Unfortunately my uncle passed away last week and I was in the midst of the family chaos. I've now got a bunch of his stuff to get rid of because no one in the family wanted to deal with it.
Condolences on your uncle and "me too" on dealing with other people's messes!!! My parents decided quite suddenly to chuck it all and do the full-time RV thing, so for the last month I've been digging out their place, sorting what we could yardsale, what we could donate, making seemingly endless runs to the dump... meanwhile the clutter at home has been using my absence to regroup and multiply, I swear!!!
On the upside, making H and the kids come by to help once or twice has been HUGELY effective in getting them all to cooperate with our own decluttering! My father is a packrat like his parents before him, and they were in that house for 18 years... so yeah, it was a lesson, alright! Now the yard sale is over, 2 vanloads (and I mean *PACKED*) have gone to charity, and I am in the final stages of sorting what is left, some of which will go to the local Senior Center yard sale and the rest will go the landfill. If no one in the family wanted it, no one at the yardsale wanted it, and I don't think the seniors can sell it either... well, that's 3 strikes, and I need my space back!!! (There is still roughly a closet's worth of "stuff" they have asked me to hold for them until October... some of it they are taking to donate to a church group when they go on retreat, some of it is heavier clothing for the fall, and some of it is stuff they aren't quite ready to say goodbye to yet... but will re-assess in October.)
Meanwhile, we HAVE made a tiny bit of progress on our OWN clutter in the last few days, and I'm happy to see this thread still alive and kicking! We went through an absolute TON of laundry and culled out things that the kids no longer fit/like/wear, but couldn't be bothered to dispose of, that was about 5 trashbags full, all told. My niece wants "hippie garlands (long shreds of random fabrics)" for her wedding in October, so I am sorting out old sheets from our linens to contribute to that cause. And just tonight, I *FINALLY* got started on the "scary room" that I have been avoiding for like... years...
Underneath all that "stuff," there is a (very small) home office with bookshelves, an old desktop computer, a printer, and a huge, gorgeous desk I used back in grad school 10 years ago... then my daughter's mental illness presented, and that room became the "stuff that is unsafe for her" room... THEN, even as we got better at keeping her safe, the room became "eh, just shove it in there and deal with it later..." And that's how it's been for a long, long time... but tonight I pulled out three bags of trash, a bag of stuff to shred, a big box of recycling, and more stuff for the senior center... since our trash cans are bulging from the laundry purge, chances are I'll try to get the rest of the trash out later today (since it's after midnight now) and then drive it to the dump with all the rest of my glamorous errands...
But, bottom line, very little of THEIR junk will be absorbed into OUR junk, it has been a HUGE motivation to purge our own stuff, and I am finally getting started on the worst room in the house!!!
we easily have 2 - 3 of every tool. We were hoping to make progress on the bathroom demo portion of the remodel but considering we need tools for said demo this clean out needed to happen first!
