this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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I'm going to take a different view of this for people to consider:
My dad collected a lot of stuff. He wasn't a hoarder because most of the stuff had value, but he had so many collections: Coins, stamps, cigarette cards, movie posters, movie memorabilia, LPs, CDs, DVDs, so many other things.
When he died, I had to deal with it. All of it. And I am not a material goods sort of person overall, so I didn't want most of it. It took me years to sell off what I could. We couldn't even sell off most of the DVDs, LPs and CDs. They ended up either given to friends or to thrift stores. I'm still dealing with it even though he died in 2016. Who wants a life-sized ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin (dog for scale)?
Did I make money from selling it off? Absolutely. It even helped when we needed some money. But it really wasn't worth the near-decade of stress I've had to go through to deal with this stuff and there really is no end in sight.
And now my mom is in her 80s and she has a house full of antique furniture like this which, again, I have no interest in (and no room for at this point).
Do not make your kids deal with this stuff unless they really want to. I said I would deal with it because my mom is just not good at this stuff and my brother lives too far away, but if I would do it again, I would either hire someone to deal with it all for a percentage and wash my hands of the whole thing or tell my dad that he needs to sell it off before he dies.
Instead of having a few items from my dad to really treasure, I ended up with a bunch of shit I didn't want to deal with and it makes the stuff I do want to keep, most of which wouldn't be worth a huge amount anyway, have much less sentimental value to me.
i understand all that but i don't know how big your dog is
She has a head relatively the same size of a life-size ceramic Charlie Chaplin bust.
Wow, that's quite a knickknack to have around.
How often do you have to explain to visitors that it's Charlie Chaplin and not that other guy?
Never because it's in a box in the garage. I've never been a huge Chaplin fan like my dad was. He's much better when he's serious than when he's trying to be funny. The "look up, Hannah" speech at the end of The Great Dictator is definitely one of the great movie speeches and I highly recommend anyone here who hasn't seen the movie at least read it, but his "kick each other in the pants" style of comedy never appealed to me. I was much more into Keaton.
I will say that I picked through my mom's old LP collection and sprang for a player so I could start listening to some of her classic albums. Now I periodically throw on some Springstein or Beetles because its right there and I can. I also picked up a few newer records - the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, Father John Misty - and listen to them, too.
No idea what I'm going to do with my mom's grand piano. She keeps trying to off-load that on me and all I can tell her is "It literally will not fit in the house."
My dad was not into rock music at all. His collection was mostly film soundtracks, classical music and popular music from the 1930s and 1940s.
I like all of those things, but not enough to save the LPs or CDs. I can stream or download any of the ones I really want to listen to and enjoy it just as much, but not have it take up room in my not especially large house.
You have to understand, we're talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs. Some of them were worth something, but most of them were worth pennies. The month I paid more to eBay than I did make any profits, I gave up.
This is just one part of the CD collection when it was still in their house. There were multiple other shelves.
I can't find a picture of the LPs, but imagine a wall of them the size of 1.5 garage doors.
And this is just the music. This doesn't begin to go into all the other stuff.
On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.
By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp. He had a huge collection of first-day covers he had been collecting for my whole life. It went for $400.
Oh yeah. You've got to weed out the good stuff from the bad. I took maybe 1-in-5 from my mom's far smaller collection of LPs.
The worst thing I ever did was buy my mom a printer. She would go through stacks of paper in a month, just printing out whatever she thought she wanted to remember on the internet and sticking it in filling cabinets. I refused to show her how to change out the toner at one point, and that's largely staunched the flow of dead trees.
Like all hobbies, you really need to find a community of other hobbyists before they're worth anything at all. Even a super-rare stamp has no value unless its got an actual buyer. And how many people even still care if you've got a Civil War double-stamped limited edition whateverthefuck anymore? Unless you're selling it straight to a museum, where are the buyers?
I do wonder whether I'll live to see people with these giant Magic: The Gathering card collections claiming value at six-figures plus when WotC has long since gone bust and nobody plays the game anymore.
My wife's cousin had a massive collection of Yu-Gi-Oh cards- we're talking like fill a suitcase massive- and they're basically worthless. He gave them all to our nephew about 10 years ago. He's 18 now so I have no idea what he'll do with them.
There are services in the UK where they come and clear the house for free. They take the risk on the value of what is in there.