If your children are grown, it might be the perfect time to declutter decades worth of possessions and downsize the family home. Let’s take a look at how to get the job done with the least amount of tears shed.
Choosing a house. Once you’ve decided to move, ask yourself a few questions about the type of place you’d like to live and what size space you’ll need for your new lifestyle. A few examples of key questions to ask: Do you want to stay in your current area? Where do your kids and grandkids live? Do you want to move to an active retirement community? How drastically do you intend to cut down your living space? Assess what you will need for living, entertaining and storage. This will dictate how many of your belongings you’ll need to discard or donate.
What to keep, what to unload. Once you have an idea about the size of your new space, it’s time reduce your accumulated belongings. To make things easier, categorize your belongings into piles: keep, sell, donate, recycle and trash. Furniture, accessories and electronics can be sold through Craigslist or consignment stores. There are plenty of organizations that will pick up donations.
Measure the rooms in your new house and determine, room by room, which of your furniture pieces to keep and what must go. Compare the amount of storage you will have to your current space. Assess your stored items and keep purging.
Sweating the small stuff. What about things like keepsakes, accessories, clothing and knick knacks? Offer your kids’ keepsakes to them. Don’t be offended if they politely decline or if you find out later they tossed them. Their keepsakes may not have the sentimental value to them that they have to you. To keep a memory of these things, take pictures and save them to a flash drive.
When it comes to financial records and pictures, digitize. Many financial records can be scanned to computers or flash drives. Do the same with picture albums, then destroy the hard copies. If you haven’t worn something in a full year, get rid of it. If you have bottles of household cleaners and chemicals that you don’t use, most cities have a program for safe household chemical disposal. Curate you collection of holiday decorations, alleviating your need for attic and basement space.
Keep your goal in mind. Decluttering is liberating. Fewer belongings mean less time organizing and cleaning, which frees you up for leisure activities.
Take your time. Sorting through a lifetime of possessions is time-consuming hard work. Start early, and allow yourself as much as a year to clear things out, depending on the size of your current home and the number of possessions. Work steadily so you don’t have to rush things at the end when moving trucks are on the way.
