Back story, my mother lives in a house my husband and I own outright. We moved her and my father there a couple of years ago because of their horrific living conditions in their last apartment. We knew my dad was terminally ill and indeed, he passed away last year. This was never intended to be a permanent place for them as we do need to sell the property for our own financial security.
We recently found what seems like an awesome 'independent living' facility very close to my home for my mother. It's a beautiful place surrounded by live oak trees and green grass, and she'll be in a large 2 bed/2 bath apartment with a full kitchen, a private patio that backs to a quiet green space, 3 delicious meals per day and weekly housekeeping service. This may be short term, with rent at over $3,000 per month, I do not expect this to be a permanent solution, but the lease terms (90 days then month to month) are favorable for our current situation.
To move, Mom will need to select what furniture and personal belongings she wants to take with her. We have time to make decisions, but the reason we are doing this now is that we need to get the house emptied out and ready for sale. We do NOT want to end up paying thousands of dollars a year to simply move stuff to storage because Mom can't decide about anything, but in our experience her decision-making skills have declined terribly. This is complicated by severe short term memory issues. She can fill a box with items she has decided to discard and forget what is in the box within a matter of hours or days. The entire garage is stacked floor to ceiling with that type of stuff.
I know this is not an unusual situation. We're lucky in that mom really does seem ready to downsize the amount of stuff and the desire to downsize has become a big weight on her shoulders and really stresses her out.
I'm looking for suggestions about what worked best for you when helping your parents or loved ones in a similar situation? I'd like to give this no more than 6 weeks (at most); also, I am not opposed to a small storage unit. I just don't want it to become the, "It's easier to just not make a decision right now" defacto answer to every difficult choice.
Ideas? Best practices? Thanks!
I didn't keep fancy outfits/gowns or sandals and heels she couldn't wear. Nothing that almost fit or didn't. It took 3 days just to sort mom's room. I didn't keep 20 of her 22 purses. I pretty much put aside (to keep)her comfortable clothing, a few cardigans and pajamas, under 10 of each tops and pants, and sneakers.
My dad still had his faculties, so he did his own sorting of what he wanted. He kept trying to get me to do a yard sale, which was completely out of the question. That stuff would have had to be stored, I just didn't have the time or space to do that. A majority went to garbage, because of the nicotine. He kept making snarky comments about how all his stuff was garbage. I just couldn't do it the way he wanted. 🤷🏻♀️ He doesn't miss any of it.
If I had to do it again, I'd start with necessary furniture first. If there was more space in the new place then add in 2nd choice furniture items. Same with everything else 1st choice items, if space add in 2nd choice items. If your mom is sentimental ask her about her choices for those items. Items like expired canned goods, worn out clothing, things gathering dust due to being unused etc... I tossed without asking. If they didn't realize it was there, they won't miss it. Those were the things we got rid of. It's an undertaking for sure. In the end the lack of clutter made things easier for them, less confusing and less overwhelming. Start earlier rather than later...if you can months before.
The main stuff to hold on to which helps with aging memory are the photos and family memorabilia. I stored some in boxes at my home and rotated them in and out.
So if you can tolerate a few months of her being in a facility until the house sells, you keep a financial list until payback.
We stored those things for 7 YEARS without ever going near the storage unit again. There was a huge bill of about $6,000.00 dollars when she died this September which came out of our inheritance. What a waste! We got all the family and grandkids together to help clean it out in a month but everyone took very little; they are all well established already. It was such a hassle to do right after she died because I had to go running all over to get anything disposed of. After Covid most businesses (SalvationArmy, Goodwill) were no longer picking up donations and we had to make arrangements with a place for homeless women with much aggravation from me since I was 1 hr. away from the storage unit and had to keep going there so people could pick up things.
Never again!!! Do not store things in a unit as your mom will probably never need them again. The only good that came out of this is I am making sure I don't leave my kids with the same mess.
Moving is expensive, and I cannot afford to relocate on my limited income and resources. Our family was all permanently split up decades ago from foster care.
Years ago, my remote family verified and compared SF vs OR and TX shelter costs and advised me against moving. And, what independent living is affordable where I live or elsewhere?? I own my own place outright with all my precious things in it; just need shelter comfort. With my disability and no local support, this type of life event would be traumatic for myself move away from the lovely place in the Bay Area to an unfamiliar area outside of CA with unforeseen fun, volunteer work, limited public transit and unknown healthcare to use.
It's very likely that my future moving is reserved for when I'm forced out if unable to care for myself from my lovely condo of 32 plus years to an AL or NH just like my late mother was in 2013 when she could no longer care for herself. I sure hope the condo will sell with a decent fixer price.
So, I live nicely with some nice neighbors and just a few friends. Meanwhile, I use my free time to go through drawers, cabinets and closets to consolidate. It's very hard to eliminate things I lived with most of my life and will think out the purpose of each item. Will I use this item or that? I want to make one of three decisions, either keep, donate or trash, like I did when I had worked at Goodwill employment. I want to keep the mahagony highboy its matching desk that was my late mother's, and the nice nightstand. Who will help me decide when I cannot? Maybe I won't care about anything except comfort at the time. I say, God, don't keep me around until I'm 90 and using up my resources in some dumpy NH with unknown or even lack of staff to care for me.
I wouldn't use pods.
When I moved, post divorce from my house and my newly purchased coop wasn't ready yet, I paid the moving company to store my stuff for a couple of weeks. It wasn't that expensive.
I did move some books, boxes of papers and excess household stuff to a UHaul locker for a couple of months. The cost was great incentive to toss vigorously and ruthlessly.
This woman would not let go of anything!
I paid for the pods b/c she had absolutely no money and made her sign a contract that she would pay me back once her house sold. She ended up not moving and I was out almost $4K, for delivery and storage in her driveway only. This was the cost for >3 months usage.
Moving these pods to one of the company's storage sites and having to pay for delivery of them would have run another $700+ PER pod.
So take that into consideration when you are thinking you can just pick away at a storage pod or unit. It's a slow and incredibly depressing thing to do.
She BEGGED me for help and I worked with/for her for almost 4 months---(Long, long backstory here). I'd go every morning and work for 6-8 hrs and maybe throw away one contractor's bag of junk. Maybe.
When she decided not to move--I was FURIOUS. I never went to help her again. She asked me why and I told her "L, you BROKE me. You wouldn't even open your MAIL...we had to save it all. I just can't anymore". She was very, very angry, and I learned a lesson.
The out of sight--out of mind idea is good on paper, but if that's how you choose to deal with this move, you will get less and less motivated to work.
(BTW, the neighbors were all helping too, it was not just me. They got together and collected $$ and I was made 'whole' over the cost of the Pods. Lesson learned)
I cleared out mom's house (lived in from 1956-2011) in an epic purge over my Department of Education summer break (June-Aug). Took most of the housewares to Goodwill; saved the good stainless and silverplate for my kids, told everyone to come and take what they wanted.
Called the Salvation Army and had them take the rest of the furniture. Then Brother called JunkLuggers or one of those services.
Then, there was the garage (Daddy's realm). Took my brother 3 years to clear that out (lots of hazardous waste stuff--DDT, asbestos based stuff). My father never met a chemical he didn't want to save.
I cleared out 50 years of tax returns, old greeting cards, unused toasters and blenders. I put loads of stuff at the curb and was gratified by the folks who came by and walked away looking happy that they'd found a treasure. It meant that what mom loved was going to be loved by someone else.
In your shoes, needing to do a quick sale, I would have movers take EVERYTHING to storage and purge it, without mom's "help" over the course of a month or two. If you are ruthless, go every weekend for a couple of weeks, you can get this done.
DO NOT put this stuff in front of your mom to choose from. That way lies madness.
The hubs and I moved my parents into assisted living.
Cleaning out the house was quite a big project. I would loathe to have to do it again. There was a lot of stuff accumulated over 60 years. For example, there was over 300 glasses for every beverage
imaginable. The Hubs and I chose to tackle the project head on with no storage unit. We felt that it was just an avoidance tactic. I also let my parents and sibling know that my house was not a storage option. We would not allow our home and garage to be filled to the brim waiting for my parents to make decisions on who got what.
As you can imagine this did not go over very well with them. It was a very stressful time and if I had to do it again I would probably just let my parents put their stuff in storage knowing it would sit forever and I would make sure that my sibling who lives out of state be the contact for whatever needs to be done and wash my hands of the matter. I learned a lot of things about my family during this time and most of them were very interested in my parents possessions and not my parents, even though they sat at their holiday table for over 50 years.
She was LIVID.
She was the one who signed up for this place, not me, but she had zero concept of what the space really would be like with her furniture. Still, we worked out what could fit, and we arranged furniture within that outline. Everything else went into the estate sale, and in the end she was more excited about the money the sale brought in than about the "stuff."
As it was, she never went to that IL place, and she spent her final years sharing a bedroom in her niece's house. The furniture we selected went into a storage unit at $200/month (such a waste), because she was always "almost ready" to move to IL.
If you ask them to go through their things with the idea of getting rid of them it is heartbreaking so try not to do that so explicitly. Just get moved into the new place and take over doing it disposals yourself. And occassional little white lies will help.
If I had to do it again--and I sure hope not--I would probably not be so 'kind' about it. Mom looked at everything with such a sense of ownership and longing. Realistically, they could have put everything in storage and then paid those enormous storage fees for the rest of their lives, b/c they just WANTED all their stuff. But, why?
We did finally get to the stage where we just gave mom choices: How many 9x13 pans do you really need? 10 (that you have) or 1? She had a very hard time making decisions! We ended up, at the end, just making one sided decisions and she 'lost' a lot of things that she wanted.
Dad really didn't care. He was losing the house he'd built and there was no getting around that. (OB 'borrowed' the equity in their home and lost it in a bad business deal. That's why mom and dad had to sell and move. Heartbreaking.)
We did have to get 'brutal' about some things and to this day I feel badly about it. But mom could not make decisions, and was frozen in place.
SO MUCH was junk. Not to be rude, just saying. JUNK. And she saved everything, every bank statement for the past 42 years, every card, everything. That was the stuff that was hard to get her to let loose.
I let this memory of how awful it was to pack and move mom & dad guide me as I am still purging my 'new to us' house of stuff we brought here that we do not need. I try to toss 1-2 garbage bags of stuff per week. And take one box/bag to GoodWill per month. Or more. I have a lot of closets and many of them are completely empty. It's a good feeling!
I'm finding that the older I get, the less I want all this 'stuff' around me.
After mom passed, YB went a little crazy and had mom's apt completely emptied in 48 hrs. It caused some ruffled feathers, as he didn't do it with an eye to what had been 'promised' to various family members--he just wanted it EMPTY. It was his way of mourning mom, and of erasing 25 years of non-stop caregiving.
That's one way to do it, but I gurantee it will cause some hurt feelings. I don't think YS has spoken to him since the funeral. Luckily, I didn't want ANYTHING from her house, so I didn't care, just felt sorry for YB and his frantic purging.
IMHO, there is NO one way to do this without there being a lot of emotions involved. Good and bad. Prepare for some anger, sorrow and sadness.
There is a "thing" called Swedish Death Cleaning. The idea is you go through things and get rid of them or organize in a way so that upon your death relatives are not faced with a monumental task.
Since I am not dying....at least anytime soon as far as I know...I did what I called Swedish Invalid Cleaning. Pretty much the same idea but not quite as intense. In a week or two I did get rid of a lot of things. A lot went to the curb on garbage day but a lot went to a resale shop in town. (Now I just know I can't shop there for a few weeks 😂) And on that note..if I do shop when I get something new to me I will try to get rid of at least 1 thing.
I think we all collect more stuff than we really need and I am trying to change that in myself. Not all bargains are bargains if they end up getting tossed later on.
We made all the decisions for the folks. Named a week all of the siblings were available and told them this was the only chance to get what they wanted while helping us move the essentials. The staff had suggested we furnish rooms "lightly" for future wheelchairs, etc. Everything not taken was donated that week or tossed. Their community garbage service brought a large dumpster and would change it out for a new one when we called. I think we did 3 dumpsters of stuff. The neighbors who had been so kind to them were also invited to select furniture and belongings.
The older relatives were a little shocked. The three kids all lived out of state, we sold the house within 3 weeks of the clean out.
I like Grandma's short, simple decision approach "big or small dresser?" Also I'd try to avoid late afternoon decisions or whenever you see fatigue or frustration.
Another idea I've heard of is by theme. Ask her how she wants her new place to be, to feel & look then choose for her to meet that 'theme'.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a professional stylist or organiser? Bet they cost big time.
I'll just lurk here as I'll need all the help I can get with this too!
DH & I have downsize plans + elders both sides will need to do one day... Siblings are sentimental about Every Thing - execpting zero help there. They can strore & pay but I won't. Why pay storage for items not in use? Thank it & say goodbye, Marie Kondo style.
"Mom, we are going to have to move you to a new apartment. What dresser do you want, the tall dark brown one or the short one? (Doing this you have given her a choice but a limited one so she still feels like it is her decision.)
You really only need 1 night stand, I am going to keep the other one in our spare bedroom." (doing this she may feel she is not really getting rid of it that it will be put to use...do with it what you want once she has moved.)
"Fancy" clothing she probably will not use again, keep maybe 1 or 2 better outfits. the rest you can tell her you will keep in storage. Donate any clothing that she has not worn in a while. "Vintage" items you might want to check with a local theater group or the local high school arts department and see if they want any items.
Katrina destroyed her entire home and it’s contents.
I will let others answer this question.
Good luck!