Dealing With Our Estate

This isn't something new for full-time RVers, but we decided a few months ago that we would really pare down what we had in storage in Denver. We have now been on the road full-time for nearly three years and we know for sure we don't need or want most of what we stored. Last year we got rid of most of the furniture. This year, it was the really hard decisions.

During the last decade or so, we have had to deal with the property my mother and John's father owned. That is so difficult for surviving children. We feel we are doing our children a favor by doing this now. But it is a lot of work.

We had three vaults of belongings in storage. Where do we take it to sort through it? Our site at a state park wouldn't work. There wasn't room in our son Eric's garage. An internet search turned up Le Mouton Business Park in north Denver. They had storage units measuring 16 x 30, plenty of room to sort our stuff. We went to check it out. It is located in an industrial area just west of the National Western Stock Show cattle pens and coliseum.





There is plenty of space for the delivery truck to pull up.



And we could get our truck right up the the door of the unit, even though it was inside.



So we rented the space for a month and had our stuff delivered.

What do we think we will want several years from now, when we decide to come off the road full-time? And even more difficult, what do we have that is important enough to keep for the long term--family photos, ancestral mementos, files and paperwork and memories from our own life? Will we even need or want it? Is it important enough to keep or take somewhere for permanent storage? Are we attached enough we just can't give it up?

We have both bought probably thousands of books over the years. How do we get rid of them? This is just one truckload of books we distributed in the last week. I don't know if it was a donation to the local library or a gift to the church where John used to be the rector. Three years ago, we gave away maybe 30 boxes of books.






I forgot to take pictures the first morning. But here is what it looked like by afternoon. By then, we had sorted it and begun making the tough decisions.



There was furniture (we won't keep any of it, but did give a few things to our son and his family), lots of boxed stained glass windows that John made and large framed art, and many, many boxes.





We even brought some boxes back to the trailer to sort through.



Of course, there was a lot of trash.



On Saturday, we drove a few blocks to have lunch at a neighborhood diner. Since we were in an industrial area, we didn't expect many customers, but they were at least half full at noon.



Sunday, Eric and Liz came to pick up some of the things they wanted--like our everyday dishes, the food mixer, a mattress pad and comforter that go with the bedroom set we gave them last year, and some furniture. We had some fun while they were there.



And we had a nice empty corner when they drove off.



This is a pile of stuff that goes to our storage unit at U-Haul. It grew bigger as the day went on.