I think I am in a unique position to understand the importance of not hoarding things. Over the course of our marriage, we have lost all four of our parents and had to clean out two full houses worth of "stuff".

Believe me, these people were hoarders, bless their little hearts. Not the scary type of hoarders who save mountains of newspapers and stuff, but normal "Mom & Pop type" hoarders.

It made me sad when I was going through my Mom's house, particularly her craft room, which was crammed to the rafters with unfinished projects, art supplies, and expensive, unread craft books.

I kept thinking if she'd spent more of that time and money on doing fun stuff with us instead of all this useless junk, what great memories I would have instead of cussing her while I was wading through all this stuff and trying to sell it for pennies on the dollar at an estate sale.

You need to think long term and realize how this might come to roost on your children. If things go in the normal way, you might have 20, 30, or even 40 years before this becomes an issue, but we all know that this can happen very unexpectedly.

My cousin and his wife died suddenly in their mid-30's and left behind 3 orphaned children. Things like that happen sometimes, and if something terrible like that happens, do you want your children to have to deal with your whole house full of junk, in addition to all the other traumatic stuff they would have to deal with?

Cleaning out a house after a death is a terrible thing. It's exhausting, both physically and emotionally, it's heartbreaking, it's frustrating and annoying, and it's just about the least fun thing you can imagine doing.

My in-laws were very clean people and not pack rats (so we thought) but we had a big eye opener when we started digging into the drawers and closets and all the little hidden areas of the house - ugh!

They had saved every pay stub, every birthday card, every paid bill, and 20 years worth of bank statements - what a mess. And because we were out of state, we had three days to do the whole house. I've never worked so hard in my entire life and my kids and husband did too. Everyone hated me by the end of the week, but we got most of it done and the neighbors and people from Goodwill had to deal with the rest of it.

So take a minute a go around your house and put yourself in your kid's shoes and imagine them having to deal with your house if something happened to you. Then take some action and get rid of some of that stuff.

Be sure and come back next Monday and Friday for the next installment in my Clutterbugs series. To see the rest of the series, just click the Clutterbugs tag at the bottom of this post and it will bring up a list of them.



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