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Oh, man. It's getting to that time where I can see downsizing my parents' stuff as being on the horizon.

There's so much of it that is unremarkable. It fits into their house+garage, but it consumes a great abundance of space. There are, IIRC, 3 generations of China, each with its own China cabinet -- and I wouldn't know which dead person they once belonged to anyway. Tools. Furniture. Stacks of rough-sawn hardwood lumber, and logs.

I have enough furniture. I don't need rolling toolboxes full of mixed hoarded socketry, unsorted wrenches, and rusty tap-and-die sets in inch-standard sizes. The bench-mounted belt sander my dad made from scrap 40 years ago is cool and all, but it's been over 25 years since he's bothered to have it set up, it was always finicky to get running true, I've never suffered for a lack of using it.

If I ever move stuff like the tools and the lumber, I want it to be the very last time it ever happens -- and then I never want to see it again.

The China is particularly daunting: For as long as that stuff has been sitting around on display at their house, it has been both too nice to ever use and also too good to get rid of. (If the time ever comes that I want my own set of nice China for whatever reason I might, then: It's easy to get.)

I will work hard to dissuade anyone else from taking anything that is physically big, just on the basis that nobody needs that kind of curse in their life.

But I fear that others will find that a lot of this stuff will be too emotionally-precious to depart with. It will then be "temporarily" relegated to a storage facility until enough years go by that someone finally gets sick of paying the bill and it all gets sold to the highest bidder, thrown away, or donated anyway.

That expensive trip through purgatory seems like such a waste of money and effort.

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