How gradually do kids move their stuff out of the house?

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Monday, September 19. 2011

How gradually do kids move their stuff out of the house?

When one's kids get their own places, they tend not to have a lot of space. Few kids move out into 5000 square foot houses or apartments with giant closets and storage rooms. For both practical and sentimental reasons, their stuff tends to hang around, collecting dust and taking up potentially-usable space.

Even when you love them to death, at some point you want their stuff out. Baby birds have to fly. They will accumulate their own mountains of stuff, in time, and the cycle of stuff will repeat.

I remember when my Mom advised me to empty my old bedroom of anything I wanted to keep before it disappeared. I thought that sounded very cold at the time, but I now realize that it wasn't. They had done their job, and done it very well indeed at considerable sacrifice.

My old bedroom was destined to become a guest room - and a room where the grandkids could stay to visit. However, to this day it has a large ceiling to floor bookshelf with my old books on it.

Posted by The Barrister in Our Essays, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 13:02 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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1) It's even easier if you're raised by a mother who throws out anything that doesn't move for 3 days. Throughout childhood and the teen years, anything not on my desk or shelves was a candidate for disposal.

2) It's also easier when your parents move out of THEIR house. I fortunately had a business trip to the USA just as my parents were about to close on our childhood house. I managed to pack up a box of mementos that otherwise would have vanished.

3) How important is this stuff, really? When we moved to Israel we sent a crate (about 1/4 of a shipping container) with new and old things we thought we'd need.

Due to various circumstances, the crate sat in storage for almost 3 years. We'd forgotten we even had most of that stuff - and we laughed at how inaccurate we'd been in trying to anticipate our needs.

#1 Ben David on 2011-09-19 13:13 (Reply)

When I was 25, my parents called and said, "We're moving to Saudi Arabia. Come get your stuff or it's going to Goodwill."

#2 class factotum (Link) on 2011-09-19 13:15 (Reply)

LOL. My parents moved to a new town while I was in the navy. Most of my junk failed to make that move unfortunately, since I had the lack of foresight to be at sea when they did that. For YEARS after that, I would occasionally say to myself "I wonder what happened to 'x'. Oh, it got lost in the move."
I doubt if there really was anything of earth shattering importance in that junk, mostly childhood collections of trash I suppose.

For my own kids, since they have bought their own places, I have migrated their stuff by default. For a year or so after they moved in, every time I visited another box of their stuff somehow would come with me. And you know, the biggest battle I had was not with the kids, it was my wife who couldn't turn loose of their childhood cr*p.

Well, all their stuff is in their possession now, and surprisingly more of my stuff finds its way to their houses. It is AMAZING how much stuff the kids need, they just do not realize it. Why shoot! By the time I move to a smaller domicile, I'll barely have enough stuff to furnish my own place. Awwwwww :^)

#2.1 JoeC on 2011-09-19 17:00 (Reply)

Meh. My son is 35, and the Publisher of a newspaper in NE Louisiana.

Career success aside, the closet in our "Guest Bedroom" is still filled to the brim with boxes of baseball cards, original Star Wars toys, and whatnot. (H.S. Yearbooks, collectible pogs, and probably stuff that I don't even want to know he was collecting while he was in High School, for that matter....)

I'm hopeful that he'll move it out someday, but am more thinking that he hopes to inherit the house someday, and not have to deal with it all.

His mother has the other bedroom as a "Sewing Room", which means that my firearm collection is very cramped. I could use a whole room, and get a couple of closets and three or four gun safes.

Bummer, that.

#3 jefferson101 on 2011-09-20 20:12 (Reply)

I had a ten speed Fuji bicycle I bought with money I saved up busting my ass mowing lawns during middle school, which I probably rode over twenty thousand miles through high school and part of college. I got a job which took me all over the country for years, and later settled down in Colorado. I intended to bring it back with me to Denver, but guess what? The parents sold it at a garage sale for twenty bucks without even telling me...I remind them of how inconsiderate that was every time I come to visit them.

#4 model_1066 on 2011-09-22 02:12 (Reply)

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Monday, September 19. 2011

How gradually do kids move their stuff out of the house?