Not quite a horder - decluttering

I am keeping the shadow box and professional wedding album. I have 600 pix from the photographer and who knows how many from friends and family. I wore my moms dress and was given his moms engagement ring. I will keep those for my children.

I've divided up most of the wedding gifts based on who gave them. He obviously notice because wanted to know why I took all the Waterford. I did give him back what he gave me, except the ring. I don't want it to go to the gf and have specified it in my will, it goes to my son.

I just want the hurt to go away and not care. I would love to remember and enjoy the good times. It wasn't all bad. Have two beautiful children.

I digress. Sorry. So do you just trash pix? I'm probably going to ignore them awhile longer.

Zills - my grown son still had NO desire to see old wedding pictures of bio-dad. I've kept the album but darned if I know why. 25 years down the road, it's not as distressing to look at - and I can remember how cute I was then before gravity took over. As for china & silver & etc. as Devine says - most kids don't want any of that stuff anymore. Heaven forbid - it has to be washed by hand. There really aren't many places who will even take it on consignment & I live in a HUGE city with lots of antique places & consignment shops. I've settled for putting it in the very high cupboards for now. He can include it in the "estate sale" after I die.

NM - I love about the hooks & eyes. My grandma had boxes full of buttons. She saved rubber bands but luckily not string. For those of us who's parents lived through "the war" - which means our grandparents lived through WW's 1 & 2 - re-using was imperative. I do wash & re-use both tin foil and zip lock bags - but not if there was something wet or goopy. Only if it was bread or cheese or crackers.

zills - I agree with everyone else about waiting a while before throwing anything out yet.

I don't cut the hooks off of my bras, but I do cut off and save the buttons off blouses I throw out.

I agree to put the photos aside for at least a year. NOT under your bed, however. That's got to be bad juju.

I worked for a health organization and had a doctor I didn't like. After he left to go elsewhere, I took his photo and punched it full of holes before I burned it. Very therapeutic.

Mrs. M--I hear you about it being a changed world. I have a china cabinet and display a set of china that was my grandmothers. One of my uncles brought the set home from overseas while he was in the service. Bot Grammy and the uncle are gone now, so I'm talking with other family members like my Mom to try to narrow down the time frame and exactly where he was when he bought the set. Wish I'd though to do that before Grammy died. I love seeing it, and have used the set for family Thanksgiving dinners a few times. Not sure what will happen to it when I die, I'm not sure anyone else in the family wants it.

Vergadoll--I know my grandmothers got into the habit during the depression, they both talked about it at times. We do live in a world of wonders and conveniences, but I am finding that fewer conveniences actually work better.

Jazzy--I'm trying consignment for the first time with this closet clean out, just to see how it works. Great earrings!

Zills--maybe have the pics converted to CDs or scanned onto a zip drive? You'll still have them, but not taking up much space, in case someone wants to see them at a later date. Scanning them and saving them with some identifying info (date, event, name of people, particularly names of people) can be a real help if someone in the family gets into genealogy.

NM - I think it would be better if Zills just boxes up the pictures and tosses them in the attic or garage. To spend either time or money digitizing them only keeps the wounds open - and worse if she were to annotate them. I understand why you suggested it, but that just probes too many hurts for now when the analpore took off with a bimbo.

Zills - Either address the box in five or more years or leave it for the kids if they are interested. You've got too much living to do girl. Surround yourself with as many positive things as possible.

MinusTwo--good point, and one I didn't think of. I was thinking of all the pics that I helped my cousin clean out of her mother's house, and all the mystery babies in those pics. Totally different situation.

Zills - thanks for posting back. I've been there and it's REALLY hard. Everything is up-ended and nothing matches anymore. Sometimes it's hard not to be bitter. Your kiddos are a good age for still cuddling. Hope you have physical help when you need it. Holding you in my thoughts.

MinusTwo, It sounds like you have some conflicting feelings about your sorting. Unless you have a particular time crunch, maybe give it a few days. When you start back up, try to sort things that are less emotionally laden, like paperwork. NOT letters and pictures--that's about the hardest place to start.

Thanks for the thoughts ladies. I haven't even been considering 'sorting' for the last week so the dream came out of the blue. I've already gotten rid of most of my parents things - and most of my grandparents also. And I have destinations for some of the sentimental mementos that are left. Still - everywhere is a ton of stuff that means nothing to anyone but me. Now mostly things from my own life.

Realistically I don't think I've saved even an eighth of the things that my Mom saved - like all of her children's school paperwork from Kindergarten on and all of our baby teeth. And a bed jacket her mother hand made for her when I was born. And a dress my grandmother made Mother for a HS dance in 1928. Federal income became law in 1913 - two years after my Dad was born. He had files with all of his tax returns & all the back-up paperwork. Interesting reading if you have a historical bent, but he wouldn't have let me see them while he still alive. And they lived far away, so everything had to be cleaned out quickly.

I gave up on the pictures last year. I brought two boxes of letters down from the attic two years ago. I've read some of them but the boxes are still sitting in my living room. I couldn't bring myself to toss w/o reading. Now I'm concentrating on clothes. I've had my son's cub scout shirt hanging in the garage for a year with all the badges & medals. He is grown w/no children and when he came to town said 'WTH - of course I don't want that'.

The idea of taking pictures of things that are harbor important memories and then letting them go appeals to me.

Edited to add - some days the idea of lighting a match to the house appeals to me - LOL

MinusTwo--Oh my, what a dream and I know how disorienting it can be to be feeling the emotions of a dream hours later. Good idea to pass on the clothing sorting for a day or two. Grieving follows its own time table.

Janky, I just had an image from Game of Thrones, where Khal Drogo was burned with all his treasures, plus Daenerys' Dragon Eggs. Maybe you'll be the next Mother of Dragons! 

Bwa ha ha!!

Janky, my husband is retiring on June 30th. We collectively have LOTS of stuff to get rid of. Unfortunately, he has been diagnosed with a thoracic aortic aneurysm, so I now have to do all the heavy lifting.

I'm proud of all of us who have been successfully downsizing our "extras." Believe me when I say, Your kids will thank you for it. My mother passed away last June and left a massive hoard for us. She was a Depression Baby and you know what that means--she saved absolutely EVERYTHING. It took us 6 weeks to deal with all the stuff. By the time I got back home I was ready to light a match to all MY stuff!

Instead, I let the kids have first pick. Surprise! They don't want our stuff, at least, not much of it. They're still in their 20s & 30s, so I still want save some of the more meaningful family things. So, I rented a 10'x10' storage unit--everything we wanted to save had to fit in there, including furniture, pictures, and piano. I plan to keep it for about 2 years, after which I'll go through it and cull whatever is still there. We live in a camper, so NONE of that stuff is going to move back in with me any time soon!

Honestly, it was harder going through my mom's stuff than going through mine. She saved it all. All the letters she wrote to her mother as a young mother; all the letters I wrote to her from college on. Tax returns, old college papers from 1960, textbooks from the 50s. As MinusTwo mentioned upthread, all this stuff is pretty interesting from an historical perspective. I wish I was interested in saving all the letters and stuff. I truly do. I read through a small portion of it, maybe 10% of it, and it was an interesting capsule in time. But I don't have time, nor the real interest in editing, transcribing, and publishing this MOUNTAIN of papers for my siblings, and frankly, they don't care about it at all. Sorry, Mom, but it all went in the trash. She's probably rolling in her grave right now.

Anyway, my kids probably don't appreciate it now, but they will when I'm gone. Instead of a 2200 sq ft house filled to the gun'ales with questionable stuff, my kids will have exactly ONE small storage unit and a Fifth Wheel to go through.

Poodles, I so agree that our kids will appreciate that we took time to declutter best as we could. Back in the 90s, within 4 years, my grandmother, who was 102, my mom, my dad and an aunt all passed. Parents were divorced, so there were four homes to....well, what would the word be? Or phrase? They needed disassembled, I guess. Grandma had a houseful of nice stuff. My aunt was a mild hoarder. Nothing disgusting, but lots of paper work, any bill she ever received, saved in the envelope it came in. Lots of old stuff. And my mom and dad had a reasonable amount of things, both were tidy, and my many siblings helped, but that brings its own kind of stress. It was simply the downsizing of four homes in four years that really highlighted the need to keep things simple for my son when that time comes. I have to guard against keeping too much because I have a big house, and it’s easy to tuck things in here and there and not realize its adding up.