Will you want your parents' stuff when they die?

[OneWorthyLemonCat]

I'm a big declutterer, and now live pretty minimally. I have a one in, one out policy on new possessions, and try to only buy quality items that I really love.

I've just been thinking about my parents and in laws. They often make reference to DH and me and our siblings having their "stuff" when they die.

We'll barely wany any if it though.

Of my mums, I'd love her Ercol sideboard. Of my inlaws, we would love my MIL's collection of LeCreuset pans.

That's it. EVERYTHING else that they own will go to charity, or in a skip.

We don't share the same taste, and although DH and I have plenty of space, I know so many people have much smaller homes now. We also live differently to them - I would never use fine China, or serve cakes on a glass cake stand, or poach a whole salmon in a fish kettle, or serve drinks in crystal glasses, or use solid silver cutlery!

Which of your parents' possessions would you want? How do you think it will feel taking their worldly possessions to a charity shop? (I wonder if shops will be so inundated in 5-10 years that they stop taking donations anyway. I know many have stopped already). Does it make you live or think differently about your own approach to acquiring "stuff" through your lifetime?

DH and I dont have kids, and I'm very comfortable with the idea that our much loved possessions will have brought us happiness through our lives, but will end up at the rubbish tip when we're no longer here!

I’m sure that my Grandmother was buried with her wedding ring, that was 20 years ago. I have her engagement ring along with my Nannas engagement ring and my Mums wedding ring.

Tbf, my mum talks quite openly about what she suggests we do with their stuff after they are gone, I don't think thinking about it means people want their parents gone or only care about their stuff!

Funnily enough, this was going through my mind recently. DH & I both have both sets of parents who are in their early 80s (81-84). At some point we're going to have 2 decent size houses to sort.
Both sets of parents have very different styles/tastes to DH & I.
My in-laws have a very traditional style and most of their furniture is vry dark, heavy & 50+ years old. They are still using a Hostess Trolly which was a wedding gift 59 years ago! However, they do have a few interesting pieces from when they lived in Hong Kong & Alabama. I would also like to keep their Spode Christmas items so we can continue to use them each year.
My parents have a very eclectic mix. Their dining table is very antique looking & 50 years old, lots of Lladro bought in Spain in the 80s but then they have a brand new 70 inch state of the art TV! However, they do have a few unusual bit from my Grandparents so I'd probably keep those as they're quite rare.
We'll keep photos and small bits from both homes but the majority of items will be sold or donated.
I think both my mum & MiL have some real gold jewellery so I'd probably keep a few bits and have a necklace or earrings made by a local Jeweller using that.
I doubt DH & I have very much that our own children would choose to inherit and that's absolutely fine by us!

I kept very little of my mums stuff. Some clothes, household items, jewellery, but she was a de-clutterer so there wasn’t a lot of ‘stuff’ anyway.
80 % PIL stuff went in several skips over several months. Despite being wealthy they lived like paupers so all furniture, household items etc were almost 60:years old, threadbare and falling apart. Any ‘heirlooms’, silver, vases, canteens of cutlery, old cameras etc which had been kept boxed up for years and never seen the light of day were auctioned off and the money split. It was fair bit. Two old family grandfather clocks were taken away by the council. I don’t think they would have approved!

One of the best things my grandfather did in his will was explicitly state that for all his possessions we should get money for it if we can but if we don’t want to or can’t, then just give it to charity or bin it. It was very liberating to know that he would have approved of what we did with everything and wasn’t sentimental about anything.

I have loads of stuff from my late mum and my granny. I have my granny’s tea cups on my Welsh dresser and loads of my mum’s books.
I’ve only just been able to throw out my mum’s VHS videos which lived on my bookshelf for a good 8 years after I last had a VHS player and 14 years after she died.

In contrast my partner’s mum has just died and he’s thrown everything out but photos.

I wouldn’t choose a lot of the stuff I’ve kept but it feels like a tangible link to my mum so keep it I will.

My parents have some good art some of which I’d like. But I’m not so keen on their furniture.

I also have a lot of dark furniture from my granny’s house which wasn’t at all “in” when I inherited it but very much is now and is so well made

My other half inherited about 15 giant jars of Nescafé instant coffee, that was about all he kept !

I have a box of letters my in laws wrote to each other during the war. FIL was abroad from 1941 to 1946. I've never opened them because it seems too personal but I have kept them . I think DS2 might be interested as he's keen on family history.

All our olds are dead.
From the in laws I kept the box of letters. FIL was a sweetheart and mad on gardening. I have a few of his tools and his diaries. These consist of weather reports and crop yields.
The vast majority of my mothers stuff was collected by a charity shop. I kept the house name which she had engraved on a piece of slate and was important to her. And photographs. Old photos of family and people, I threw away all the dog and holiday ones.
When my grandparents died I got grandad's diaries and some papers from his employers in the 1920s. His diaries covered 1921 to 1925 in the army in the middle east. Much mention of dysentry.

I am trying to declutter though I am not a hoarder to begin with. One thing that would help would be for the DC to take all their stuff!

I'm in the process of clearing my parents house. I have jewellry, a few clothes, pens, a few books, some bits of quirky china from when they travelled, documents, photos, I may take a picture.

Years ago my daughter told me that the only thing she really wanted was the snowman candle that I bought in Boots in a January sale for 50p in the early 1970s; apparently it was Christmas to her. Rather than have her wait until I fell off my twig I gave it to her for Christmas the next year. She was delighted!

I'm a bit cross with my Mum with this subject tbh.
My parents divorced over a decade ago, and my father has been very good at sorting his financial affairs and minimising his stuff. Same for my in-laws, they were doing this over ten years ago.
My mum on the other hand, has claimed to be getting rid of stuff for years but during a recent house move, my siblings and I have been overwhelmed as/by the sheer amount of crap stuff she has kept has come to light. Luckily, the house she has moved to has enough space and a huge outbuilding and garage to store all the crap stuff, but she is of an age that she cannot really cope with sorting the stuff herself (not that she was really doing much before). My siblings and I are going to have to take on this fun work fully over the next few years!
Last week me and my brother found amongst her crap treasures: orange curtains which were vintage late 60s/ early 70s (to be fair still vibrant as they'd been packed away unused for fifty+ years), a wicker basket with a broken handle, and some rotten home-made soft toys from circa 1977 🙄

The whole point is you've already removed whatever you want from your parents' belongings but the remaining stuff you don't want offer it to other people. The posters above aren't selling them or giving them to people they're leaving it up to house removals to cart it all away or offering it to charity shops that are already full. Even a garage sale is better than just throwing it all away.

I have 3 siblings, and they all had adult or nearly adult children by the time my mum died too. (There’s a big age gap, my DD wasn’t born till years after mum died). So between us, with us all taking one or two special things or things that would be useful to us, most of the stuff worth keeping was kept. One of my nieces was pregnant and just moved out from her parents for the first time, she didn’t have much so she ended up with a lot of the furniture. I had moved in with mum when she needed care (and previously in rented/ furnished place abroad) so I also didn’t have much in the way of furniture, so kept some stuff too.

Special/ sentimental stuff we decided between us, there weren’t any clashes or big fall outs we’re all decent people. It’s been 14 years since she died and I still like using a mug that was hers, or her sewing box or the ancient recipe book her mum had given to hers.

My in laws have a big house absolutely crammed full of stuff, and my DH has inherited their dislike of parting with anything - we still have furniture of his gran’s in the garage which we’ll never use, and boxes full of tat he can’t apparently let go of despite being very good at telling DD and I what we should be clearing out and getting rid of! FIL in particular is cloyingly sentimental about the most meaningless bit of shite these days and already forever trying to foist mouldy teddy bears or piles of dusty books nobody is interested in on us. So it’s going to be a huge job one day, and will fall mostly to DH and I as the only ones in the same country as in-laws.

A weird feeling being married to someone with ageing parents, having cared for and lost both parents young in life (well 4 of them, birth and adoptive really). I hope my in laws are around for a long time to come and I hope they stay as fit and healthy as they are now, but I do feel a sense of dread that it’s all to come somewhat. As huge as the grief was for me, as hideous as the whole process was afterwards, and as much as I’d give anything to have my mum back or to have had her for longer, the one bleak advantage is that it’s done. I won’t have to go through it again. Except I know that DH will, and that much of the ‘work’ of it will either come to me or I’ll be made to feel guilty if I don’t take it on, and I’m dreading it.

Very little. My parents have shitloads of crap - have lived in the same family home since 1967 and are still there in their late 80s. My sibling and I frequently talk about what a nightmare it is going to be to clear it.

They are still hoarding stuff that belonged to their parents, and it was cheap and worthless in the first place. We're not talking priceless antiques here or family heirlooms. Grandad was a miner. It's all just tat.

Same here. His dad recently admitted he still has all his parent's stuff in the attic so my DP (who is also a hoarder) will inherit multiple generations of stuff. We need to be in a house situation where we own a big garage so I can say everything needs to go in there unless it's actually useful, and he can take however many decades to sort through it all.

My parents are the opposite. They keep nothing.

Desperately and fruitlessly hoping PIL declutter before anything happens. Their large house and land is FULL of old shite. I'm sure some of it is valuable but I can't imagine wading through it all, especially whilst grieving.

MIL has proudly announced a few times in the last years that she's decluttered, but then I just find it all stacked in the garage. 🫠

This thread is the most fantastic example of how even the most minimalistic of us have, frankly, far too much stuff.

Lord knows why we're still churning out furniture, ornaments, soft furnishings, stuff on such a monumental scale. Well I do, a) profit and b) people want new things because heaven forfend your cushions don't match and are a bit old fashioned.

It is a little bit nauseating when you think of the sheer volume which just ends up in landfill. The resources we could have saved by not mass-producing so much crap...

I don't know how my house will be cleared after I'm gone. A window will have to be taken out to remove my piano. That's just for starters.

Fuck no, and I’m really not looking forward to having to sort all their shit out because they won’t face up to reality. My dad in particular is a massive hoarder!

Don't be silly. Many on this thread have already had to face this. We did, after my parents-in-law died, and to an extent after my Dad died too, although my Mum is still with us (not for much longer, sadly) so it was just a case then of deciding what to do about his clothes and other items that Mum didn't want or need. Clearing an entire house or flat is a big job and deciding what to do with other people's stuff is tough. There is nothing horrid or disgusting in considering in advance whether one solution might be for family to take some things.

I was thinking about this the other day as I was with my mum this past weekend and she was looking at all her stuff and saying ‘who will want all this when I’m gone?’ My parents lived interesting lives all over the world and my mum was a great collector, rugs, pottery, interesting bits and pieces (a hippo spear, a necklace of baboon teeth, a long line of cowrie shells the marker traders used as payment before a national currency was created in the country they lived in). But where would it all go? I love the rugs but we have no room. I’m pleased all the stuff gave has given her happiness though.

We're now the eldest generation. We've sorted out both our mother's estates with our respective siblings, and most of what we've kept is destined for our kids. Our DC is an only and still young; not married, but on the brink of buying first property while we're ready to relocate and downsize a bit. So we'll shift some stuff them, and DC will take the furniture left to them by my DM (silver flatware and a rather nice Georgian games/sewing table) but will have to wait for the real bonanza -- which is my batterie de cuisine! Amazing quality Swedish stainless and copper pans from the 1950s, superb quality knives and a fairly complete (but unmatched) set of LeCreuset.

From the in-laws I kept their collection of Venetian and Scandi art glass and a beautiful handmade salad bowl by an artist friend that was a wedding present. SIL had most of the jewellery and several very fine china dinner services. We are still trying to re-home some of DH's G-GPs goods and chattels but they've been dumped in the cellar!

I half agree and half don't. It illustrates to me that everyone has the need to make their own world. Some people are creative, but most of us in the UK at least want to curate our environment, and times, tastes and technologies change.