Advice on how to divide house contents?

DigForVictory

Copious notes being taken as parents are already trying to earmark furniture etc to go to specific people & one sister lives in a tiny flat & another in a modern new build & I live in a three story retrofitted industrial unit.

On space alone I can mop up a lot & that Wouldn't Be Fair but then they don't want the family archive papers.

Also I'm the only child who can read Cyrillic, so I suspect I'll get a stonking block of maths reference textbooks in Russian. The irony - I don't speak Russian, let alone High Maths.

High quality copies of popular drawings is a very canny move.

Robin9

My MIL has given her son (who will be executor) a list of what she has already of a few specific items.

In reality there's nothing much of interest to us and its of no real value but lots of memories to MIL

Plenty of stuff for the charity shop and we will probably pay her carer to arrange as none of us are local.

YoungBlueEyes

Thanks DigForVictory, I do have my moments

It wasn't expensive either, the beautiful thick paper they're printed on cost more than having it done. Lucky they aren't 10ft square oil paintings cos god knows what I would've done then ha haa!

eddyinfreehold

I very much go with Tom99 here, with a few additions. Rules are, if you want anything you have to help clearing. It took about 2 weekends in total. The first morning was a bit traumatic as people kept picking things up and saying they wanted them which got someone else's back up. In the end we got down to just one job. Sorting books into themes and boxing them. There were 80 boxes in the end and we were all pretty sick of books, or anything by then. We then sorted linen, blankets etc into one heap, china and cutlery another, glassware another, and so on. Everyone took a fair turn at choosing an item as per Tom above and it was all sorted pretty sharpish. A big trailer to the dump was essential. A skip would have been the alternative. You cannot have too many of those flatpack cardboard boxes or clean sturdy rubble sacks, gaffer tape, string and permanent markers.

The interesting one was all the silly little things .... there is a great word in Welsh to describe this... annibendod .... which means a sort of annoying clutter of stuff. We filled several buckets with annibendod: bun pennies, thimbles, pens, pencils, interesting stones and seashells, postcards, stamps, coins, the skull of a seal, fish hooks and flies, the contents of desk drawers etc. All too sentimental and going back 60 or more years. Rather than chuck it all, we will have time to go through it later now the big stuff is gone.

YoungBlueEyes

My friend Carole has a good word for that too - 'stuffocated'

eddyinfreehold

YoungBlueEyes wrote: »

My friend Carole has a good word for that too - 'stuffocated'

...very good