Curious about how to start the process of downsizing your family home? This is how I broke the process down into manageable steps!
Part 1 – How I Downsized the Family Homestead
My husband will tell you that I come from a long line of hoarders. I will tell you that we aren’t hoarders, we are collectors! My parents grew up during the Depression. My Mother saved everything, and she collected all kinds of things. She once wrote up an A to Z list of all the things she collected and I think she had something listed for each letter!
My Dad’s dad was in the farming business. Farmers save things, you never know when that broken piece of whatever might be able to fix something you are working on!
My Mom was the oldest child in her family. My Dad was the youngest of his siblings. They both ended up with family mementos from various relatives. My Mother was also very sentimental and made a scrapbook of every trip they took. She also was very involved in civic organizations, so she had scrapbooks and photo albums and paperwork relating to various clubs.
I was an only child and maybe a tad spoiled. They had me later in life after losing one baby shortly after she was born and then suffering several miscarriages. My Mom saved anything that had to do with me. Newspaper articles, programs, toys, baby clothes, simply everything. I always said she was saving things for my museum! You know, the one the town would build for me after I became the next Martha Stewart or Rachel Ray!
When I was growing up, we lived in a 14-room farmhouse. I think it started out as a 12-room farmhouse but they added on at least two rooms. We basically lived on the first floor which left the entire upstairs for storage.
Plus, we had all those outbuildings where neat stuff could be stored. Living in the country meant we had to think about mice. Sometimes we forgot to take the mouse issue into consideration when storing things in the outbuildings. I am not a fan of mice…. they destroy everything!
After I started my herb business, I began to collect display pieces and props for my shop and for when I did shows. My parents added a Santa house on the property which became my herb shop and a building made out of old windows that we called the Glass House. I used that as a greenhouse part of the time. We had so many buildings on the property, we had to start naming them.
They also had a pavilion where I could hold classes and they could hold parties. The pavilion originally had a shingle roof which I replaced with a metal roof in the Fall of 2017. I also had a new concrete floor poured as it was originally 1/2 concrete and 1/2 gravel. I had plans to turn it into my farm museum/outdoor kitchen. I was going to add a mini split for heating and cooling and insulate it. But when we decided to move to Florida, those plans changed.
In 2001, my husband and I moved into the farmhouse and had a modular home build in the back for my parents to live in. When they moved into the modular home, they took very little of the things that belonged to them that were stored upstairs. Mom would periodically come get one or two things. Over time, my stuff got mixed in with her stuff and it became quite messy up there. Perhaps one day I will post how it looked before we got serious about clearing things out.
It was around that time that I started Petals & Porch Posts and started acquiring even more things to fill up the shop and take to shows. By the time I was ready to buy the pizzeria, I had three storage units off site in addition to all the buildings on the farm.
We lost my Mom in August of 2014 and my Dad in September 2017. About 6 weeks after my Dad passed away, I decided to rent out his house. At that time, we weren’t planning on moving anywhere very soon. In order to make room for the renters and they things they needed to bring, I bought a storage unit from the Amish and had that installed where the Santa house had been. The Santa house was beyond repair, and we ended up burning it. The general rule on the Jones/Snyder property was that it had to be beyond repair in order to go into the burn pile.
There was simply too much furniture in my parents’ home to deal with before the tenants wanted to move in. I suggested that they use the furniture and household goods that were in the house, and they could store their possessions in one of the 3 storage units I was renting in a nearby town. That worked out well as it kept my stress at a reasonable level. I moved my Dad’s personal items and a few small pieces of family furniture into the storage unit that I had purchased. I moved all of my Mom’s personal papers and photo albums and club scrapbooks.
Shortly after the tenants moved in, I started to get serious about downsizing even though at the time I had no intention of moving, selling my business or making any big changes. I just knew it was thyme to get started on sorting thru things.
Where to start was one of the first questions I had to answer. I knew it was going to be a massive undertaking and was going to take a lot of time and energy. I had friends and family members that were willing to help me but I felt that I had to be the one to go thru most of the things myself at least until I determined what was important and what wasn’t. Everything had to be touched at least once, most things numerous times. Donate, keep, pitch were the first three categories. I had a pile of things that I wasn’t ready to deal with and I started making piles of things that I knew I could pass on to other relatives. I also had a “this can go to the estate sale” pile.
Speaking of estate sales, I had to also figure out what kind of sale, where to have it and when to have it. In late December 2017 and early January 2018, I started the process of researching auction houses. At the time, I hadn’t really started the sorting process, so I really didn’t even know what we had. I had a general idea of what types of things my parents had collected, and I knew what types of items I had collected over the years.
In late December 2017 and early January 2018, I began calling different auction houses. I made an appointment with one gentleman from a town about an hour away from the farm to come look at the property to see what he thought. When he arrived, I showed him around the farmhouse, the various outbuildings and the modular house. His opinion was I didn’t have enough items to have an on-site auction, but he said I was welcome to pack everything up and bring it to his auction house located an hour away. He even offered the use of his large moving truck. Packing and transporting all the things I thought we would want to sell really was not an attractive proposition, so I kept searching.
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