Monday 17th Feb - The Loft Challenge

What a brilliant idea!

In a blog post someone said that their grown-up son has set them a loft challenge; every time he visits, he brings down a couple of crates and bags from the loft, and they try and sort it before his next visit.

I'm up for that; we're about to get serious about clearing my recently deceased godmother's house, and I am everlastingly grateful that she has already done most of the hard work. And she had no loft.

When we tried to clear my sister-in-law's house, we gave up; we would have had to go and live nearby for a month in order to go through every drawer and bag and bag-inside-a-bag which just couldn't be done. In the end we salvaged a few items and left it all to the house clearance people.

My parents downsized four times, starting from a large seven-bedroom house with three attics, and ending in two-bedroom flat. I am so grateful to them for all the hard decisions they have saved me from making.

I'm very conscious of the state of our loft; we have lived in this house for over thirty years and the loft is terrifyingly full. I don't want to leave our children with a nightmare to sort out.

(Do you think we could in turn get them to do the bedroom challenge? Every time we visit one of the offspring, or they come here, we could give them a couple of bags of their stuff to take away and sort? I don't mind storing things that they actually want, but I reckon there must be things that could be re-homed, re-cycled, or even actually used?!)

While I'm on the subject, one project that is high on my list is to sort all the kinds of things people need to know when the time comes into some kind of order. My god-mother's affairs where much simpler to deal with than they might have been. Although she had stopped filing things away some months ago, nearly all the paperwork was in piles in the same room, so gathering it all together and working out what needed to be done was massively simpler than it might have been.