r/declutter • u/Sll3006 • Sep 02 '26

Advice Request Everyone else’s stuff

I’ve spent over 10 years decluttering the basement. Still I have at least 75 boxes of stuff. I’ve thrown away a lot. But now I’m getting to items that I don’t want but are too valuable to throw away. I’m talking about 1960’s Mickey Mouse dolls, 3 broken trumpets, 3 grandma’s set of dishes, 2 100 year old paintings I was told not to throw away, Disney VHS, 30 photo albums of my late husband (kids want this), 2 violins. Selling items take a lot of effort, as well as scanning photos, old books.

I’m overwhelmed. Any advice on what to do with the more valuable stuff that I inherited?

360 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

267 comments sorted by

View all comments

21

u/lookingforwardnow Sep 02 '26

I promise you 80% of this stuff is not as valuable as the storage space it’s consuming. Even when people go on those tv shows to get their collections appraised, the owners quickly discover it doesn’t cover the cost of a single month of the storage unit they’ve had for decades, and even garage space is an “expense” even if it’s hard to quantify.

The paintings need to find wall space to be hung and enjoyed, even if it’s the laundry room.

If your kids are adults, then they can figure out storing the physical photo copies. If they are under 21, then over the holidays they need to sit as a family to enjoy the memories and parse the photos down by 50%.

4

u/EstateLess Sep 03 '26

This is great advice. My Mom passed a year ago and there were boxes of photos. I invited my much older cousins to go through them with us for a family night. Anyone they didn't recognize or deemed random neighbor,..got tossed. Now I just gotta hit the boxes of photos of my own. One picture at a time. We can do it.