@Owlunar@Former-Member, one of the conclusions that my sister and I have come to re. decluttering our parents house is that Mum finds buying things comforting. She used to often buy little knick knack thingies for me, too. Some of them I liked, others weren't to my taste at all, but the hard thing is that it was her way of saying she was thinking of me. Honestly, I would have preferred more frequent phone calls from her.
A lot of Mum's bits and pieces came from the op shop to start with. Some will get sent back there, others may be too junky to be of interest to them. But she did find a few lovely treasures as well.
I enjoy an op shop forage myself (hate pretty much any other kind of shopping... except bookshops and garden nurseries); but nowadays more often than not, I'll pick up an item, and think "oh, there's probably one of those in Mum and Dad's house/shed" or "is nice, I don't need it, it can be someone else's treasure".
I did go to a couple yesterday. Bought nothing in one; in the other, got a couple of plates that matched ones at home to replace breakages, some CD recordings done by a friend of ours who is a professional harpist, a couple of interesting books, a divided storage box for beads, and some wire fruit baskets that I use in the garden for bulb planting. (You sink the basket into the ground with just the rim showing, and plant the bulbs inside it. That way you don't lose track of where they are when they go dormant.) Am happy enough that all of that will go to good use, and even help with getting things into order.
