My house needs an enema....

and I'm on the horns of a dilemma.  I've got plenty of my own crap to get rid of but I'm interested in opinions from The Hive on items of sentimental value.  I have a box of old 8mm movies shot by my dad back in the 50's before I was born.  I think they were converted to VHS at some point but I have no idea.  If they were, I probably have them somewhere.  Regardless of that, these movies are of people I never met, will never meet and have no idea who they were.  I doubt there will be any of my mom and dad.  I also have a bunch of things like medallions for competitive swimming my dad earned--a lot of stuff which I have absolutely no idea what it represents.  It has no sentimental value to me but I feel like I can't just throw it in the trash.  To do so seems disrespectful.  I know that rationally it's just stuff--that it can't possibly have meaning for me.  I think the old man would understand if I threw it out and wouldn't want me to waste time worrying about it.  I'm 62 and my kids won't have any emotional attachment to any of it.  All I'd be doing if I keep it is to kick the can down the road and leave it for them to settle, which seems impolite or uncaring at best.

Thoughts?

In reply to stroker :

Do you have kids? I sat down with my daughter when she was about 16 & basically said "How much of this crap do you think you'd want someday?" Also keeping in mind that she may change her mind by that point, and taking into account things I personally wanted to keep. Everything else I left behind. 
 

If you have contact with family members - aunts/uncles/cousins/etc., or have any interest in genealogy, I'd get the film converted to digital & upload it to YouTube. Actually, I'd probably do that anyway & just try to tag it with any family names or details you think might help someone find them in the future. 

Have you actually asked your kids what they think?  You might be surprised with what your kids have attachment to.  My grandpop passed away when I was in high school and the way my messed up memory works I barely have any actual memories of spending time with him.  I still have a lot of his tools, books, and just random stuff.  They're some of my favorite items of mine, I took his surf rod to the beach this weekend to see if I could catch anything with it.

I do kind of get it with the movies, though.  Dad and I recently cleared out his cousin's place with the goal of removing any and all family centric items while we did.  Found pictures of family that Dad can barely ID and he's the one in his immediate or extended family that is most involved in family genealogy.  For that I'd reach out to all your other family members, see if anyone is building a family history and see if they want them.  

Oh, I hear ya. 

The past two weekends my sister in laws have been here. We're prepping their mom's house for sale, downsize. 

She's lived in this house since 1978. The house is not overly cluttered but 40+ years has a way leading to accumulating stuff. 

The 20 yard dumpster arrives tomorrow. 

1900 sq ft house with full basement and 20x30 pole barn, on 9 acres. 

Tough call. I think there's wisdom in the posts before mine, and I'm a super sentimental guy. Uploading to YouTube seems too time intensive of course if they're not digital. But yeah +1 on ask and offer to others with a deadline. But no don't keep for your kids to go thru if they haven't already expressed an interest. 

I have my Dads movies and my Grandpas movies.  Three people are alive that might be interested and my younger siblings don't care since they're not in any as they quit taking movies when they were born.  

I taped some of the good parts and uploaded them to FB but in the end nobody really wants to see them or cares.  

I feel your pain. Fortunately our movies don't take up a ton of space. 

But then again I have whole suites of furniture I don't really want but felt obligated to take. 
 

I filled a dumpster this week. There a lot of stuff we'd accumulated and I don't need someone else stuck with the mess when something happens to me. 

My mother likes to bring stuff over to my house and say, "these items are now yours and if you don't want the item just throw it away and don't let me see it." 

My family is generally really bad at saving things that may be useful. I remember all the times I could believe, "I can't believe it's not butter" wasn't butter. 
 

I'm much better at throwing things out or giving away the items that I won't remember I have by the time I need it again. Unfortunately I got married to a pack rat, now her parents do the same thing my mother does to me. If you need some stuffed animals I can ship them to you. 

In my opinion, there are too different subjects here, that are mixed together. Stroker mentioned home movies and medals- which are strictly personal items, I wouldn’t lump them in with the average crap that people accumulate over their lifetimes. I’m all for holding on to a loved ones personal mementos, but not so much everyday store bought stuff. Anything earned or made, yes. As for the movies, don’t think of them as not having anyone in the movies that you know. Think of them as if you get to see what it was like from the point of view of the person who passed away, as they were holding the camera. How much room does it really take up, a coupe boxes? 

Ive been trying to cure myself of the packrat mentality too. With things like medals and keepsakes, especially if they are low volume Id be tempted to turn it into a small ish (think picture frame) shadow box for display in my study, along with a couple labels describing the contents.

For the films if you can it would be good to at least review them, and if you like them digitize it. Then maybe edit down to a 5 or 10 minutes reel. Something like you would see at an art exhibit that can just be an ambient loop on occasion. I use google photos slideshows for my TV, but I bet theres a way to do videos too if thats what youre into

If it doesn't matter to you, and it definitely doesn't matter to your kids, then I wouldn't waste any time trying to come up with creative ways to keep the stuff around. Just pitch it and feel better.

Going through something like this now.  My brother and I bought our parents estate (with everything still in it, long story) and are going through everything.  Appears our stepmother was a QVC-a-holic and bought tons of cookware and never even opened them.  We had a big yard sale this past weekend and made out pretty good.  Still have the basement to go through with a small library of books some dating back to 1719.  Fun stuff

Find out who in the extended family is interested in family history and give the movies to them.  Also, if  you don't want it, all family history documentation.

I like the idea of digitizing the movies.   I  have tons of cousins and only myself and one cousin keeps the family history together.  We have real records of the family going back over 200 years, photos's of paintings done of ancestors before photography, the journal of one ancestor who received a 10,000 acre land grant from the British Crown, pre-Revolutionary War of course, in what is present day West Virginia.  The town there is named after him and I have connected with his descendants who still live there who are approximately 5th cousins.  I have copies of a newspaper my GG grandfather published in Yazoo City in the 1840's when Mississippi was The Frontier.    All this because of the extensive family records passed down to me that gave me clues for further research.

It's hard.  Moms best friend's parents and brother passed and we helped her go through the house.  She's a hoarder, they were hoarders.  "I can't get rid of that, it was special to mom" meanwhile all that stuff that was so special to her mom or dad is now filling her damp garage and when she passes i'll be throwing away everything because it will be ruined.  She took a giant clam shell that I'm confident i could have got her $1500 for and put it in the garage.  Her house has paths, and her bathroom is barely functional and I really wish she would have let me ebay the valuables for her so we could fix her living conditions.  I took a trailer full of stuff from their house because it was neat, but we left so much that they needed multiple dumpsters and she sold the house as-is with the crap inside.  I'm still sorting through stuff and wonder why i bothered

in the end it's just stuff.  Someone else's sentimentality is not yours.  Move it along however it must happen.  Recycle what can be recycled, donate, try to keep stuff out of the landfill but make it go away.  I don't have a problem getting rid of stuff that has no sentimental value to me, i do have a problem getting rid of stuff i might use someday.  I'm working hard to declutter.  I understand how not easy it is.  

In reply to Andy Neuman :

This is my exact situation. My MIL and FIL likes to send boxes of crap to our house that should have been thrown out 15 years ago. When we bought our first house, they cleaned out their attic and loaded a 15-box truck and filled my garage with moldy Barbie dolls, stuffed animals, and broken furniture. All so they wouldn't feel bad about trashing it. My wife is a pack rat too. I said that when I married her, I the amount of stuff I had quadrupled. I could easily live a minimalist existence. 

Dudes.  I have a 6-foot grand piano in my living room because my mother was getting rid of it and DW didn't want to see it go.

No one has played it in 30 years.

It's probably valueless (despite it's rarity) but it will be hard to convince her of that.

We are in the middle of this the family home of 50+ years is on the market and surprisingly a bunch of old photos sold for $50 on FB. It's amazing how people can make our problem theirs.

If anybody has any house enemas to spare please send me one.  My wife has cluttered up our playroom to where it is no longer usable and the garage to where she hasn't been able to park her Solara convertible in it.  For 10 years.  Did I tell you it now needs a new top?  

If you want to honor your father, make a shadow box. This will allow you to keep a few things and get rid of the rest. One of these deals:

As for the footage, I hear you. Without knowing who is who or where is where, its just old footage. Maybe you could donate it to some a stock video library or something? Then the footage lives on.

All I can offer is with the medals, if they have any labelling like "cross town classic" or "xyz high school" some collector may appreciate them because they collect items from that school, area, or event, not just your dads old swim medals.

As far as the footage, unless its Godzilla, or Mothra, or Godzilla V. Mothra, its dumpster fodder.

The problem with digitizing and uploading footage is there may be someone in them who cares. 
 

My son is a videographer. My father gave him a lot of old super 8 footage he took when I was a kid. My son put a big effort into digitizing it, and loaded it to a site. He tried selling a few snipits, just to cover his cost of digitizing. 
 

Then my brother steps in. Single man- no family or heirs. When my son tried to sell some of the footage, he had to get us to sign releases. My brother wouldn't sign. He didn't want his "personal stuff" out there for commercial gain (personal stuff he didn't know existed, and is more than 50 years old.  Just random footage of little kids). He also thought he should be compensated richly if Charmin should decide he was photogenic enough as a kid to want his ugly mug. 
 

He didn't sign the releases. My son couldn't sell it. He lost the money he invested, and it created a permanent riff in the family. 
 

I realize this is a little different, but people are weird. One it gets online, you never know what could happen or who is gonna overreact strangely. 
 

Ive probably got 50 photo albums in my garage from my deceased Dad. I feel your pain. 

Digitizing the film doesn't mean it has to be put online, but it is a good way to save the video without having to have a bunch of reels sitting around.  It also makes it easy to share with family members who are interested in it - many families have members who are into genealogy, and the videos could be a gold mine for them.  As an example, we have a digital copy of a film taken at my grandparent's farm in the 1940s, and being able to see my parents as young people (as well as other relatives who died before I was born) is amazing.

Chuck it.  We all have so much crap in our lives that it's already overwhelming.  Forcing someone after us to go through it all is selfish.

When my FIL died a while back I was trying to help my wife and her brother go through the mountain of crap he left behind.  When I tossed some paperwork I found about embarrasing things he had done in the mid 70's my BIL got all pissy that I wasn't letting them make the decisions about what to keep or toss.  I went to play with the kids and left them to it, some people...  

Grab anything that you think is worth more than $50. List it between 25% and 50% less than its worth, to get rid of it quickly. Leave listings active for a week, then throw them away. Everything else goes in the trash. 

Modify this to your free time and storage capacity limits.