This is where I tell the story of DH buying our first home, before he met me. He bought it from an old couple that was going into a nursing home. He let them leave all kinds of furniture and shit in the house, including and old crappy piano that didn't work. Because you know, one day he'd fix it up and learn to play?
I had a charity come and pick up truck loads of stuff when I first moved in, eventually we had to actually pay someone to take the piano. And we had all these fights over stupid things that these unrelated people left in the house because it reminded him of his grandparents. These we NOT his grandparents, but the mere memory of something similar and he was hanging on to it.
He also kept all his books from college and when I tried to get rid of them he claimed, with a straight face, that he's going to reread them in retirement, you know 30 years from now.
He has bins and bins of random cords and electronics in the basement. Our thermostat was acting up last week and he disappeared for a while and found one from the old house that he had kept when he installed a new digital one there. So it's like 70 years old. Keeps every extra screw and bolt from things like IKEA furniture after he's put it together. I swear he's reincarnated from someone that lived through extreme scarcity.
My MIL gave me boxes and boxes of DH's stuff, which included the 30 year old pregnancy test that she took with him. BARF.
Thanks for this. I feel better.
Did you actually go through everything?
I really dislike the idea that women are in charge of this. Like God forbid men deal with this stuff themselves, it's cleaning so = women's work passed from mother to wife.
We've gone through some of it. I think she saved every single art project, test, report card, etc that DH ever got, so we went through it and saved the funny stuff from elementary school. We also have baseball cards and like model cars and stuff that I asked DH to go through, but he hasn't yet. I made him in charge of it because I don't want to be the one that throws out something that he wanted to save.