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First, I was married with children but after 23 yrs my wife decided to move out followed years later with divorce. The boys are grown young men now and on their own. Everyone has moved away but me.
We had a pretty full life and she collected things that we had planned to keep forever: kids toy sets, toddler furniture, sport trophies,wedding, vacation and family albums and much more.
It's been 7 years of living alone in the house full of memorable things but I don't use them anymore and they are sort of painful memories of good times gone.
I've struggled with what to do with all this stuff that is collected in the attic and their rooms.
At the end of last year, I did finally just load up about 2 truck bed loads of stuff, mostly mine, and drop it at the goodwill. Afterwards, I felt pretty good.
By nature, I don't like clutter but I'm surrounded by it. I even have lots of stuff in the garage including tools and various shop supplies used over the years.
Sometimes, I wish I'd get back to the spartan lifestyle I live when I was young. You know, everything I owned could be thrown in the back of my enclosed bed of my pickup truck if I wanted to move.
I know and have read of the 3 month rule but I hate just throwing stuff away.
I notified my boys that they should get the stuff thats important to them or ask their mom if she wants it but they live across the state and the other lives 4 states away ;besides the boys have no where to keep it.
I'm at a struggle of what to do because it feels like an anchor around me with all this stuff I'm just keeping.
I want to feel free of all this stuff.
I guess you have to (like me) either figure out if some things are worth any money or not and then research venues for them, have a yard sale, offer up to friends, etc. on freecycle or just donate again.
Sorry to hear your story. I would offer what you do not intend to keep and give everyone the chance to take it. You cannot be expected to responsible for storing everything in case they want it someday. I wouldn’t keep every trophy or every item. They won’t want them either. They will probably have their own kiDo one day with their own trophies. I am sure you didn’t have your parents trophies.
If it were me, and I am pretty sentimental, I would keep the most important things for myself. Then I would take pictures of their drawings and projects when they were little. The rest, I would at least box up and get it out of sight and put in a garage or spare room, for starters.then, give everyone some time to take what they want.
Best wishes. Time to move on and try to enjoy the rest of your life.
Anything with monetary value can be sold on eBay or Craigslist or a local paper. Things that are serviceable but not worth the effort to sell can be donated to Goodwill, thrift stores, Salvation Army, etc, or given away on Freecycle.org. You can get rid of furniture, toys, tools, clothing, and various household stuff this way.
Your kids need to decide what they want. Put it in a box and ship it to them. If your ex has been gone for years, never asked for any of this stuff, and wasn't awarded any of it in your divorce, I'd assume she doesn't want it and you're free to dispose of it as you see fit. I'd suggest taking one box, and putting important stuff in it, like the photo albums, and getting rid of the rest.
And then what happens? Are you going to downsize to a smaller residence? In order to "feel free" of your past, you may need to make some other changes besides throwing out old clothes and toys.
I would probably condense all the memorable stuff into those big plastic tote boxes and just stack them in the attic or garage...unless you plan on moving or something.
Call the kids and tell them to come and get their stuff if they want it. They probably don't. Other than that, do what everyone else said. Get rid of it.
Someone just told me that you've called the kids. Sorry, I'm tired, and thank you kind stranger.
One of my happiest moments was when I posted a craigslist curb alert in December for my exterior Christmas decorations. They were gone in 5 minutes. The guy who picked them up told me that the lighted, motion deer were happy on his lawn. He was going to put up the icicle lights the next day. He and his wife had just moved into their first house, and they didn't have any money for decorations that year.
I understand what you mean. My GF and I both go through "purge phases" where we just want to get rid of a ton of stuff. I think it's good and healthy, it keeps you from being a hoarder and frankly clutter is so annoying. We are fairly minimalist in our house, without actually realizing it. I think it's because our desires don't really go together for most people -- we like a big house but not a lot of stuff in it. The size is because of noise separation, dedicated spaces (offices, bedrooms, and gym / entertainment areas), etc. but not because we have a lot of "stuff" clogging up every room. Even still, there are times -- like right now -- where I have an overwhelming desire to just go through and get rid of about half the stuff or sell it.
I've typically moved just about every two years (buying and selling homes), which gets tiring, but it also makes sure that you don't bring stuff with you that you don't want. It has been two years and maybe that's why I'm already antsy about still a lot of things I don't want. My dad was in your position and last year basically told me to come get ALL of my stuff from his house. My poor house is nowhere near the enormous (20,000 square feet) size of his, and I basically filled every free space with the stuff I had stored up there, which was most of my collections from childhood or even early adulthood because I stored a lot of stuff there while living in smaller condos. I would say legitimately HALF of all the things in my house need to go, and they're mostly items that need to be sold, because I left behind anything of no value to be discarded.
I'm not sure if this would work for you, but it seems so overwhelming to me because of how much stuff there is that I'm thinking what I'll do is set a daily or weekly goal and just plug away slowly at it, rather than trying to do it all at once. When I've done that before it's like your life is completely put on hold without time for doing anything else, which just doesn't feel very productive. I think if I just focused on selling two boxes of stuff per week, I'd finish the project in 3-4 months anyway.
Ironically I find what I most appreciate as far as "stuff" is usually not very space consuming, like movies and video games, and since I put my movies into large 1,000 DVD cases (4 of them), I can store an enormous library of movies in a very small amount of space. Even so, those have become a complete disaster and I know it. They're all catalogued by software (Delicious Library), don't get me wrong, but the problem is I may have a DVD, a Blu-ray, AND a 4K copy of the same movie, and there's no reason to have the older versions. I need to take the time -- which is going to be a ridiculous project -- to go through these cases and start purging about 500 or so movies from there that I'll never watch again or that I have better versions of (some I have on both DVD and Blu-ray and should have dealt with the duplicates years ago). I know that project won't save me much actual space, but I'm running low on space in the 4th case and I'm not buying a 5th case so it has to be done. It's just not much reward for the hard work :P
I wish you the best of luck, but I will say it's a great thing to do, I think after a while "stuff" starts owning you rather than the other way around.
Contact your kids and tell them that they have 30 days to come and get their stuff or you are donating or selling it. Then see what happens.
My Mom had 10 kids, and a lot of them would store stuff in her garage for years/decades. She finally got so tired of it all, never room for her own things she wanted to store in there and could not even park her car in there and told them to get it by the end of the month or she would sell it all in yard sales weekly and keep the money. Some of them came for things, but others never did. What she couldn't sell, she gave away.
It's your house, your rules. Do what you have to do, not what the kids expect you to do.
I would probably condense all the memorable stuff into those big plastic tote boxes and just stack them in the attic or garage...unless you plan on moving or something.
I agree with putting memorabilia in plastic tote boxes. I have 30 or 40 of them, loaded with stuff I don't need, but don't want to throw away. The type of stuff I might want to look at once every five or ten years. I stack them all in storage cabinets and closets. When my apartment is cleaned up it doesn't even look like I'm a hoarder, even though I am. LOL.
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