When my elderly neighbour’s even more elderly sister died Mary had to sort out the house. What she found was banknotes, here there and everywhere. She stuffed two carrier bags with £17,000 and walked down to the bank.
My nan's house was a bit like that. When we were clearing it, my auntie found an old-fashoned corset still in its original box, shook it out to show the rest of us, and loads of £20 notes came flying out. And there was an envelope full of receipts for household items from when they first set up home in 1939. I think they'd bought up half of Woolworths. It was quite fun matching up the receipts with the items, surprisingly many were still in the house.
My mum is like @pansyface and @Fairygirl , everything very organised and she's always throwing stuff out. She even tidies out the garden shed from time to time.
Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
Well fancy that, how unexpected 😁. When we cleared my Great Aunt's flat, every cupboard was full of old hearing aid batteries. There must have been hundreds. This was way back in the days before recycling, but why she kept them heaven knows. My Dad is completely different, he has hardly kept a thing, in fact l've had to ask him to run things by me first. He was going to throw out a load of old photographs but l talked him into putting some into an album. We had a good afternoon while he talked through who was who, and l learnt some family history.
But what about all my junk? My daughter has already told me that I must at least get rid of all my beads before I go. I have a lot of beads having been really into making jewellery for quite a long time. But the thought of sorting them into lots, photographing them and loading them onto ebay makes it a very daunting task. And what if want to take it up again?
Think of clearing out as a process of letting go and doing your family an enormous, loving favour. Safe to say that it will be infinitely easier for you to make decisions about your stuff than it will be for family who are caught up in hard emotional weather.
Getting a house clearance co. in isn't that straight forward as the sentimental / valuable stuff is often mixed in with the rest. Most people I've met who have been faced with this task don't want to toss the lot in case there are letters, photos or precious mementoes in there, and often there are. It can be a hellishly hard and exhausting process, going through it all, even if there aren't crammed housefuls of stuff. It might seem easy to you, but it's different for loved ones, dealing with paperwork, family bickering, sales, funerals, overseas family visiting and a thousand other things.
I would see the pre-home clearance as part of your bequest. Have your power of attorney sorted well before you need it. Leave money or jewellry or whatever as agift to others, and leave a
tidied up legacy as a gift too - with your will clear and up to date (with no room for
confusion). Have the details of your wishes for end of life and funeral plans laid out clearly and communicated and kept somewhere agreed on and safe. Write it down. Have the conversation. Please don't leave others to have to come up with funeral songs or poems, burial v cremation. They will have other things to do and much to grieve. Help them to sleep better, not having to sit up all night going through poetry books or looking for celebrants.
And if you have skeletons hidden away, it's so much better to find the courage to share them rather than have your kids find out by accident. I have a few friends who have had a punishingly hard time going through their father's stuff. Get rid of old porn or sex toys (seriously). Make it as easy as you can for those left behind.
When my parents died I put pretty much everything on Olio or Freecycle. Nearly all books to Oxfam. My dad's tools went to a youth training programme. Fabrics went to a primary school who wanted it for crafting. Gardening stuff to a community garden.
It took a little while, but everything got a second life. I think if you know that other people will find items useful then maybe it's easier to get rid of it all quickly. Don't store it even for 'a few months'. Keep what you adore. Shift the rest.
Clearing out my mum's stuff after she died was horrendous. I thought my dad was the hoarder (my sister and I are dreading when he dies) but my God, she doesn't seem to have been a whole lot better. We kept finding more and more stuff and my step dad was baffled as to how she'd managed to collect so much, not to mention how she'd hidden it away. The vast majority of it was clothes and most of it had never ever been worn. She must have had something like 20 bikinis that still had the tags on. The amount of clothes she had must have run into thousands of pounds. My sister and I took the odd bit here and there and the rest we bundled off to charity. She definitely had a problem. After that, my sister told my dad she wanted to sort through his things now but it never happened.
Some of my mum's ashes went into my raised beds although I still have some left and no idea what to do with them. The bulk of them went into a woodland area in her garden although a lot of it at that time was nettles which my stepfather cut not long after so no idea how much is left of her in the garden! My raised beds have done better than I'd expected and I like to think it's her ashes that gave them an extra touch (probably not though).
My Dad got rid of too much... only because my Mum hid them from him, do we still have large numbers of letters he wrote to her, and to his parents, during WW2 from Canada where he served with the RAF. I'm currently typing them up so they can be shared with the family. Dad became an intensely private person, perhaps because of his wartime experiences, so I feel a little pang at sharing his private correspondence - but only a little pang, because what he wrote was absolutely fascinating, and probably not just for his family but for historians too.
Mum was a hoarder, but an organised one until Alzheimers made her disorganised. Then she started hiding things in unlikely places, in the belief that bad people would come into her house and steal stuff... clearing out their house when she had to leave it, was a bit of a nightmare, because, for instance, I had to sift through the spare woollen blankets (interleaved with mothballs) in the trunk in the loft, knowing that something would very likely be hidden there. It was - her favourite photo of Dad...
Since 2019 I've lived in east Clare, in the west of Ireland.
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I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
When we cleared my Great Aunt's flat, every cupboard was full of old hearing aid batteries. There must have been hundreds. This was way back in the days before recycling, but why she kept them heaven knows.
My Dad is completely different, he has hardly kept a thing, in fact l've had to ask him to run things by me first. He was going to throw out a load of old photographs but l talked him into putting some into an album. We had a good afternoon while he talked through who was who, and l learnt some family history.
Some of my mum's ashes went into my raised beds although I still have some left and no idea what to do with them. The bulk of them went into a woodland area in her garden although a lot of it at that time was nettles which my stepfather cut not long after so no idea how much is left of her in the garden! My raised beds have done better than I'd expected and I like to think it's her ashes that gave them an extra touch (probably not though).
My Dad got rid of too much... only because my Mum hid them from him, do we still have large numbers of letters he wrote to her, and to his parents, during WW2 from Canada where he served with the RAF. I'm currently typing them up so they can be shared with the family. Dad became an intensely private person, perhaps because of his wartime experiences, so I feel a little pang at sharing his private correspondence - but only a little pang, because what he wrote was absolutely fascinating, and probably not just for his family but for historians too.
Mum was a hoarder, but an organised one until Alzheimers made her disorganised. Then she started hiding things in unlikely places, in the belief that bad people would come into her house and steal stuff... clearing out their house when she had to leave it, was a bit of a nightmare, because, for instance, I had to sift through the spare woollen blankets (interleaved with mothballs) in the trunk in the loft, knowing that something would very likely be hidden there. It was - her favourite photo of Dad...