Sort of the opposite idea of this thread: do you have something left you by a parent or other deceased relative that you wish you could be rid of?
I lived with my dad to care for him, so although my brother and I will split the proceeds if I ever manage to unload this house and move somewhere I don’t hate, my brother is not at all sentimental and wanted none of our parents’ stuff so all the contents are mine to deal with.
Most of the furniture is fine and I plan to keep most of it. But the albatrosses around my neck:
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California king waterbed (free, um, floating? the kind that’s baffle-free), which I desperately want to put out at the end of the driveway with a free sign if it ever stops thunderstorming for a solid 3 or 4 days in a row. The particle board base will die if it gets soaked
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A freaking fiberglass canoe strapped to the basement rafters that hasn’t been used in 20 years (a housewarming gift for the house’s buyer? no, seriously, can I just leave it when I escape?)
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A 90s vintage entertainment center that was also banished to the basement when the last CRT TV died and its pal the refrigerator leaking coolant (you’ve noticed that my parents banished things to the basement instead of dealing with giving them away or having them hauled off)
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An enormous glass-doored 70s era hutch that my parents bought before I was born
The last is the biggest thorn in my side because I need to move it to paint the room it’s hulking in. sigh.
You?
I’ll take the canoe off your hands. 
Mom and dad are both gone now. I have a delicate glass figurine of a bride that my father gave as a wedding present to my mother. What am I supposed to do with it?
I also have a lot of photos of my parents and their friends and some family photos from when they were retired and I was not really active in their lives. I feel horrible about throwing them out.
Sounds like you’ve continued the trend. Call a junk removal group to come and pick it all up.
Sigh…I’m afraid I’m the parent who will leave albatrosses.
- 3 cats
- a stupid collection of antique blue Mason jars and zinc lids
- an odd lots collection of favorite coffee mugs
- a cast iron antique twin bed from a long gone convent
What do these junk removal groups charge, usually? Asking for a friend. 
That varies wildly, even within my town. When I have gotten a quote, my reaction was always “yikes!!”.
However, if you have a refuse company that collects your household trash, they will usually cart away something extra for a small fee, if you pre-arrange with them. For instance, recently my garage company charged me $5.00 to haul away a twin mattress and a couple of broken screen doors. The trick is to have a way to get whatever it is to the curb.
When my grandmother died, my mom gave me one of her diamond rings. I don’t wear jewelry, and I never saw my grandmother wear the ring so it meant nothing to me. I offered it to my daughter - she didn’t want it. I gave it back to Mom - she likes diamonds, so I dodged that one.
However, I have a Franklin Mint vase, from the same grandmother’s estate. At least I had seen it in her house, but it’s not the sort of item I like, it’s way too big for anything but a gigantic bouquet, and its Asian flavor doesn’t go with my decor, such as it is. So it collects dust on a top shelf, waiting for one of the cats to knock it to the floor. I checked to see if it had any value - nope, not really. But I’d feel guilty if I got rid of it.
Nope. No trash pickup in this town.
Dang. Sorry.
Other creative ways I’ve deal with these kinds of problems:
Find a Scout group or youth group/team and offer a donation to their group if
they will do this project for you. I also worked this by asking a parish priest if he
had several burly altar servers he could send to help-they came, ended up
taking at least one of the furniture pieces or appliances home to their mothers.
The boys’ group got their donation from me and several mom’s were happy.
If there is a martial arts club around, ask if they’d like to ‘karate kick‘ the big
furniture to pieces. Of course, they have to haul it out of the house first!
If there is a CraigsList or Next Door group in your area, list it as “Free” and as
either “on the curb” or “must remove from house”. This has worked for me too.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I bought the house I grew up in from my mother’s estate when she died. One albatross is the enormous deck my parents, mostly my dad, decided to build off the back of the house. I am not an entertainer of guests. I an a hermit. This huge, multi-level deck would be great if you were hosting big gatherings. It overlooks a lake and the view is very nice. It is deteriorating and on one hand I feel an obligation to maintain it but I don’t use it and the whole property is very high maintenance and the deck has fallen to the bottom of the list of things that need to be attended to. I have considered removing a large part of it but even that would be a huge undertaking. I have taken off some stairs that went down the hill. I always thought they were too steep and too long and a pain to mow around and that was a lot of work and I am still struggling to grow grass where the steps used to be.
So that’s my first thought on the topic.
My parents collected Franklin Mint coins and US mint proof set coins for over 40 years.
I’ve checked around and there’s no collectors value in them. The precious metals have value.
I just can’t stand the thought of this collection being melted down. My dad loved it so much. Wore gloves handling them. They’ve rarely been out of the file cabinet.
So, I have a heavy duty file cabinet with over 60 lbs of metal. At least it’s not hard to vacuum around. 
My mom is still alive. I did suggest having the collection appraised. That went nowhere. I’ll probably ignore the issue until I’m gone too.
I’ve got an anti-albatross: Something my parents didn’t leave me.
And that is: Any medical records from my long-gone childhood days.
I don’t know for sure what childhood diseases I’ve had, although I remember some. I’m not sure if I know entirely what childhood immunizations I’ve had, although I know some. I don’t know what else might have gone down in my medical history. I know, from fambly lore, of some surgeries I had as an infant, but no detail about them.
I had this problem going through my mother’s things. She had a lot of pictures from her youth of people I didn’t know - folks she went to school or worked with. I, too, felt bad about throwing them away but I did. She had a ton of pictures she had collected from the extended family and I went through them all and threw some of them away, too. The rest are now stored with the family history archives, which I inherited. About 150 years worth of stuff in a big cedar chest. I think what I added should be sufficient to represent the last couple generations. You just can’t keep everything.
Wow, thank gosh I don’t have parents leaving me stuff like this. My only legacy from my father is a USB drive with all the genealogy research he did on the family (we go back in the US from just before the revolution, to Germany where the trail stops).
When I’ve lived in a more “houses with garages facing each other” neighborhood, I’d see so many neighbors who parked their cars in the driveway because the garage was full of old furniture that I assume was a legacy from family. It seems a burden to keep this stuff in your life if you can’t even use part of your home.
I got it all including 4 rental houses and My Daddy’s house. My jerky (many) sibs didn’t wanna deal with it. They just wanted their cut of the money.
So I trudged through it all. Piece by piece.
Sold some, kept some.
Split the money/proceeds amongst us.
I have one 4drawer filing cabinet. Ugly brown. Broken lock. One big dent. It’s full of my Daddy’s personal letters and papers. I haven’t had the heart to go through it yet. This many years since.
Not ready yet.
So it’s a true albatross around my neck. It weighs on my heart everytime I walk by that ugly brown file cabinet.
Maybe scan all the stuff in that cabinet to digital – aside from anything that reminds you of your Dad or good times – and shred? I’d do that; it’s time consuming but there are services that will do it for you. Me, I’m very opposed to having surplus stuff staring at me in my home. Every time I cast something off I feel lighter, and if you keep the images and anything that connects you to your father, you’re not casting him off.
{{{ }}}
You can stand up straight and look at yourself in the mirror about this. Your jerky siblings can’t. Ever.
I’m a organizer/ stower-away of things. That’s one reason I haven’t done the file cabinet. I know I’ll have to do away with iffy things. And about a bazillion greeting cards he got from his adult children. He saved things like that. That’s where I got the hoarding gene.
My kids keep thinking the bonds worth millions are stored in there. So they encourage me to get to it. So they can get their cut. I live amongst a bunch of money hungry jerks. It seems.
It’s said mostly in jest. They know there’s not any bonds hidden in there. I knew Daddy’s bizness pretty good.
