A step-by-step plan for clearing out a lifetime of memories — and stuff
When I was a kid, I felt kind of sorry for friends who, by virtue of their parents’ jobs or other circumstances, moved from house to house, city to city, state to state. My family was firmly rooted in the same home from the time I was 3 until my mother’s death last year, when I was 62, and I always appreciated the security that came with having had the same family home forever. That sentiment extended to my adult life: Even decades after I’d actually lived there, the house held a wealth of memories, comfort — and stuff.
Ma lived there alone for the 30-plus years after my father died. But when COVID hit, my brother moved in with her. It soon became clear that she needed more care than he could provide, so we worked together to relocate her to a senior living facility near me. That’s when it hit me: We as a family had made no plans whatsoever for leaving the family home.
Nearly two years after our mother’s death, my brother remains in the house; he recently bought out my share of the estimated sale price. There’s still a lot of stuff there, and the situation makes me wonder how much easier it might have been had our parents moved more frequently — or ever — and done a bit of downsizing and decluttering along the way.
It also highlights for me the importance of talking as a family about the reality of leaving the family home someday.
Luckily (and not surprisingly), a whole profession has arisen around leaving the family home. People such as Sheilah Sable, of Albany-based Call Sheilah, and Michelle Kavanaugh-Anastasi of Organize Senior Moves in Glenmont, have crafted careers out of helping others navigate the emotional process of parting ways with the homestead. Both companies offer a range of services for people who need help moving, downsizing, decluttering and even staging their homes for sale.
Sable says her clients who are downsizing include two categories of people: “those who are attached to everything they own and find it painful to part with items,” she says, and those who are “logical and rational, who can say, ‘I don’t really need this stuff.’
“People in the second category are able to recognize that they are likely moving to the last place they’ll live and plan to take with them only the best of the best” of their possessions, Sable notes.
Regardless of which category a client falls into, Sable approaches the task of clearing out a longtime dwelling with the same scheme in mind. She offers some top tips for achieving that goal (see sidebar).
In the end, there’s some comfort in knowing that we boomers are all in this together, right? And maybe, just maybe, we can find ways to make things easier for our own kids when it comes time for leaving the family home.
Top tips for clearing out a longtime dwelling
- Identify a staging area. “When I walk into a house, the first thing I do is identify a place where we can place things we know we want to keep but don’t want to have in the way as we downsize,” Sable says. As you sort through the items, use different colors of painter’s tape — not sticky notes, which tend to fall off! — to mark items you want to go to each of your offspring, charity, the dump and so forth.
- Limit yourself to three hours of work in the house each day. “Everybody gets loopy after three hours,” Sable notes. “People get tired and make bad decisions.”
- Adult offspring should get the stuff they want out of the house ASAP. “This rarely happens,” Sable admits, “and it gets painful when the mom is saying, ‘Oh, my son really wants this,’ but the son makes no effort to come gather the item. Adult children say they don’t have a place to put the item or they’re too busy to come get it. But you’re adults. Figure it out!”
- Identify the biggest “pain point” and start there. You’re eventually going to have to go through every box, bin, cabinet, shelf and drawer, Sable says, so tackling the most difficult decisions up front makes the whole process easier. When it comes to all those framed photos and other sentimental items, be sure to take your time — even tell stories about them as you go.
- Don’t count on an estate sale to yield big bucks. “It’s very hard for people to swallow that their treasured items, particularly furniture, are not as valuable as they imagine,” Sable says. “If a client says, ‘It was my great grandmother’s,’ I tell them it owes them nothing more. At the end of the day, with an estate sale, you’re only going to make a few thousand dollars at best, and the sale just prolongs the agony.” Instead, Sable suggests donating as many items as possible to specific people, then, as painful as it may be, donating or tossing what’s left.
— Source: Sheilah Sable
More Articles You May Enjoy:
