Hoarder in-laws want us to inherit their stuff

You have 2 options. Your decision may be influenced by whether you believe in the afterlife and their ability to haunt you.
Option 1 you make it clear you’ll pay a clearance company to empty the property before selling it / will put it up for auction ‘as is’ and sell to the highest bidder.
Option 2 you smile and go along with it & revert to option 1 upon their death.

I still have flashbacks to clearing my late IL’s house rammed with over sixty years of stuff. It was made worse as my DH also has those tendencies and wanted to look through everything personally. It took us six months to clear a 3 bed semi and garage, shed. They had left a note book listing things that they thought were worth something (they were worth bugger all). I must admit I impressed myself with my research skills on getting a lot of the stuff to various charities. Several bin bags of knitting wool went to a charity that teaches prisoners to knit. Thousands of buttons, zips and threads the local church shop wanted those. Unfortunately the gigantic collection of paper bags, yogurt pots and margarine tubs went to the recycling. My DMIL’s vast wardrobe of identical pairs of brown slacks and short sleeved white blouses went to the BHF shop.

These people are in their 70s, they have potentaily another 10-20 years before this stuff becomes Ops concern.

I recognise myself here! I feel somewhat comforted that I am not alone in this!

Oh no. How awful. Having to declutter a large family home, with annex before taking possession of said inheritance.

Seriously.

Do you mean they won’t want my first attempt at oil painting, and my carefully written poems? and They’ve actually dropped hints at some items! Some things are not their taste, but there are some nice things in all the “ stuff”. They’ll definitely my piano! Good job I won’t be here to see the skips and listen to the discussions!

Not everyone is cut out for swedish death cleaning. YABU to expect them to do it.

As PP have said, house clearance companies exist and can do it for you. Some will do it for free or cheap if it looks like there is enough with resale value to make it worthwhile for them.

Well for now they are still alive and that is their stuff.
Imagine being told to get rid of it all before you die so you don’t cause any inconvenience to anyone once you’re gone. And I assume you will partly inherit the 4 bed house, would that be an inconvenience too?

Tell them you've paid upfront for big skip 👍

Why would you tell them this? It would just cause them distress. They don't need to know at all.

OP, just accept and agree with what your in-laws say. You can't reason with a hoarder, and attempting to win them over with logic or truth will just cause them unnecessary upset. Then deal with the stuff as you see fit when the time comes. When they pass, they will be released from their hoarding disorder, so you don't have to feel guilty.

My late dad was a hoarder with the same mentality that everything was valuable. 20 car loads went to the tip, recycle or charity, one car load of bric-a-brac went to a general auction (made a moderate profit), and the rest is actually valuable and we are gradually selling it.

Honestly, i know you think your stuff is coveted, but i can assure you they won't be falling over each other to claim your junk things. One persons treasure is another.......

This could be a blessing in some ways because it will actually be much easier to do the clearance after the pass, than try to do it piecemeal now while they are alive: they attach sentimental value to every item. You do not.

You are not. So they will not have to suffer watching it all get binned, nor will you be forced to spend very much time sorting through the items that do not interest you.

Instead, as PPs have suggested, you can visit the house, retrieve anything you may want (photos? Any artwork?), dispose of anything highly personal (letters, personal care items, certain items of clothing perhaps), offer a charity the opportunity to take anything they can sell, perhaps offer any furniture that may be in good condition via a website such as Freecycle (where takers have to come and fetch the items they want), and then get a clearance company to come with a skip.

All you would need to do when the time comes is bring a good book and a kettle, and then let the various parties (charity, freecycle takers, and finally the clearer) in to to the house when the time comes.

And until then, you do not need to worry.

There’s no point worrying now - you can pay for clearance. Probate usually takes time so you’ll have time to clear the house and it’s good you don’t care much for any of their hoard.

We cleared my Grandma's house in virtually no time. Sorted all the paperwork and Everyone took the few things they might want. 4 cars with repeat runs to the tip one afternoon and then 2 guys we found on Facebook with a van and a valid disposal licence for the furniture.

Get house clearance in. Sorted ✔️

My 80 year old mum downsized recently and despite lots of talk about having a really good clear out before she moved, she actually moved ALL OF HER SHIT WITH HER to a house that was half the bloody size of the old one.

She paid someone to laboriously sort and pack up and label then move all this shit, knowing full well she didn't need most of it, she then paid them to move it all into storage because her new house was so full of boxes she could hardly get in the door. She paid then to unpack it, and she's now paying them to to gradually get rid of all her shit to the tip and the charity shop because she can't move for shit. It's a wonder she's not fallen and broken her neck on some of this shit before now. But only when she literally had NO SPACE for most of it could she actually bring herself to make decisions about what to get rid of. She must have wasted at least 3k on moving this shit from one place to another, to another and eventually to the bin.

Honestly, I despair.

All those boxes and albums of photos , Dad on a beach at Margate! It’s a hell of a job! All those school exercise books from primary and secondary school. All those programmes, souvenir tickets and postcards. I’ve lived in several countries, many different houses, travelled a lot- my family will have great fun when we are gone!

I have no idea how or why but DH and I both seem to have found one another and both of us have hoarders on each side of our family despite neither of us having those tendancies ourselves. I'm talking can't-get-into-some-rooms-as-you're-faced-with-a-wall-of-boxes levels of hoarding. I won't even visit SIL's house anymore as it's unbearable being in there.

We dread it. My elderly Aunt lives alone in a five bedroom house with multiple outbuildings that is packed to the rafters with stuff and she refuses to downsize or sort any of it. She's said herself that it'll be for us to deal with.

The plan, as others have said is to go through and spend a day picking out anything we want to keep and then just getting a clearance company in to empty the place. We cleared FIL's house ourselves and it was awful and upsetting to see everything just getting chucked into skips but it is what needed to be done. I'm not dealing with it in future though, a company can come in and sort it.

The best piece of advice someone gave me as I embarked on clearing my parents’ house was something similar. I’m not remotely sentimental but even so it did help to think the sentimental items were not my memories, but theirs.

I know I'm so tempted to get it for my family. I'm dreading it, I'm the complete opposite 😕

you'd think so wouldn't you?

I'd declutter that straight into the bin.

Surely most people just pay clearance companies to take everything away and don’t think anything more of it.

Don’t tell them!

It's far more likely, I would have thought. And you are given such an absurdly short time to sell the property to fund care, if one (widowed) or both of them need it. So much more difficult when it's full of stuff, it needs to be cleared before you can put it on the market/have it photographed.