Hi all.
Massive job @Determined, but sounds like it's going well.
@Former-MemberGuesswork like that is hard. I hope he does appreciate your choices. Since your Dad was living in a unit, I assume there had already been a fair bit of downsizing done when he moved there?
I get it about the sentimental value. Latest trip to our parents' home was with Hubby, sister and our younger girl, and towing a trailer. So I've just brought home a few things, including a cane laundry basket made by either my Dad or my Grandpa, a woven wire plant stand that belonged to my Grandma (Dad's mum) and two ceramic jardiniers that were my Mum's mother's. (She died long before we were born, so we've never had a specific grandmothers-name for her, but I guess there's still a sense of connection there. I look a lot like her, which probably adds to that.) All things that have way more sentimental than $$ value to me. Now the challenge is making sure we remove junk here to make way for the "treasures" coming in.
Still not really any mass tossing-out at the parents' home yet, but we moved some things away from the fenceline that had the next door neighbours concerned about rats etc.. Found some definite rubbish, but most of it was scrap metal that Dad would have been collecting to get some cash, until age caught up with him and he didn't have the capacity to organise it happening. There wasn't enough time to do anything with it this visit, so we may need to make another visit with trailer in tow sometime soon. Or call the scrap metal guys for pickup. Am not sure which would be better, since getting another trailerload from A to B would be a help too. It feels good being able to do more than "rearrange the deckchairs" at their place.
So... current plans at that end are:
Continue ferrying what we want to keep here;
Organise scrap metal collection/drop off;
Once there's a skipload worth of rubbish in one place, order a skip.
Selling on unwanted stuff that's worth making better arrangements than an op shop drop off is still a hard call though. Because it's being done as short occasional visits, neither garage sales nor facebook buy/swap/sell groups are really workable, and either of those would be likely to draw attention to the fact that the house is mostly unoccupied.
