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The great junk transfer is coming

theglobeandmail.com

291–300 of 461 posts

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#291
post #70

Cleaning up after your parents is a gift you give to them: look at it like them paying it forward for all the times the cleaned up after you as a child. Psychologically, mentally, and physically, parents can have difficulty tidying up their stuff. My friend’s parents came from very poor backgrounds and had a lot of trash. The father had a shed full of stuff that was useful to him - he knew what was in it and how to u…

Yes, but seriously, the previous gens. hold onto a lot of junk.

No post body was provided.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#292

I watched a friend have to deal with this. There’s just so much to sort through or get rid of. My grandfather left dozens of model airplanes behind. No one in the family flies them. Most of the people he used to fly them with died before he did. Fortunately, my grandmother is still alive and we’ve found people who would appreciate the planes. We could have just burned everything but we have emotional ties to these th…

If you are in a niche, plan to get rid of it BEFORE you get old. Please, there are collectors, and stuff! I just got four new to me toolboxes, from my neighbor who was a diesel mechanic. Perfectly good after a bit of sanding and oiling. They're awesome, from the 80s, well made, and they'll keep me going for a long time. My father, a prodigious collector of oddities has done several wholsale removals of collections. O…

It’s really not that simple. My grandfather had almost a year to find people. Almost everyone he’d known was dead. The others already had too many of the things and were in the same situation.

Chemo stopped him from putting more work into finding people.

There are hobbyist groups for just about anything, but they can be small and hard to find. I’m twenty years, I’m sure there would be three people somewhere who would want the reMarkable I have now, but I’d have no way of reaching those people.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#293
Realizing that someone has too much junk that you're going to inherit is easy. Convincing them to do something about it is hard.

I'm unfortunately going to have to face this scenario with my in-laws and I'm not looking forward to the arguments in the future about a whole storage building of junk that we're going to inherit soon. Rusted cars. Art from the eighties nobody wants. Furniture. Medical records. Lots of planned projects that will never be realized.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#294
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what the big deal is to be honest, just a harmless hobby to collect random trinkets, it gives people joy, and you can just get rid of it when they die. I don't see what the harm is

The son in the article, nine months into the process of clearing his parents' house, estimated he is one-third done. That's a lot of mental and physical work he inherited, or alternatively signed up for.

You can just use a service to take care of the estate, you are not obliged to do that at all.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#295
post #220
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. The top-level article is unbelievably crass. I have had to deal with this. Sorting through an entire lifetime's worth of knick-knacks, papers, Christmas cards, plaques commemorating achievements and milestones that probably wouldn't even make sense to a twenty-year-old, all of it. Sure, it was hard. It takes time. But so did changing my diapers. And dealing with infant-me crying through the night. And watc…

Hell, no. What's unbelievably crass is the idea that children are obliged to respect and sift through gigantic heaps of stuff just because their parents had some emotional connection to some small parts of it - because most of it is guaranteed to be absolutely useless junk they did not actually value but merely couldn't bring themselves to throw away because of hoarding instincts. The idea that this obligation is som…

> The idea that this obligation is some kind of way to repay for what the parents did for the children is completely absurd and idiotic. It does nothing for your parents.

Thank you for saying this. I can't believe the points people are making here. Your parents are already dead at this point. Of course it does nothing for them. Taking care of them while they're still alive does something for them, but once they're dead nothing can ever affect them again.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I truly don’t understand people that fill up their homes with stuff. I almost replied this way, too, but then I remember the junk drawer I have full of DB9 serial cables, Firewire cables, PCI SCSI cards, 256MB RAM chips, 2GB spinning hard disk drives, three prong computer power cables, mice, webcams, power strips, power bricks, and a fully functional Dell OptiPlex GX620 with a screaming Pentium D 3.2GHz CPU. I keep…

Leftover paint exposed to temperature extremes is unlikely to last longer than a year or two.

I had vinyl siding installed and some wood trim painted on the exterior of my house in 1985. The leftover oil-based paint is stored in my crawl space, which has no direct heat or air conditioning. I used some of the paint in 2021 to touch-up the wood trim and then put the can back in the crawl space.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#297

I watched a friend have to deal with this. There’s just so much to sort through or get rid of. My grandfather left dozens of model airplanes behind. No one in the family flies them. Most of the people he used to fly them with died before he did. Fortunately, my grandmother is still alive and we’ve found people who would appreciate the planes. We could have just burned everything but we have emotional ties to these th…

[deleted]

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#299
My father's family lost everything in the Great Depression. His earliest memories were of moving out of the mansion into successively smaller houses. My mom is the daughter of refugees who often went hungry in their early years in the US. When I was growing up in the 80s, we lived in relatively wealth, but I thought we were poor. We had economizing rituals that are laughable in retrospect: we'd save everything including used tin cans, we would share a single teabag for making tea at breakfast, nothing ever got replaced if it could be fixed (Dad still keeps an 1980s-era microwave working, although over the years he's had to replace half the components on the main board).

My parents' house is now probably worth millions. They had careers and have savings and are living out a very comfortable retirement. There's a house full of stuff that I'll have to deal with one day. It will be hard, but I will try to look at it as a meditation on the challeneges they went through and how they coped.

I expect one of the hardest parts to be books. I was raised to think of books as practically sacred. Every inch of the house is stacked deep in books: art books, science books, old books, mass market books ... Libraries might want 1% of them, but they'd sell the others at fundraisers for a nickel or maybe just send them off to be pulped.

There's also my dad's old computer stuff. I think there's a PDP-11 rotting in the garage. When I was a kid, there was a big old analog computer out there. I suspect these will be re-homable.

Re: The great junk transfer is coming

#300
Why is everyone acting like this is not already a solved problem? Heirs are not forced to spend hundreds of hours sifting through their parents stuff... If that is too much of a burden, just call up the nearest estate sale company. They will do it all for you.
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