About eight months ago I got a call from a woman whose parents had moved to a retirement home. She wanted to know what to do with the items that they had not taken with them. I explained that all she needed to do was keep what she wanted and I would handle everything else. She finally called back a couple of weeks ago (never a good sign) and I went to see the residence. Here is what I was told:
Most of the furniture had been hauled home to her garage where she tried to sell it on Craig’slist. When that failed it was taken to charity
All of the clothing had been taken to charity
The books (about 60 boxes) had been hauled to a book dealer who had paid $50. The remaining boxes were then taken to the library.
The neighbors were given “a lot of things they were interested in.”
By the time she called me back there was so little left that I had to charge to remove what remained (old pesticides, scrap lumber, stained mattresses, etc.). As well as my charges she had paid eight months of taxes, insurance, and utilities, as well as put in a lot of work for virtually no reward. If she had followed my advice, she could have had the house empty, clean and on the market within a month of her first call.
In doing the cleanup, there were several large garbage bags already full of stuff around the house. As I recycle everything possible, I had to go through these bags and sort out the recycling. One bag was full of dozens of boxes of unused greeting cards which I took to charity. Another, where they had apparently emptied a desk, had over $40 in unused postage, an envelope full of $1 silver certificates and another envelope full of older issue $2 bills (all of which was returned to the family).
Postscript: As with many people, they had been spending their time “throwing away money”, in this case literally (and who knows what they had thrown in the garbage in the previous eight months)!