To be so angry sorting out my parents stuff

[DazedorBemused]

I've just cleared another carload of stuff from my parents attic. They were born either side of WW2, and talked. Talked so much about rationing, poverty, striking, unions, etc.
My brother was occasionally ill as a child. To compensate he had fancy Lego, computers when they first came out, hand held video games.
The contrast between his pricy toys and my enjoy your family board game type stuff is obvious.
Then my parents got into collecting stuff - porcelain, dinner services, up scaled their Christmas decorations again and again.

I'm sorting through all this stuff and finding receipts for expensive trivial stuff in the early 90s when I was at uni, working two term time jobs and full-time in the holidays and I'm a 50 year old woman upset at having to go to the tip again.

We took away a couple of items of sentimental value but then got a firm of house clearers in to empty the property.

I think people feel guilty for doing this but it can drag on and rapidly get overwhelming.

My paternal grandparents tried to organise as despite being retired and in good health a sibling house some distance away had been overwhelming experience and dragged on and on. They sold/auctioned some expensive items off well before deaths to avoid arguments - it was still really overwhelming task for my parents - and other relatives made it harder but with no help offers as well.

We are not near DH family - or mine but rest of my family is close to each other - cost of just getting there and back let alone the travel and time is a lot - it will be a huge task.

IL using a house clearer for family member actually make it easier to suggest this when time comes. We'll also likely end up having to look after one Uncle on one side as there is literally no-one else - but we're not close I've barely met the guy.

I am thankful to everyone who has contributed to this thread - as someone who will be facing this situation within the next few years, reading about your experiences has been immensely helpful.
For me one of the biggest mental challenges will be a huge ottoman full of old photos. We have little family left, most people in the photos are gone and mean nothing to DD and it makes me sad that nobody will care about those photos one day. It would be nice to donate them to a museum for posterity but such a thing probably doesn't exist.

OK, I'm biased, as I'm a lawyer. But we don't "rinse" people as suggested upthread.

What we do is charge for our time. And yes, it takes time to sort out an estate, house, contents & all the rest.

Also, for blended/estranged families or families with an awkward member, having a neutral third party sorting it out can be worth it's weight in gold

Indeed. My mother grew up in a house with a maid and a chauffeur, and was sent to prep then private secondary school. When my time came, I was sent to the local comprehensive. Not a penny was spent on my education. I didn't even know what a prep school was until I started looking for schools for my own kids. They always had money for nice cars and fine wines though.
My parents were able to buy a house as soon as they left university for £2000. We had to rent through our 20's and finally managed to buy in our early 30's - a grubby flat costing 150 times what they had paid for their detached house.
My parents never had to pay for childcare because my mother worked part time and my GM did the rest. We were paying 1400 a month.

I think for many of our generation, trying to attain a comparable standard of living to our parents has been like running up the down escalator - you can see the top but no matter how hard you try, you can never reach it. However, there they are at the top, giving you the finger while sipping a gin and tonic, and asking you why you're out of breath. The generation after us are, of course, even more screwed.

Our county council has an archives and will accept some donations. They put on exhibitions of social history.

I don't doubt what you say is right.
One of my siblings is a solicitor and was the executor of my parents' estate. He charged petrol to the estate- his cost in driving from his home to our parents' home.Everyone else drove much further and did not ask for any money. He also bought biscuits for my parent's care home and charged the estate for that.
Everything that I thought was a nice gesture, he charged. For his own parents too.
That's one particular person though.

The " Sunday best " room was a cultural working class thing. It didn't necessarily mean that the people had a huge house.
My grandad was a miner and my Grandma kept the living room for best-they only used it for family occasions at Christmas. The room was always cold because the fire was only lit in there when it was used.

Might be worth asking local museums. A great Uncle to me army card and few photos were donated to a museum family spent some time in - not one you'd expect a living history one but they had displays in reception area - and my grandparents were very pleased to see them on display.

With grandparents this had been discussed and they labeled pictures - and many ended up in a self published family book about parent of a family member who lived a more interesting life and we all got copies - it's nice to have.

IL are talking about labelling pictures they have - hope they do DH has little interest but kids occasionally are interested.

Yes, this makes sense. My parents used a solicitor for my Grandad’s house because they lived so far away. There were also some other things going on - his sister was a hoarder and kept turning up to take a load of stuff that she didn’t need (like the kettle) and got quite put out when my mum had had enough. Plus my Grandad was convinced that his house and the contents were far more valuable than they were.

I'm sorry that you had that experience, but it really isn't universal for either your generation or your parents'. I don't know how old you are but my parents grew up in homes where money was very tight and have had great pleasure in helping their children and seeing them get opportunities they didn't have. This sort of thing comes down to personality, not the period where you were born.

Yep, I know several people who have had issues from having the solicitor be an executor. I'm sure the pp is a decent and trustworthy lawyer, but surely has to admit that not all are by a long chalk! Personally I wouldn't risk it as you don't know which you're going to get!

Some of us with small families / no family end up alone in this world and have no choice but to rely on a solicitor.

@Juliagreeneyes I've just googled and those little cottages are perfect for a twelve year old girl! Seeing them through an adult lens, they are both hidious and adorable.

Well then of course there is no choice in those circumstances x

Yes I know that. I mentioned that there were 5 people in a terraced house to show that the practise of keeping a room for 'best' was still done despite the fact that it must have had an impact on how crowded the family were.

My grandmother also used to worry about things like making sure her washing was on the line nice and early so the neighbours didn't consider her to be lazy. And she used to leave the curtains at the front of the house open all night just in case she slept in and people saw drawn curtains and judged her.

The shame of what other people thought of her was clearly very important. I think it's sad that she lived like that but understand that Lancashire working-class culture in the 1940s and 1950s had different priorities to how we live now. Personally I don't give a monkeys if people think I'm lazy! 😆

This very cute re the Lilliput Lane cottages!

Yes. My grandmother was very much the same. People seemed to be judged for really petty things.
In the war, she used to get the Calico bags that flour and sugar was delivered to the shop in. She would bleach them and embroider them and make them into table cloths.
I once said to my Mum " You know I couldn't be bothered with that" and she reminded me that they didn't have a TV.

You’re totally missing the point here. All of those things were tertiary level education, and there were not only no tuition fees, but grants and often free accommodation available for them too (eg nursing). Now you would have to do a degree for the same training/jobs, and pay the full tuition fees at a university to, essentially, train yourself and bear the cost of it. Whereas before, the state or employers bore the cost of it.

This is why it’s misleading to focus only on the percentage of boomers who went to university. A smaller percentage of that cohort attended UNIVERSITY, but a much more sizeable additional percentage also had free tertiary further, vocational, technical and employment-based training that would now be part of a university degree, including free tuition and grants/bursaries (and sometimes accommodation).

Take nursing and teacher training, for example. That used to be funded by the state or employers; now it is part of a university degree and funded by the individual student. But it is misleading to compare nursing training in 1975 to nursing training now unless you acknowledge that boomers got that training free that would now be a full tuition fee university degree. Ditto teacher training, especially for primary education (mostly women, of course, like nursing — one of the reasons that they get forgotten).

What do you think the polytechnics did pre-1992? They were free too, and there were more of them than universities. They were a proud tradition of vocational education that always gets forgotten. It’s highly misleading to forget that a large cohort of boomers attended them free for a range of non-degree courses and diplomas that would today be degrees in exactly the same institution, only now rebranded as a university.

Do you understand that to see the percentage cohort of boomers who had free tertiary education compared to today, you need to take this into account?

I remember a thread (a while ago now) where the OP had about 13 big cardboard boxes full of books that had belonged to a now dead relative. She was trying to find anyone who would take them but no one would ... and she didn't want to take them to the tip because her relative had really liked his books.

@ArtTheClown I loved them myself as a 10-12 year old — my parents had much richer friends who collected them, and we used to stay with them and I adored all their Lilliput Lane houses! They were such a “thing” — you could join a special collectors’ club and then pay for even more expensive limited edition tat 😆 I wanted my parents to buy them too, but my mum said we couldn’t afford it.

The friends who were crazy about them were very conscious of all those 80s fashion trends, and as soon as they went out of fashion the cottages all disappeared like they’d never had them. I wonder if they just kept them all in the loft somewhere — I never thought to ask. They must have spent thousands and thousands of pounds on these things, that by the mid-90s were horribly twee and unfashionable. Well, at least I appreciated them!

I am in my late 40s and still aspire to the idea of a 'for best' set of everything. We've got posh glassware and a posh cutlery canteen, but we just do not have the physical space to store a whole dinner service over and above the everyday stuff. We live in a four bed detached new build, 126 square metres. By modern UK standards this is a big house, and we do use all the rooms daily, but much as I would would to keep some of my parents' possessions even one token piece of furniture would be a struggle.

My Dad lived by himself for 25 years in a house four times the size of ours, and it was still packed to the rafters. Not only did he have an everyday dinner service (with 72 place settings!) but a 'for best' one too, an outdoor one (96 place settings!) and a colourful one for when the white everyday set was too boring. As well as a dozen separate grill plates which don't match any of them. Oh, and the Chinese dinner service...

Also it’s pretty sad that eBay is full of people trying to get crazy prices for Lilliput lane, crystal animals, Lladro figurines etc., when the going rate for them now is pennies at car boots.

Presumably a fair amount of the ones on eBay trying to get some mug to pay £150 for a “rare” cottage, are likely to be clearing out relatives’ houses. A great example of how the OP would be crackers to be spending the time trying to sell things like that for any money on eBay or whatever.

Our county council has an archives and will accept some donations. They put on exhibitions of social history.

That's interesting to know. I've got my grandma and grandfather's wartime ID cards and ration books and don't really know what to do with them. It seems a shame to throw them away.

Thank you @Juliagreeneyes for your posts.
My parents talked endlessly about there hardships but possibly it was because their parents truly had it hard, catching both world wars and low living standards.
Compared with the previous generation, my parents being cross about having to buy a textbook for a free OU course. Having to go out at night to catch a decent bus service to the technical college for professional exams. Getting annual pay rises and extra leave. It's left me, Gen X silent. I'm sure my parents didn't realise what a wedge it drove between them and the grandchildren. Moaning about the hardships involved in their 1960s social lives, only having two dresses for parties, when mine were at home for COVID.

Some of the posters above remind me so much of my parents, the nostalgic glow covering multiple decades, jobs and lives all rolled into one to justify the hoarding of time, money and stuff.

I have just heard from a specialist dealer he's offered me £60 for a niche collection. Compared with doing a proper day's work I should have tipped it.

Try your local primary school or one close to where they grew up.. It's part of the National Curriculum.