Note to Parents: Start Downsizing Now Because Your Kid’s Don’t Want Your Stuff

Start downsizing now!

We buy houses with all the contents quite often. That means that the seller skipped all or part of moving out.

Usually, someone has moved to a nursing home or passed away and the friend or family member helping to sell the house was not close to the owner and doesn’t care about the stuff or does not want to deal with the memories attached to the stuff.

Either way, it all gets left behind leaving us to do the cleaning out.

A while back we had two back-to-back houses like this and I had the privileged of doing some cleaning out. My husband Don and his son Scott worked on the garage and the storage area and I worked on the living area.

I want to urge every person who may read this to put time on the calendar to go spend time with your parents or grandparents and start with one closet. Go through one every few weeks, because there is a story there behind all those items just waiting to be relived by the person and to give you memories to cherish going forward.

For the house this weekend in Olathe, well I don’t know the whole story. Just that the seller was an executor of an estate for a family member who had passed away and that another friend had been staying in the house from time to time. But in cleaning out we learned so much more.

The owner had loved his house and sometime in the past 20 years had installed a beautiful new kitchen and stocked up on his favorite foods, which seemed to be Italian Pasta Dishes with a from-scratch sauce based on all the cans of tomatoes, sauce, sardines, and other ingredients and the entire shelf of spaghetti and egg noodles. But sadly this person must have passed away a while back as half the neatly stacked items in the cupboards had expired in 2009 and the other half in 2018.

We then dug into the coat closet and found that the gentleman who had passed was into hunting as evidenced by all the coats and flannel shirts for that purpose. We also found a Superbowl Jacket, an Indian Motor Cycle shirt, and several Ford shirts all still with tags on. We found tons of tools, books on repair and lotions, potions, oils, and more for the repair of cars and motorcycles in the garage. There was a way cool motorcycle too, but the family sold that before the house.

In the storage area, we found items that went with all those Hunting Shirts. We found that he liked to shoot and load his own shells with the equipment and supplies to do so. He was into music with box after box of albums. He loved to read . . . or at least look at the photos with box after box of magazines from popular mechanics to muscle cars, time magazine to some more racy titles all stacked up and saved for us to find.

We then dug into the master bedroom drawers and closet. At some point, there was a wife who loved to travel as evidenced by all the T-Shirts from all over the world and she loved her Boston Terriers as evidenced by all the books about them. We found condolence cards in the garage on her passing years before. The gentleman who had passed lived in his garage and all his keepsakes seemed to be there. Maybe she was the maker of the sauce we talked about earlier as those ingredients expired in 2009.

We then dug into one of the extra bedroom closets and this is where the daughter packed up all her memories for safekeeping until she had a suitable place of her own. That must not have ever happened, or she no longer wanted her 4 H trophies, her shirt she made with the Blue Ribbon still attached, her high school graduation cap and gown, or all the prom dresses, shoes, and clothes she was going to come back for someday.

There are a ton of memories in this house, and when I get the chance to dig through them, I really enjoy it. It brings back memories of digging through my mother’s things. We took about a 3-year process of going through her things before she passed. We started with the family photo album that was falling apart and she shared story after story on many of the pictures. She admitted she had no idea who some of the people were in a few of the others. Then we started one closet at a time, sorting, giving away, tossing out, and reliving memories, while she was still there to remember them for me. We also tagged some of the items with names of who was to have them when she no longer needed them.

If you have the chance now to do the same with your parent, grandparent, or friend, take the time. Go dig in and start with one closet. Don’t wait until it’s too late and then leave it for a total stranger like me to dig through.

What about the stuff, what do we do with it? Well for bigger items, they end up on Facebook marketplace, for dishes and clothing and other household goods, we usually donate to that Thrift Store of some kind whenever possible so someone can get some good out of it And some of the memories, they find a way into our own homes. Walk around my house and you will find items that were once cherished by someone that I have never met, but they were left behind in a house and now have meaning for me.

If you have a house that you need to sell that is packed full of memories and want to sell it with time to dig through it, we can help. If you have a house full of memories that you would rather not relive, we can take all of the contents. Either way, we are here to help. Just reach out with the contact form below.

It was great not having to go in and clean up that unholy mess and worry about disposing of everything.  I hope you guys make a good sale on the property, I’ll be only too happy to refer you to others.

Thank you, Scott, that house has been a stone around my neck for the past ten months.  I’m so glad that your mom friended me on FB and got things rolling, I’ve had a lot of deaths in my family in the past seventeen months,(my father, my estranged husband, and my only sibling–my brother. I have been swamped trying to deal with it all simultaneously.  You guys took me by the hand and drug me through what needed to be done, and I appreciate that.