Perhaps those with a collection they don’t want to have thrown out when they die could identify someone who might like to buy or be given it? I mean, presumably the person who collected all of those Pez dispensers knows better about the market for them than their spouse or children. So do them the favor of suggesting a likely candidate.
A friend from school is, on his mother’s side, the descendant of an old New England family. So I assume there were antiques, perhaps paintings and so forth in his mother’s house. I asked him how he disposed of it. (I’ve seen how he lives; antiques and formal paintings are totally out of style for him.) He said his mother left detailed instructions; give these pieces to that cousin, other pieces to another cousin and here’s the name of an antique dealer that can handle the rest.
My father died over a year ago, and we are STILL going through this. He and my mother were both hoarders to some extent, and they lived in that house for 53 years.
Moreover, both came from long lines of hoarders. Thus we are trying to find places - other than a dumpster - for Civil War era publications, antique medical gear, a teacup with an attached note swearing it came from Monticello during Jefferson’s time. It’s exhausting.
But more than that - far more - are all the things that are hard to dispose of because of how much they meant to Mom and Dad. None of us kids really want it, but it’s so hard to throw away things that lasted through 70-odd years of their marriage and were always there while we grew up.
And don’t get me started (too late it’s already happened) on the hundreds of things from furniture to kitchenware that are in very good shape and “certainly could be used by someone.” Except we aren’t finding those someones, even when we try to donate to charities and second-hand stores.
It seems criminally wasteful to put big, sturdy, serviceable pieces of furniture into a landfill, but what else is there? We held a very-well-advertised yard sale and practically gave things away. (In many cases literally gave things away). It hardly made a dent.
To all who have said you are culling through your possessions to make things easier for your descendants: bless you; you little know just how wonderful a gift this is.
I used to have some children’s books from the forties that had belonged to my mom and uncles, and that I’d read myself many times growing up. However, they were Christian propaganda that I didn’t feel comfortable passing on to anyone. I finally freed myself by burning them with the yard waste.
I was lucky when my Daddy died, he was a Marine…in theory everything he needs to survive should fit in a sea bag.
He had some stuff more that that…mostly stuff us kids gifted him and his clothes.
I had a hard time dealing with it because of grief. But it wasnt actually as slow as I thought it would be.
Hubster is driving me crazy over this. We have a huge Coca-Cola collection, he has a huge sports collection, and an enormous music collection from the years he (and we) played. He doesn’t want to donate anything because we could sell it. We have several display cabinets. I want to get rid of these giant dust collectors and at least half the crap in them. Nope.
I wanted to put his sports books on a < gasp > bookcase, but noooo he likes the rickety ancient tv stand that lists to the side and is missing paint. I figure if (when) the stupid thing falls apart, I might be able to get rid of it … but I doubt it. Seriously, we had a fight over the stupid tv stand. There’s more, but I’ll stop while I’m behind.
Neither of us have collections of things, apart from a dozen prints by a favorite artist. He has tools, I have kitchen stuff, but all those things can be used or sold after we’re gone. So no one needs to fret about possibly tossing something valuable. Even tho some of the ceramic pieces I made are beyond priceless.
My dad died a little over a year ago, and though he lived in a tiny apartment in an independent living center, he was a bit of a hoarder so he had a ton of stuff to go through-- like literally every Christmas and birthday card he ever got for the past 30 years. It was an interesting rehash of family history going though it all, but it was a lot.
Now that I’m 60 and the kids are out of the house, my wife and I are looking down the road at retiring to some tropical locale, or at the very least, just downsizing. With just two of us in a fairly large house on an acre and a half, there’s always a lot to work on and / or pay for-- a falling tree here, a failing septic system there. So my wife’s mantra, with an eye toward that not too long away day, is “get rid of it if we don’t really want it; don’t buy it if we don’t really need it”.
Anybody want a bunch of anarchist/extreme free speech/zine culture literature from the eighties and nineties? I didn’t think so. So why can’t I bring myself to throw it all away?
My current project (which I keep putting off) is to go through all my crap stuff and decide what can be disposed of. I have no one to leave any of it to, except for a niece who has claimed first refusal on my SF library. Most of it will probably go to a thrift shop, who can then worry about throwing it out.
Since I don’t have any heirs, any kids, any nuttin’, I really don’t care about what I leave behind. Let the state workers laugh at my vintage TV Guide collection, my grade school report cards, my NASCAR trading cards. I DON’T CARE. I’ll be dead. But as long as I’m alive, I enjoy them.
That reminded me of the 3 full boxes of woodworking magazines that used to belong to my FIL and which my spousal unit refuses to part with. Even tho we’ve had those boxes at least 10 years and even tho he’s not opened a single one, nor does he particularly like working in wood.
I’m dealing with some of that with my mom, who is 89, and who has a lot of miscellaneous stuff that’s important to her - random jewelry, her mom’s gloves, bits of furniture from long ago Germany.
For my part, I have a ton of tools I’m using less and less, including a chainsaw and come-along, and I am thinking of how to slowly get rid of that stuff.
Our house is also packed full of stuff. We’re working on it.
Because it’s history. The only luck I had getting rid of things marginally like that was to take scans first. I also got lucky with a couple of old cookbooks and an old lace sales directory from Mexico. For them I found websites where people were posting similar things and contacted them to see if they’d be interested.
I may come back later and post a link to copies of The Ice Pick. It was a newsletter for the ice making/delivery industry in southern California. I only had two or three, but they came out when refrigerators were starting to become a thing. Each one was filled with reasons that Ice boxes were healthier and better than refrigerators.
I am lucky because my mom is an anti-hoarder. Her house is really clutter-free. When we had to relocate her older sister some time in the 90s, and she was found to be a hoarder, it really messed with my mom’s head. I remember she had a little collection of porcelain bells before that - not soon after, they were gone.
I have a toy collection as a hobby. I have set rules for myself that I have to buy things in person (eBay is too easy) and I have to have a place to display everything. If I run out of room on a display, something has to go. If I see something I want but it’s too big for my shelves, I can’t get it.
My nieces, being GenZ, are all about consumerism. Their mom is just a straight up hoarder. Some of their shit is stored in my basement. As I get older, I need to stress to them that when I go they are NOT to hang on to my toy collection. It’s something only I enjoy. It should hold no sentimental value for them. They need to sell it and get some cash and be done with it. Price to sell!
As an aside, I do really enjoy selling shit on eBay. All sorts of stuff from my house has proven to be sellable. I just sold pieces of a broken toy last week! Currently I am working on a project for an older acquaintance of mine, who has a bunch of stuff in his house that he’s meant to get rid of for years since his wife died. I went over and packed all the stuff up and took it away and am selling it piece by piece on eBay. We’re not making a ton of money out of it but he’s really glad to have the stuff no longer sitting around, and I’m glad to have a project and getting stuff re-used instead of thrown away. Including my stash of shipping boxes.
I don’t know the first thing about your son, so this may not be applicable. By the time my parents downsized their possessions to move into an independent-living retirement community, I already had my own bodacious collection of tools, and didn’t want or need my dad’s stuff, most of which was vintage. I kept some bolt cutters, a come-along, and a huge bombproof workbench (to supplement the one I already had), but that was about it. He ended up craigslisting everything else.
Rather than assuming, you may want to talk to your son and ask him about these sorts of things.
I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they can’t afford a front yard full of old cars.
It wasn’t always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don’t have closets. In those days people’s stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I’m surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they’d be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews’ rooms the bed is the only clear space.
Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven’t changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.
My parents passed away a few years ago. Lived in the same house for close to 50 years and were into antique furniture.
As we were discussing the estate auction with the auctioneer and potential prices that the furniture may bring he warned us that the market for these items were literally and figuratively dead. He explained that the people of my parent’s generation (who collected this stuff) were either dead, down sized into smaller houses, or in assisted living/nursing homes and didn’t have room for furniture like this. He was right. Some items like the pump organ couldn’t even get a bid. The only items that seemed to have held their value was my dad’s antique guns.
My mom was an avid amateur photographer. There’s a picture she took at the 1969 or 1970 march on Washington, of some protestors sitting on a column, with one guy standing up and doing a peace sign with one hand and a Black Power fist with the other. Nobody she knew, just an evocative picture with good composition. She had it framed, and it was always hanging somewhere around the house. When my father passed away suddenly two years ago and we cleaned out the house, I took it home with me and hung it in my home office. Why? Because I like it, and it reminds me of her.
I didn’t think of that.