need furniture advice

[LunaBun]

I, too, wish I were closer. I've had to help declutter and purge my grandmas house after she passed, my aunts after selling her house and my mom just moved into our basement and consolidated her stuff from 2200 sq ft to 1200.

I'm happy u found a place for the piano....heres my 2 cents....I would start one room at a time. Pick the items in each room that are the most sentimental and know that its truly OK to get rid of thing you can't use. I know that it's hard...but if you can kind if detach yourself from the task and tell yourself it's for your sanity....and perhaps you're keeping yourself from being on a future Hoarders episode (kidding, but that's what I tell myself as I'm purging).

Plan on having a sale in the spring...call it a garage/estate sale...and start piling stuff you don't want in plastic tubs and putting them in the garage...perhaps start with your friends stuff....and anything of yours you know you dont want. You can then have the charity come pick it up afterwards. Vow to now let anything back in the house you've decided to sell. I've gotten rid of lots of unwanteds using Craigslist, too. Hang in there!

 

[Imbrium]

garage sales are SO much work, most of the stuff I'd get rid of isn't worth selling and my garage is currently "dead to me" or I might, lol. I figure I'll go the donating/trashing route, as it's much faster/easier. if only the trash bins the city gave out were bigger, heh - I had to annex my neighbor's trash bin last Friday after overflowing my own and now it looks like I'm going to have to annex their recycling bin 'cause mine's stuffed to the brim!

the next big thing of mom's I think I'll part with is her elephant collection. she treasured it, so I'm sentimental about it, but at the same time I don't want to cart someone else's elephant figurine collection around for the rest of my life. she worked at Sunshine Cottage School for the Deaf... she was very popular there and *very* well known in her field (she had PHDs in deaf education and speech pathology). I think I'll call them and see if they would be willing to let me drop off the collection so that her friends/co-workers/ex-students could each pick an elephant to keep to remember her by. I know they still miss her, as this year on the anniversary of her death, I found a card from one of the teachers there on the windshield of my car.

I've made a ton of progress in the last three days or so with cleaning out the house, organizing and starting to re-do the floors. it's looking SO much better already!

 

[LunaBun]

Huh. I wonder if I'd know her name. I'm a speech pathologist.

 

[Imbrium]

oh, wow, really?

Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Wilkes was her name. not sure how well she was known in the speech pathology world, but she was pretty widely known in the deaf education world - near the end of her life, she put together this whole new educational program for deaf kids that she spent a few years working on.

just found her obit online... it says "Dr. Wilkes is known internationally in Deaf Education. She was Program Director and Chair for the Master of Deaf Education and Hearing Sciences at UTHSCSA in partnership with Sunshine Cottage School for Deaf Children. She was a nationally recognized lecturer and workshop leader with work published and cited in professional journals. She created four significant language and speech tools to help professionals working with the hearing impaired.

Over the past 5 years these programs have had international impact in education of the hearing impaired. She was the Alexander Graham Bell “Professional of the Year” in 2002."

 

[LunaBun]

Interesting how online connetions are formed. . Wow, I don't know her but did a quick search, she was definitely a great loss to the community. I'm not specialized in deaf education, but it sounds like your mom had great input for slps teaching kids with any degree of hearing loss. I will actually mark a couple of the articles for future reading. . I am a school based SLP at the moment and actually don't have any kids with hearing loss on my caseload at the moment, but did the previous 2 years. . Thanks for sharing that, it had to be so hard to figure out how to handle/close all her affairs. I can't imagine. :hearts:

 

[Imbrium]

fortunately I didn't have to deal with any of it, as I was 21 and would've had no clue what needed to be done - my aunt teresa (mom's youngest sister) was the executor for her estate, plus I had Joe (mom's new husband) around to help so everything got done for me.

edit: well, I did have to deal with some, I suppose... HUGE pet-peeve of mine... junk mail for the dead.

I had an uncle I barely knew who died when I was 7 (dad's oldest brother)... he lived in colorado and the rest of the family was far away (Tennessee, plus us in New Orleans) and for whatever reason, my mom ended up being the one to fly out there to settle his estate. after she got done, his junk mail somehow followed her back to New Orleans... then when we moved to Texas, it followed us HERE. my dad died when I was 9, while we still lived in New Orleans, and his junk mail followed us here as well. to this day, I get junk mail addressed to dead people, two of whom have been dead for 20-22 years >.>

I did a bunch of research online and did everything I could find to get them on DNC lists to stop the junk mail, and it's gotten better... but it hasn't stopped. the worst was right after my dad would've turned 65 - OMFG, the amount of mail people get when they hit that age! the ones that bug me most are for life-insurance policies. I think if they send a life-insurance offer to someone who's been dead for two decades and never even lived at the address it's being sent to, I should be allowed to take out a policy on them and immediately cash it in. either I'd get rich or the junk mail would stop and either way, I'd be happy.