They were clearly attached to the items and in essence they people those items once shared the connection. Having strong emotions is not a bad thing, you need to see over the petty complaining.
Quote from the article:
"Sons and daughters who have faced the chore describe wrestling with how to do it properly, respectfully and fairly (also cheaply and quickly) while ghosts hover. The whole process shakes awake buried sorrows, sibling rivalries, family dysfunction. It is never just about the the stuff."
I think the point is that people are obviously sad and grieving about their parents' death, and that then having to deal with their possessions is additional grief.
Someone kept something useless and valueless for decades. It clearly meant something to your recently-deceased parent, so if you just bin it without thinking then that feels like a betrayal to me. Imagine if you walked into your parents' house when they were alive and just started binning their momentos/prized-possesions/favourite cups/tools/etc right in front of their face - what would the reaction be from them?
I don't think people begrudge the time and effort so much, just that they are upset at having to make decisions on what to keep and what not to keep, especially if they are already grieving.
I've got some of this on the horizon for my in-laws. I feel like if I do the clearance and not my wife we can find a happy medium - I know the in-laws well enough and long enough to treat it with respect and deference, but I am also distanced enough to not get all tied up in sorrow about old childhood memories or whatever, and hopefully be able to move quickly(or if nothing else to genuinely clear out the trash and leave the personal stuff to the wife to look through)
I had to deal with my Dad’s possessions when he passed a few years ago. We still have quite a lot of it in our garage. He had a lot of technology that is long since obsolete. A lot of books and toys and things that were important to him. It’s had a profound effect on me and how much stuff I am willing to keep, understanding that it will be burdening someone else some day.
I'm fortunate that Mom and Dad have been considering this and have been actively thinning their possessions as they age.
For about the last 10 years, their "birthday presents" to us kids have been things from the house. (Us kids are old and don't need typical presents. The nostalgic stuff is better now, anyway.)
> But my kids will just have a Google Photos album
If google doesn't lock out your account at some point between now and death.
Seriously, relying on something like google as the repository of all memories seems extremely risky when we know how often they lock accounts for no reason and there is no recourse.
For years I've been engaged in an enormous decluttering project in the house I grew up in. Aside from filling a few huge dumpsters, I went on countless trips to scrap yards to recycle metal stuff, to Best Buy for electronics recycling, to auto parts stores to get rid of old motor oil, to thrift stores to donate useful things, and to a hazardous materials disposal facility where I had to pay nearly $700 to responsibly dispose of fertilizers, antifreeze, old paint, and so on. I also spent entire days digitizing huge amounts of photos and documents. It has been a very time-consuming project. My piece of advice to help prevent this kind of situation is to keep a big "thrift store donation bin" beside your trash and recycling bins.
> And, even if they did want them, this Great Intergenerational Dump is happening just as millennials are facing a housing crisis, which will leave many of them either renting or living in much smaller homes. Grandma’s massive china cabinet is not going to fit.
Seems like a weird comment given the possessions were already in a property in the first place, and the death of the parents will normally result in one of the children inheriting it too. Unless the parents were renting, in which case I doubt they had much space or money to accumulate too much stuff (this will more likely be my generations problem, since homeownership is soo far out of reach for most of us).
As said above, if there is more than one child the most common is that the no child can afford or is willing to pay his siblings their share of the existing house and it ends up split.
Also most people have their own life/home, often far enough from their parents place to want to relocate there.
Ironically, investment grade housing ensures that for multi-child households, the price of a home is generally too high to afford the buyout of other family members, so the "family home" is more likely to bubble up to someone wealthy enough to buy it as a rental.
Just another way the market perversely guides capital toward a centralized population due to the quirks of estate management.
The book "Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind" by Julie Hall is a fairly good guide to how to handle this situation. Would recommend reading it before you need it.
My mother in law was born and died in the same room of her house, which had been her mother’s (father went to war and was KIA; he’d been born in that house).
On of my sisters in law moved in while her mother was dying; she was moving out of her husband’s home (he’d grown up there; his father had too). When her mother died, SIL simply kept living there.
I’d sometimes go into the attic and find weird old stuff. It appeared that stuff was discarded when house was renovated or repaired, but otherwise simply accreted.
This is also about a change from living in houses with some
real estate to living in small boxes stacked on top of each other
in a dense city.
Depending on your family history and where you live maybe this
transition was done a generation before, or even longer, but
for many who have parents and grand parents this is the shift
from houses in more rural areas, or houses with a garden and some
space to dense urban living.
People in small, stacked boxes do not like stuff because there is
little space for stuff.
They are trained to rent everything.
Box, music, movies, games, car, bike, scooter, sports equipment,
tools, a space for parties, coffee, cooking, books, photo albums,
Less common: furniture, clothing
Perhaps in a few decades what a new generation will leave behind is nothing.
Some will say that is great.
People in small, stacked boxes more than others.
I think it is a tragedy.
There is real wealth that is transferred, but there is so much more.
A mosaic of how your parents lived, their culture, what they learned,
and what they treasured.
My father's rich record collection.
From a different time and place.
A time capsule.
Books, some have been handed down in generations.
Most now impossible to buy.
Tools of all sorts.
Some have old and well used and still working and
great to own if you have a house with some property.
All is stuff and stuff is junk now.
Your grandchildren will have no idea about how you lived and what you experienced. There will be no record collection, books, tools.
I do live in a small, stacked box myself and these things I find tragic.
I'm not looking forward to dealing with my parents stuff, a major reason(other than their death) being that taste seems largely generational. They both seem to love giant wooden cabinets...for everything. They both have monstrosities of a TV stand/console/shelf, etc. It's actually nice quality, but nobody I know my age or younger really likes stuff like that. I can't imagine I ever will.
Some things have a bathtub curve of desirability: they go out of fashion but many decades later the good stuff becomes stylish again — retro or antique. Think ugly 50s Formica kitchen table and chairs, 70s cookware and fondue sets, or 80s children’s toys.
There is a public database[1] of registered car models by year in the UK going back decades: if you look at the data for say a super crappy Vauxhall Chevette station wagon, numbers drop sharply followed by a longer slow decline, and finally a ducktail uptick when they become collectable by mental enthusiasts e.g. one acquaintance I know with an original hatchback[2] “I would rather drive my Chevette into the sea - I will never sell it”, gotta agree . . .
Doesn't sound very hard. Walk through and grab the stuff you like, and then have an open inspection to sell off all the stuff you don't want at a price just worth making it for your time.
Perhaps gather the common items like kitchen stuff and dump it at an op shop / charity.
One thing I don't see discussed is how increased longevity means that the inheritors are also older. This means that they have more and more of their own junk to deal with. Even the grandchildren are getting relatively old these days; it is different situation to receive stuff from grandparents when you are just getting your own home set up vs really already having everything you possibly could want
When my grandma died we found something similar. We were getting more and more aggressive with shoving stuff into garbage bags, when my mom and aunt opened the closet and found clothes of my deceased grandfather. He had died ten years before my birth. Most of it was falling apart, except for a tuxedo that fitted me nicely! A good catch for a day of clearing out this apartment.
Almost 400 comments, and noone seems to be getting to the crux of the issue:
This is about mortality, legacy, and humanity's fundamental inability to effectively deal with death.
The "junk" is memories. A lifetime of memories of people important to us - important to them - a record of their accomplishments. It was the best they could do. Not everyone gets a library wing, a mausoleum, or a wikipedia page. But for a brief moment maybe you have your stuff - and stuff triggers memories that your life actually happened and had meaning.
And then you're gone, and it all becomes a useless burden.
Yes, it's frustrating. But it's more existential than that. When you clean out your parents' junk, you have to confront with the reality that in some years someone else will be cleaning out yours. And the memories you're making of the rich and powerful experiences you had will also disappear into the aether.
That is disturbing and upsetting to most humans. I'm impressed so many commenters here can be completely detached from it.
Oh gods I can relate to this article. I am moving from Iceland to Tenerife in the next 2-3 years (just made up my mind last month) and I have a 163 sqm house full of "stuff" I need to reduce to 4 large suitcases in less than 24 months. I dread it but a bonus is that I won't leave a pile of garbage for my kids to clean up once I kick the bucket.
Hoarding is a revolting, serious antisocial behavior. If your loved ones do this, there are counselors and therapists that can address this, if the person(s) are ready to accept responsibility and change their behaviors.
It’s easy to dismiss it as quirky and harmless but it can get out of control if there’s a significant trauma or some other trigger.
I went to a storage shed once with my wife. Her father put a bunch of stuff in a shed including hers. The storage shed manager:
"Yep. Parents store a bunch of shit the kids don't want. The parents die off, then the kids empty it, then add a bunch of shit
their kids don't want into it. The cycle continues. "
Regarding the lock, hurry and do that. My family lost the combination to our safe when my dad passed away, and it was a long time before we regained access (found the note eventually).
The chair I'm sitting in cost me $20 at an estate sale a few houses down from where my parents live, because the wife died and the husband wanted to move to florida.
I do not look forward to the day my parents die because we have a history of accumulating material possessions and there will be a lot of cleaning.
My grandmother died about 8 years ago. One of the things I took when helping clear out her house was a white plastic chopping board - it was probably pretty cheap to buy, but I just hadn't got one at the time. I still use it almost every day... and remember her.
I think this is the spot-on critique of the attitude in the article.
I was in college when my mother's parents died a few years apart. They had all kinds of stuff, but I actually appreciated getting some of their kitchen utensils. Not the flatware, but the knives ( not great ones, just okay ), the slotted spoons, the mixing bowls, hand mixer, things like that. I didn't have any of that stuff. It isn't worth much money, but when you don't have that stuff it is non-negligible to buy especially with the decision cost.
I still use two of the knives for the rougher work in the kitchen and camping.
It brings to mind the story of Jesus talking to the "Rich young ruler" [0]
Where they guy is dismayed at confronting the idea - as we might translate here in this discussion - that his possessions are a great burden and not at all as valuable to anyone as they feel to him. Jesus' instructions seem economically wrong ( Wouldn't some of the stuff convey more value if simply given away instead of sold and given as money? ) but that seems to be the point being made for this individual. ( something of "you think you know what's right, what's valuable, but it's all just a mess" )
My father in law dumped 6 giant totes of my wife's childhood belongings on us right before we moved into our new home. It was a 1000 mile move so basically we had to pay hundreds of dollars for a bunch of crap she didn't even remember having.
PBS has an interesting way of decluttering in the Legacy List series. The service asks for 5-10 mementos to (find and) keep. Everything else goes to resellers, charity, or garbage. They often choose large estates that have been in the family for a century.
One bit of advice I took from an old decluttering book: You can only sentimentalize a limited number of things, so any mementos of yours beyond what are displayed on a single set of shelves should be stored/rotated or discarded.
In my twenties I was cleaning out my apartment if some old stuff and my in laws who had a cat said they would take the boxes to the dump. Turns out they kept the stuff and I had to get rid of it again when my FIL died.
My parents lived on the same farm for 70 years, a mile from where my father's parents had lived since 1905. If you think a suburban home can fill up, just imagine a place with all kinds of outbuildings, and two adults who having grown up dirt poor in the depression, could see potential value in almost anything. But when my father became too incapacitated by age to maintain the place, they bought a new townhouse in the small prairie town 7 miles from the farm, selected the things that they needed and wanted to occupy that space, including a few things they thought they should pass on to their children. Then they sold everything else, including the homestead, at auction. Us kids were permitted to buy anything we wanted personally, of course, but at the auction. Costs for us could come from our eventual inheritance, if necessary (in the end, nothing that valuable went to any of us). A week preparing for the auction, and a morning, and it was all gone.
Now in my own retirement, I have been thinking a lot about what happens to our own homestead, and the tools and detritus of a lifetime that it contains. I've been diligently culling things that I know I won't be able to use in the next 20 years (which is probably the most I've got here), either through Craigslist or the like where an item is still of use to someone, or to by disassembling them and recycling the materials (where feasible), or hauling to the landfill (where recycling is not feasible) for those things that are no longer likely to be useful to anyone.
But that will still leave a lot of stuff. Multiple looms, spinning wheels and associated equipment and fiber material from my wife; innumerable tools and machines that I still use regularly in the orchard, woods, garden, and wood and metal shops; a library of thousands of volumes.
We have a neighbor 15 years older than us who, faced with this problem and no children who wanted their homestead, which they, like us, had built up from bare land over 40 years, found a much smaller place, moved what they wanted there, and sold the homestead, furnishing included. to a younger couple wanting to start a rural life. I like that idea ... make it someone else's problem, but also boon. My own kids will get and have enough that we can afford to sell at a discount if someone who really values the place and supporting materials comes along.
My mother died last year at 92. She was a very wise woman.
One of the 'gifts' she gave her children was to intentionally de-clutter several times. She'd offer us her possessions periodically and would refuse material gifts for holidays or birthdays. At the end, she lived in a small apartment with sparse furnishings.
She also managed her own funeral, making arrangements for all the necessary processes.
Her passing was very difficult, but much, much less than it could have been.
Realizing that someone has too much junk that you're going to inherit is easy. Convincing them to do something about it is hard.
I'm unfortunately going to have to face this scenario with my in-laws and I'm not looking forward to the arguments in the future about a whole storage building of junk that we're going to inherit soon. Rusted cars. Art from the eighties nobody wants. Furniture. Medical records. Lots of planned projects that will never be realized.
Fortunately, I like to collect digital things while being minimalistic with physical things. When I die, I'll just tell my children to bury my hard drives with me.
I think that emigrating killed any hoarding tendencies I may have had. I went to live in another country with two suitcases as my possessions, and left everything else behind. Although scary, I don't miss any of those things and it was one of the most liberating things I have ever done because it thought me that the objects we accumulate are not really that important.
>An exponential growth in storage lockers that are never emptied.
Based on a couple of relatively recent experiences, you probably shouldn't get a storage locker unless it's to bridge some specific short-term need. Otherwise, you're paying monthly rent, mostly kicking the can down the road, and potentially creating an unnecessary chore when someone--who may not even live locally--has to clean out the unit.
We moved across the country a few years ago after living in one place, raising kids, for more than two decades.
The experience of disposing of accumulated junk was very cathartic, and has led us to both reduce accumulation of more junk and look critically at what we still have. We're not close to death (I hope!) but we've left things in a much tidier state for the kids when we do go.
I have hundreds of computer and service manuals for electronics that I will never see again. Part of me wants to give it away, part of me wants to retire and open a vintage repair shop. Everyone under 30 sees it as a pile of trash. Worst case scenario: they can all be thrown into the recycle bin.
Here is the hard one: photos, report cards, all of the "familial documentation." I am a technically-only child and will have no children myself. What will I do with these photos of my mother as a young girl? I've no-one to pass them onto.
What would be the added value of that app compared to already existing options? Where I live (Switzerland) there are already several nation-wide websites where you can publish ads for things you want to sell or give away. And it is absolutely free. Furthermore, as already mentioned in the thread, many charities can clean up a home if needed.
My dad collects things that only people his age collect. I've told him that my and my siblings don't want them when he dies, and they're only valuable while other people his age are still alive, thus if he wants to extract value from them, he needs to sell them immediately yesterday. He's a hoarder though, so someone lucky will buy the very valuable things today for a fraction of a penny on the dollar five years from now, assuming I can find a buyer if the economy is in a depression.
I’ve already told my wife that when her parents die we are just going to burn the house down. I’m just half joking.
I truly don’t understand people that fill up their homes with stuff. You can’t take it with you. And I have no intention of sorting through it. It’s all going straight to the landfill.
> I truly don’t understand people that fill up their homes with stuff.
I almost replied this way, too, but then I remember the junk drawer I have full of DB9 serial cables, Firewire cables, PCI SCSI cards, 256MB RAM chips, 2GB spinning hard disk drives, three prong computer power cables, mice, webcams, power strips, power bricks, and a fully functional Dell OptiPlex GX620 with a screaming Pentium D 3.2GHz CPU. I keep all these things out of some insane sense that "One Day I Might Need It And Will Be Glad I Kept It."
Same reason I keep scrap wood, extra floor tiles, and 1/4 full paint cans in my shed.
I had such a collection. It spent a decade in storage during a transient period of my life, and I emptied my storage when I got a house. I made a decision that I was going to empty every single box, whether or not I'd go on to repack them. I saved a miniscule fraction of the computer stuff, in the face of the evidence that I had not needed it for an entire decade and had no plans to open a computing museum.
I just did the same thing last weekend, from boxes that had been kicking around a few moves, which is where most of my "buildup of crap" came from personally. I'd lived in a series of apartments with more storage space than actively usable space, then I'd met a girl, she owned a house so moved in there, we bought a house together, COVID hit so we sold that house for another with a yard for us and for the dogs, then we split up and I kept this house because she had her eye on one not far away.
Five years after some of these boxes were packed, I finally went through them. I found a few things to keep, like the thank-yous from charity events I've run, but I don't need a monitor stand for a monitor I don't have anymore or all those VGA cables.
My studio and my wood shop are pretty well-organized now. Aiming to keep them that way. The rest of the house--I dunno, I live pretty lightly outside of those two areas.
I had a similar pile but went through it and tried to pick:
- Only one of each type of thing
- Only the highest quality/safest power bricks
- And items that punched above their weight in terms of utility (like an adapter that at least one end was not obsolete)
This reduced my pile by about 75% .
I find that I subconsciously keep a map of things that I encounter on my search for other items and this is actually a burden. Just getting rid of that PCI SCSI card lets me just forget that type of thing even exists and move on with my life.
I've been doing this sort of thing since the pandemic started and I haven't once regretted it. Actually now I have more space for new junk.
I have a similar method: I keep all cables in a set of small boxes. All USB cables go into one box, networking into another etc. I don't allow the boxes to overflow.
This does three things:
1. Makes it easy to find the right cable or to establish definitively that I don't have one.
2. Limits the volume of cables I keep. Say some gadget comes with a micro-USB cable, but the USB box is full. I either already know that I don't need any more micro-USB cables and recycle it right away, or check the box and find another USB cable to recycle to make space. (On extremely rare occasions I decide that the box is too small and either upgrade to a bigger one or split the category up into subcategories. I haven't needed to do this for a very long time.)
3. Makes explicit the process of thinking "Do I need to keep this thing?" instead of automatically storing it away.
I use the same method for chargers, mains extension leads and adapters etc.
I had vinyl siding installed and some wood trim painted on the exterior of my house in 1985. The leftover oil-based paint is stored in my crawl space, which has no direct heat or air conditioning. I used some of the paint in 2021 to touch-up the wood trim and then put the can back in the crawl space.
Don't throw things, get specialists that can sell and redistribute it. You can negotiate to not get money back and they can even take care of what's really trash.
There are definitely people who will move every single thing out of a house in a weekend for free. That's how storage unit auctions are done, and buyers even pay for it.
Exactly, if you want a house empty you can make it empty just about as soon as you would like. The only question is who pays and how much. As you say - if it is junk you will pay some, if there are some things of obvious value you can come out ahead.
Shouldn’t take nearly that long. Get another quote from a professional with a warehouse so they can work from there. Or schedule an estate sale as soon as legally able.
Recently had to do something like this. Here is how I wrapped my mind around it:
Get a large number of identical plastic storage boxes, take a quick picture of everything as you put it in a box, fill the box, put a number on it, take a picture of the box - done. Repeat.
This helped me bypass the physical organization stage of sorting, because before you pack everything, you don’t know what exists yet. Once everything is boxed up and documented, all you have to do is make an excel sheet of what is in each box, and then search through that instead of searching through a physical box.
Tl;dr > replace physical sorting with digital sorting.
I’m not being left anything either, but there is a lot of wealth in assets held by that generation in aggregate, and that’s the wealth transfer they are reporting on. Not just the junk in hoarders houses.
The article says, "The parents of baby boomers, the oldest generation alive today, were savers, having learned in the lean times of war and the Great Depression to treasure what they owned."
It will be handled the exact same way it always has: 90% of the time it's off-loaded at a garage sale, at Goodwill, on E-bay or otherwise sold - almost always below market value because the survivors can't be bothered - they just want it gone.
This is the very basis of yard sales and antiquing.
It's how I get a 1999 BMW Z3 with 20K miles back in 2008 for $5K bundled with a Mac Cube and several $K of other goodies from a widow of a former Apple employee. She just wanted it gone. I didn't even "hardball" her - I gave her what she asked for all of it!
I got a vast stamp and coin collection from my father: my sibs who live within 50 miles of my mother wanted nothing to do with it; she's getting on and needed to deal with it - I was willing to come across the country to take it all. Now I have quite a collection of both valuable stamps and a ton of gold and silver.
It's how you get cheap Ham radio gear, machine tools and furniture also - estate sales.
The article is ignorant of all of this apparently. Never had anyone close to them actually die perhaps. The "problem" will solve itself and no one will notice it ever was a problem!
My take is the population growth differences that accounts for the premise of the article.
The 1950's parents for the first time had extra stuff more so than previous generations with the rise of consumerism, but they also had larger families where the parents of the 1980's took stuff off their parents hands. Garage sales for sure.
Today, the trend is smaller families while the things of the 80's tend not to transfer as well.
This trend will likely continue to be even worse as fast consumerism + innovation makes many items not last more than a few years.
This will be very regional I feel. I have tried to stock my house with used furniture everywhere I've lived. This was very successful when I moved to Cornwall (UK). If you weren't too picky about the styles, there were many options, all at huge discounts over original price. But in contrast to that, in large U.S. urban areas, used furniture shops are not worth your time, with no good deals. I assume this relates, somewhat morbidly, to the difference in death rates vs. new-resident rates.
The difficulties in finding decent used furniture, and not wanting to buy More Particleboard as I've settled in a house I plan to stay in for a good long while, has got me going the other way and building my own furniture.
Articles like this do gently nudge that my personal tastes in styles aren't universal, though, and it will be worth a think at some point as to whether the stuff I'm making is future waste, too.
> The article is ignorant of all of this statement... The "problem" will solve issue and no one will notice it was ever a problem.
I think you've misread the article a little. It's not so much a problem in the sense that there will be an overwhelming wave of junk that piles up on street corners. The problem is that there's a generation which is about to share a collective experience, one which will enforce an already minimalist tendency. The article doesn't spend most of its time going on about waste management. It's about the physical and emotional toil associated with handling an estate. That's why it focuses on stories of individuals struggling.
As someone who lost a parent this last year (and spent three days just removing food from the house), I may be a little biased. But that was my reading.
This is all true, but "cheap" is a tricky term because you have to actively look for it. People picking over stuff to catalog and resell is a valuable service. Like you said, families just want it gone, but even if they wanted top dollar, parting out a collection take a lot of time.
Death is the only way to obtain a lot of hobbyist board games. They usually only go through a printing or two, then are sold and traded for a few years after that until they find the collections that they're loved in, then they sit in those collections for another 50 years until the collector dies.
A collector dying is often cause for a feeding frenzy that will make a hundred people happy. I know of at least two game collectors who had time to plan who threw post-mortem potlatches where the people who they enjoyed playing those games with while they were alive divided the collections between themselves. I guarantee those friends did not feel burdened. Honestly as much an opportunity for renewal as a time of loss.
The most fascinating collection I think, was the auction of notorious mayor, police chief and brow-beater, rather fist beater Frank Rizzo, of Philadelphia.
No where else was there such a collection of awful italian style Tchohkes, religous paintings, horrid furniture and even his own personal police baton.
Or, the article is precisely about you and you don't realize it. You might not be the son in the article. You might be the dad (hopefully with many decades of collecting yet to go).
Oh man, stamps, for the past 10 years I’ve bought “discount” stamps off eBay. Basically buying 45cent or whatever stamps for 25 cents or less and plastering my packages like the… never mind.
Obviously this is the lossy side of stamp collecting, but man, to take a haircut like that after preserving something for 20 or 30 years.
With very rare exceptions, even giant stamp collections are worthless. Stamp collecting is all about collecting, not disposing.
Sure there are catalogs that detail the "listed price" of a stamp, but that's the dealer price to you, not the price they'll buy it at (which is likely < 10%). Buying stamps is really easy, selling them (for their actual value) is hard. (I guess this is true for collections in general.)
Apart from the selling issue, is the searching issue. You might inherit a collection of a few thousand stamps, but it's unlikely to be sorted by value. Which means it has to be examined. By a professional. Which takes time. So there goes any value in it. Which is why a dealer will only pay pennies for a whole collection - it'll chew their time separating the wheat from the chaff.
Best thing you can get any collector to do is dispose of all the value in their collection, or clearly separate the value from the rest, before they pass.
Now me, I have books. Lots and lots of books. The kids will love inheriting those... :)
Yeah, my dad is into stamps... These days he only collects items that are no longer produced (i.e. from Newfoundland), and keeps them highly organized.
No idea if they're actually worth anything, but it gives him pleasure.
“Mail hacking” was a thing. I forget the name they gave it but read an article in 2600 or Phrack some time ago that talked about some of the tricks like the one you mentioned. The only other one I remember was to put a smear of Vaseline in the corner where stamps normally go. It was enough to trick the sorting machine.
This article makes me sad. Is this all what it remains when someone passes away? A headache, an unpleasant chore? What about memories? Do people have no feelings? Are they so selfish?
I think that's the point they were trying to make. I can see things from their perspective: it is pretty antisocial and callous to focus solely on material things when the fact of the matter is that somebody has passed away.
> Kevin Cameron, whose father died last year and whose mother is in a nursing home, must now decide what to keep or toss from their cluttered home in Shelburne, N.S.
I don’t think you read the whole thing. Dealing with these issues after the loss of a parent (and the even more traumatizing loss of a live parent to dementia) can be totally paralyzing. There’s so much fear that you won’t ever remember them attached to everything.
I understand. Perhaps it is a "clear" decision from a Vulkan perspective, but I recognize that it can be difficult, in practice, for any human.
Reminds me of a scene out of Labyrinth where a character tries to convince the protagonist to put more and more stuff on her back. She at first gives in, but then a spark illuminates in her mind and she realizes the stuff she's putting on her back will be like an anchor, not just a barnacle. So she breaks free. This was one of the most important lessons I learned when I was 6.
Somehow I am not very moved by people who have inherited houses having to go to the bother of sorting through yet more stuff they've inherited along with real-estate. For many younger people in the US (perhaps even most of them?) buying a house is either a pipe dream or a life-long debt-servicing endeavor.
Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to use it. When the father died, the stuff in the shed was mostly junk to be sorted into scrap metal or put in the skip. A very few useful tools, a bunch of valueless obsolete tools, and a little antique/collectable stuff. The mother’s stuff was useful or precious to her, mementoes and knick-knacks. Plus some hoarder mentality that made sense given her background. Mostly valueless stuff to anyone else. What value is a drawer of your smalls?
I want my parents to pass their problem down to me and my siblings. I think forcing parents to tidy up or downsize can be cruel. Why be selfish and needlessly make my parents sad?