I'm in a weird position here myself with oodles of room and not much stuff so I have little real motivation to reduce things. I could probably move out of this 4 bedroom house and into a 1 bedroom apartment without having to toss much.
As he's demolishing the old farm-house, my youngest brother passed on a few of the things that my mother had kept. Old textbooks, all my old report cards etc. And yes, I have my old high-school yearbooks on a shelf around here somewhere. I'm not sure what to do with the old textbooks and such because tossing books feels like sacrilege so they're on a shelf for now. 40 year old textbooks on technology are undoubtedly rather dated although the mathematics and physics are probably still relevant unlike the law and economics texts too.
My Dad was a bit of a packrat hanging on to things because "they might be useful" which as a farmer made a lot of sense. I know that I had a stash of buckets that cat litter had come in "you never know when you might need a bucket" after-all Turns out that we needed buckets at the plant and so they've been re-homed and I felt validated I do laugh going around the plant - visitors must think that we have a bunch of incontinent cats. They would certainly know what the preferred brand of cat litter is.
Originally Posted by Dawn70
I also went through old pictures and threw out any that were blurry, severely faded, contained people that either of my parents would say things like "oh, I don't know....that may be MY great, great grandfather's neighbor's 2nd cousin" LOL.
One of my cousins sat down with my grandmother a number of years ago and went through pictures and wrote down who was who - usually the animals were named and the people she had more trouble remembering. I scanned them all in and shared them with the various cousins and my kids. I'm glad that that heritage that was sitting in a box in the attic of the old farm-house was able to be shared.
Originally Posted by kml
Ooh, high school yearbooks! Not sure I'm there yet!! lol. But as I get older, I'll definitely have to rethink thingd like that and get a little closer to Swedish death cleaning.
This is an interesting concept and one I can appreciate. Being a middle-aged fat guy living alone with his cat, I could theoretically pop my clogs at any time. I've had the conversations with the kids about what would need to be done and they have made it plain that other than a few things that there's nothing here they want so there's nothing much that I'm holding on to to pass on.
Perhaps that's one of the traps that some people fall into - accumulating things to pass on vs having things that they love and enjoy. I know that my ex in-laws made a big deal about who was supposed to get what. I was sooo glad to not be part of that sh!t-show when they passed. Certainly would have been quite the introduction into that dysfunction for OM though. I still get some feelings of satisfaction that that relationship was dragged out into the light where many of her relatives wouldn't have had any clue that anything had happened.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Turns out that we needed buckets at the plant and so they've been re-homed and I felt validated 
I do laugh going around the plant - visitors must think that we have a bunch of incontinent cats. They would certainly know what the preferred brand of cat litter is.
