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Kim East's avatar

The keepsake book for your mum’s 90th sounds like a lovely idea.

It’s a hard task, going through someone else’s stuff, trying to decide what to keep and what to get shot of. We had to do that recently when an elderly aunt moved into a care home.

However, off the back of this experience, when we moved to Devon 18 months ago we decided that nothing was going in the loft in our new home. And the removal guys also suggested we have all but the essential boxes delivered to the garage, to be unpacked as and when we needed specific items (I had catalogued each box carefully so we knew where to look). This way, we ensured that only essential belongings have made it into the house. The rest went to charity or was sold or dumped. And still we try to be mindful of what we need and what we can do without, so that when the time comes our daughters have an easier task than might otherwise have been the case. In fact, keeping this in mind has made me much more ruthless than I (a bit of a hoarder) have ever been!

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Deborah Vass's avatar

The music choice did make me laugh! Thank you for the book recommendation too as it is lovely to make a discovery such as this.

Clearing belongings like this is so hard. We have recently done it for my father in law and it was such a difficult process, and though he was incredibly organized and everything was carefully labeled, there were some wonderful discoveries.

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