Reply to Parents finally downsized. Now what to do with all this stuff?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We kept 2 pieces of furniture, a set of dishes, a set of mid-mod silverware, photographs, and some jewelry.  Everything else from MIL’s 3 level townhouse we sold, donated, or trashed.  It was really sad because her stuff was so precious to her that she refused to downsize so that she could move closer to us and we ended up ditching over 3/4 of the things that she valued and prized over being able to spend time with her family.  I made a box of photos for us and one for another relative close to her.  I threw away any photo of a person my husband couldn’t recognize and I threw away any photos without people in them.  Eventually, I will send them out to be scanned onto a CD and then we will throw the photos away.  [/quote]

This advice about photos is good - I went through my parents photos and ditched any photos without people. I did consult other family members about who people I didn’t recognize might be, but if we couldn’t identify them I got rid of them. Then I pared down what we had - my parents would take a roll of pictures of each event, and I didn’t need 6 photos of me in my cap and gown at high school graduation. This took maybe 1,000 pictures down to a couple hundred. I had these scanned and shared the files with my family. There were some good ones I was glad to find.

[b]Looking at your list I’d focus on the photos, and hire an estate sale company to handle the rest.[/b] [/quote]

Agree with this. When you go through photos let go of the guilt about throwing most of them away.

My father died in the Spring and my mom moved in with my sister. Each of us siblings and grandchildren took a few things we cared about and mom took a few pieces of furniture, favorite housewares + all memorabilia stuff. Then she turned the house over to an estate agent to deal with all of it. They just finished the sale and between what the sale brought in and the agent's fee Mom only came out about $100 up and that was mainly because of one expensive item. But, the house is now empty, mom and us kids (who are spread out across the country) didn't have to do anything beyond sorting through papers and photos, and mom can move on to selling the house. She's also well set financially so we didn't care about maximizing the value of selling the house stuff and didn't have any real collectors' items. The priority was making it easy. If you want to maximize what you get for the collectibles you'd probably do better selling those on your own. [/quote]

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