Claire, you have arrived in the right location and that is a great accomplishment! We're all working on similar tasks - I inherited a lot of stuff from my parents and several great aunts - one problem was that I didn't know much about the extended east coast family and when I had the opportunity to have family heirlooms and stuff, I grabbed it, but I've been lugging it around ever since. My parents died in 1997 and 1998 and for a while stuff was in storage, but when I bought this house in 2002 I decided everything had to come out of storage. And for the past few years I've been whittling down the stuff. I have a lot more room here; my books went through a major organization a couple of years ago on the tile floor in the living room - the A tile, the B tile, etc with a couple of tiles for the letters that had more authors. I found duplicates and things I'd never read, took several good sized boxes down to sell to my local used book store (Half-Price Books).

I've been selling a lot of smaller easy-to-ship things from these estates on eBay. That's a story in itself.

You'll find our threads are usually linked back to the previous ones, if you want to read more. And you'll see a lot of living going on here also - Michelle (Lily Fester) started talking about her ovarian cancer here and spun off into a separate thread so more people would find it. She's cancer free and has an adopted son who came along just as she was finishing the chemo - it was an amazing ride, in the pages of these declutter threads.

Welcome to the group!

SRS