Tag Archives: How to Clean Out Your Parents’ House (Without Filling Up Your Own)

Decluttering, Denial, and Grief

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, Simpler Living Tagged , , , , , ,

(The first of three posts on Decluttering and Denial.)

I was in 7th grade when my gym teacher’s young daughter died of leukemia. Everyone in my community felt so sorry for him and his family. After a few years, a rumor got around that he had not allowed his daughter’s bedroom to be changed in any way since her death. To us kids, that was spooky.

Now, as an adult, I get it. Most grieving people need a certain amount of time (which varies greatly depending on the person) before they can give up their late loved one’s belongings. Most people can do it within a few months (sometimes they’re forced to by circumstances), but then there are people like Edna and Henry, who I wrote about in Downsizing Your Life for Freedom, Flexibility and Financial Peace. They lost their mothers in the same year and brought many of their belongings into their own home. Those belongings still fill every nook and cranny of their home, thirty years later.

Denial is actually a stage of grief. It takes a while to accept that someone is gone. One way our minds cope with the fact is to deny it. Denial is a temporary stage. But keeping all of our loved one’s belongings helps prolong the denial and assuage the grief, for a while.

After the initial shock of the loss is past, some people are able to move on by going through their loved one’s belongings, keeping the most precious items, and sending the rest to places where they’ll be appreciated (a concept I emphasize in both How to Clean Out Your Parent’s House (Without Filling Up Your Own) and The Sentimental Person’s Guide to Decluttering.) This is only possible when you reach the point where you truly understand that keeping all of a late loved one’s belongings cannot erase the pain of losing them.

Sharing those items with others helps a grieving person heal. Making someone’s clothes into quilts, pillows or stuffed animals is one way of sharing a tangible memory of a late loved one with others, and helps both the giver and the recipient to heal from the grief.

Sometimes keeping a late loved one’s belongings lets you avoid making a decision about your future. Someone might have a dream of retiring to a condo near a beach someday, but they say they can’t, because what would they do with all of the heirloom furniture left to them by their parents years ago? When you allow inanimate objects to dictate where you can live, consider if you aren’t using them as an excuse to keep you from making a decision that you’re afraid to make.

Denial and a Parent’s Estate

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, Simpler Living Tagged , , , , , , ,

George died after a good, long life, leaving behind two daughters and a houseful of belongings that he had always intended to sort through, but never did.

Alice, the elder daughter, lives over 900 miles away. Amy, the younger daughter, lives nearby with her husband and children. After the funeral, the sisters put their dad’s house on the market and vowed to get together again soon to go through the house and divide all of their dad’s possessions.

Alice’s children were grown and gone, and she had enough personal time accrued at work that she could easily take a couple of weeks off to drive back with a rental truck and collect her share of their dad’s things. But she couldn’t get Amy to commit to a time to tackle this challenge together. Amy’s family kept her very busy, and she was also having a hard time thinking about dividing the estate. She said she was really missing her dad, so Alice backed off for a few weeks.

The realtor reported that there were few people looking at the house, so it seemed like the sisters still had plenty of time to divide their dad’s belongings. Every few weeks, Alice would ask Amy if she was ready yet, and Amy would ask for more time.

When spring came, Alice began seeing open house signs in her neighborhood, and realized that people were looking at houses again. She began pushing Amy a little harder, but Amy never seemed to have any time to go through their dad’s house.

Then one day Amy called Alice in a panic.

“There’s an offer on the house! A good one. What are we gonna do?”

Alice sighed, and then collected her patience before responding.

“Amy, I was afraid this would happen. We should have gone through everything months ago. But we should still have a good 60 days before the house has to be empty.”

Amy began to cry.

“It’s a cash buyer. He wants the house in a month.”

Alice had enough experience with realtors to know that she and Amy would have to go through with the sale on whatever terms they could work out with the buyer. So they requested eight weeks until possession, but the buyer responded that his apartment lease was almost up so he had to have the house within a month.

The realtor urged them to accept the offer and the time frame, adding that houses of that size and vintage had not been selling very well, and that they were very lucky. So the sisters gave in: Alice arranged to take a few weeks off of work, and she arrived at the house with a rental truck barely a week later.

A look around the house made Alice’s mood plummet. How were they going to go through everything and have it all distributed in three weeks?

But that wasn’t the worst part. When Amy arrived, she burst into tears again, saying, “I’m not ready to do this! I can’t! Daddy just died, for God’s sake!”

Alice resisted the urge to go into big sister mode and start scolding. Instead, she put an arm around her younger sister.

“We’ve gotta do this, Ame. We have no choice.”

In the end, Amy took most of the furniture and almost none of the personal belongings, paperwork, books or antiques. Alice was left with the bulk of the work of going through everything that remained, because Amy was too upset to continue.

None of Amy or Alice’s children wanted any of the knick-knacks, antiques or dishes. After a week passed by, leaving the house looking worse than ever, Alice had Amy’s teenage kids come over to help her lug everything into the truck. Then she drove it back home, where she had no space for any of it. So she and her husband Ted rented a storage unit and filled it with the considerable remainder of her late father’s belongings.

And there it sits, because Alice doesn’t know what to do with it all. She put a few special items in her china cabinet, and keeps her dad’s favorite rocking chair, which Amy didn’t take, in her den. But lurking in the storage unit are boxes and boxes of china, glassware, antiques, framed art, and books that are a considerable weight on Alice’s mind. And they will soon become covered in mold and mildew, given the climate where Alice lives, unless she does something about it, soon.

What could these sisters have done to make the process easier? There’s no way to hurry the grieving process, so Amy’s reluctance to go through her father’s things had to be worked around. But there are other actions they could have taken:

  • Don’t put the house on the market immediately unless there’s a good reason (such as a reverse mortgage).
  • Set a time to begin going through the estate, and stick to it, instead of waiting to do so until you’re forced to, with a deadline looming.
  • Hire an estate agent to go through the items you know you don’t want to keep. They can either hold an estate sale in the house, or take your items to another sale they’re hosting; you’ll still get a percentage of the sales.
  • If you live some distance from your late parent’s home, try to make a trip back soon after the funeral (if not while you’re in town for the funeral) to go through personal paperwork and gauge the size of the estate that will need to be gone through, sooner rather than later.

No one wants to think about what will happen after their parents pass. But knowing what to do with their belongings will make things easier in the long run. Learn more tactics for handling your parents’ belongings in my book, How to Clean Out Your Parent’s House (Without Filling Up Your Own).

 

What to Do About Your Parents’ Stuff

By Claire Posted in Clutter, downsizing, My Books, Retirement Tagged , , ,

Many people in their 40s, 50s and 60s must add to their busy lives the job of going through their parents’ belongings. Whether their folks are moving to a nursing home or assisted living, or they have passed away, it’s their adult children who have to deal with what can sometimes be an enormous amount of furniture, household items, clothes and clutter. It can be overwhelming.

If you find yourself in this situation, and you believe the old adage that “Misery loves company,” check out this article and the follow-up piece to it and learn what others are doing to tackle this huge and emotional task. You might also want to read my book, How to Clean Out Your Parent’s House (Without Filling Up Your Own).

How to Divide an Estate Fairly Between Heirs

By Claire Posted in Clutter Tagged , , , , ,

The challenge of dividing belongings (especially valuables) is that whether they’re worth more in cash, memories or both, many items are often wanted by more than one person.

In an ideal world, a parent already gave items to those they wanted to have them or made a list of items going to specific people, along with an explanation of why they made the choices they did. But that doesn’t usually happen. What’s more common is when foggy elderly people verbally promise one item to more than one person, resulting in conflict between heirs, sooner or later.

If you’re dealing with a living estate and want to eliminate future conflicts, you may be tempted to ask your parent to assign items to their heirs now and explain their choices. But that might be too much pressure for them, or they may no longer be mentally capable of doing so.

Whether it’s a living or inherited estate, when dividing your parent’s belongings, you’ll need to at least try to prevent fights among heirs.  While it’s not always possible to be perfectly fair, everyone should try to keep everything above board and to aim for fairness.

Here are 14 methods for dividing estates that have worked for other families. Choose whichever ones fit your situation best:

You Bought It, You Take It Back

Let everyone take back anything they gave to your parent. This includes birthday, anniversary and holiday gifts, plus anything they made for them. If they don’t want it back, it becomes part of the estate that others may want, or it can later be sold.

Take Turns

Heirs take turns choosing one item each until everyone has at least a few things they want. Order of choice can be based on birth order, by drawing straws or by throwing dice. This works especially well if the estate contains items that have more sentimental value than monetary value.

Take a Chance

Each time two or more heirs want an item, settle it by drawing cards (high card wins) or by throwing dice (highest total wins).

(Discover 11 more methods in my book, How to Clean Out Your Parents’ House (Without Filling Up Your Own), just 99 cents right now.)

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