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   play in progress (playinprogress@assemblag.es)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 00:53:56 JST play in progress

   Does anyone here have a howto for uncluttering the accumulated stuff of other people?

   I live in this house in which my father has been living in for 50+ years, and my mother for 30, and they are still alive but have both in a way abdicated their responsibility for most of the stuff in here... and it is doing my head in. But I do not know where/how to even start, and all the decisions to make make me collapse from decision fatigue before I even get there...

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 01:14:13 JST simsa03

     in reply to
     This is an awful situation. Not just because of the stuff itself but because of the karmic lianas that spread througout the whole place taking away every space for breathing. Too much history that prevents new things from emerging.
     
     But as your father is still alive and shares the house with you, he somewhat has the right to have his stuff lie around. The issue is rather that he has no space left (or: enough) to keep the not that urgently needed and important stuff out of your way because the available space is already taken by your mother's stuff. So I suggest the following approach:
     
     As your mother is in her own relationship, there is no lack of money, e.g. € 100-150 / month, to rent extra storage space in the town where she's living right now. There are companies like My Storage that rent out storage spaces as a little as 1 m² on a monthly basis. One can even get discounts for longer perods, e.g., with contracts running over two or more years. (I used that option when I had a water ingress from the flat above mine and had to evacuate my stuff [books primarily] for the flat to dry and be renovated. I paid € 90 per month for 4 m².)
     
     For this storage space there needs to be set up a contract and it needs to be paid for, then there are people needed to help your mother get her stuff out of your house. Obviously she doesn't want to do this because she seems to want to have one foot in the old life and can't let go. (Otherwise she would have done this years ago.) But perhaps repeated urges and telling her this plan may change her mind. And when she finally has moved her stuff, the stuff of your dad can take the space taken earlier by hers.
     
     Hope this helps.
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     play in progress (playinprogress@assemblag.es)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 01:50:10 JST play in progress

     in reply to

     • simsa03

     @simsa03 thank you for your thoughts! I think some things are a bit different than your assumptions though - my mother has actually been reasonably diligent in getting more and more of her stuff out of here. And my father very explicitly does not care about most of the things outside his own room or upstairs - he says if he can't even remember it is there or that it is his (which is true for most of it) I can do with it whatever I want.

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     play in progress (playinprogress@assemblag.es)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 01:52:09 JST play in progress

     in reply to

     • simsa03

     @simsa03 there is a bunch of stuff that probably my mother originally bought but feels not "hers" as much as "this used to belong to a state of this household that no longer exists". Lots of blankets and such. Tbh I think my own confusion and attachments are probably the biggest hindrance here.

     As in, *I* am probably more attached to my father's books than he is. In part because they represent a sort of record of his mind in different states from now.

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     play in progress (playinprogress@assemblag.es)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 01:54:28 JST play in progress

     in reply to

     • simsa03

     @simsa03 Still, I want my own books out of the basement dammit lol.

     And my father *wrote* enough books as testaments of his mind at different points in time so that the books he "merely" *read* should be easier to part with...

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     play in progress (playinprogress@assemblag.es)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 01:55:55 JST play in progress

     in reply to

     • simsa03

     @simsa03 as you know, and is hard to explain, this house is really *dense* in some ways. not just as a space drenched in its residents' memories but other people's memories, too. it definitely sometimes whelms me quite a bit