A bit of a dark theme for this

[Riffraff]

My wife & I spent months clearing out a ridiculous amount of "stuff" from a family house. Why do old people hold on to so much useless sh!t? My mother always bought new stuff all her life but she never got rid of the old stuff she was replacing. The mail...OMG the mail! I shredded 10 lawn sized trash bags worth. It was stuffed in everything and moved from house to house 4 times. 40 - 50 years worth. She had a shredder so the intent was there but I guess the job was too big. Instead she sat on her couch with her 2 little dogs and bought more useless crap from QVC every day. There were lots of packages from them in closets that weren't even opened. Don't even get me started on them. Their business model seems to be targeting old people with dimentia. Once the clean out was done we put a stupid amount of work into fixing it up so it could be sold. So glad that is finally over but we will have to do it again at her parents place and her father saved way more crap than my mother. We will be filling multiple roll off dumpsters again.

I'm not quite there yet but all my life I pictured retirement as a time when I would do some recording, tinker on some amp projects, take a johnboat out on the lake and do a little fishing...you know the Hallmark card version of retirement. Reality looks more like running a nursing home and caring for old broken down family members that are falling apart slowly on the way out. I want to get a start on cleaning up the mess they never bothered to now but I know I have to wait on a lot of it because there will be resistance about tossing some of the stuff that needs to be thrown out. My mother-in-law has no problem with tossing the stuff my father-in-law stuffing in out buildings and around the yard so I'll start there. I just won't be able to start on the crap she packed the upstairs of her house with.

This is about the joy of life on the way up and the sorrow on the way out.

 

[Trumpet Rider]

I've been through it twice. Looking at doing it at least 3 more times. I swore I won't do that to my kids and I try to keep the unnecessary crap to a minimum, but there will still be a lot for them to deal with when the time comes.

My grandmother did it right. She was a widow in her early 60's. She sold her big house and downsized to an apartment in Kansas City. Eventually she moved to a smaller place in a smaller town, and returned all of the gifts that her kids and grandkids had given her. We were re-gifted her dinner-ware. Later, she moved in with a daughter and by that time had very few possessions. When she died she had almost nothing to be disposed of/dealt with. She was perhaps the least materialistic person I have ever known. My in-laws, on the other hand....

 

[80sTone]

I dunno....but I have stumbled across some 'useless shtt' that I actually thought we did through out and then remembered the how and what for getting it originally - sometimes has good memories we forget about...That said - I cannot abide hoarding either

 

[Riffraff]

I've been through it twice. Looking at doing it at least 3 more times. I swore I won't do that to my kids and I try to keep the unnecessary crap to a minimum, but there will still be a lot for them to deal with when the time comes.

My grandmother did it right. She was a widow in her early 60's. She sold her big house and downsized to an apartment in Kansas City. Eventually she moved to a smaller place in a smaller town, and returned all of the gifts that her kids and grandkids had given her. We were re-gifted her dinner-ware. Later, she moved in with a daughter and by that time had very few possessions. When she died she had almost nothing to be disposed of/dealt with. She was perhaps the least materialistic person I have ever known. My in-laws, on the other hand....

Wow, she really did make an effort to shed things she no longer had a use for. Almost nobody does that. Most of us go on collecting things we don't need and will likely never use right up until the end. My wife and I are going to start that process. We need to just to make our home more comfortable but it will be very helpful when we need to move.