My brother and I are in town from abroad for a few short days. We would like to help our dad begin the process of downsizing from his 4 bedroom house to a 1 bedroom apartment. This would be a daunting task for anyone, but our dad has special challenges with accumulating things--mostly books, newspaper articles, and notebook paper with notes to himself. We can only do so much with the time we have, so our goal is to help develop a process and clear next steps for him and those who can help him moving forward.
He has a group of men from his church that have said they'll help him, he just doesn't know how to direct them for the moment - imagine just a sea of papers, mixed with books, in piles and no particular order.
We spent a few hours on our first day home 2 days ago building trust. We cleaned out the trunk of his car, with his help. We found things that had long been missing, helped organize and haul away trash, etc. He was delighted. It also took us something like 3 hours! Yesterday, my brother spent 7 hours or so cleaning out my dad's kitchen. Again - he was relieved and grateful. But, we can't go at that pace anymore.
My goal is to create an area of unwanted things where we can label piles so that a helper can come in whenever and haul things away: (trash, recycling, stuff to be sold on Craigslist, charity) as well as an area with a pile of things to go to my Dad's new place, and a pile of things to be put into storage. The issue is that the whole house is stuffed full. There isn't an empty staging area, anywhere. We can put things outside today, but it will rain again tomorrow, and then we're taking off.
I've had good luck having helpers sort things into categories and then the owner make decisions, one category at a time. The issue is that like 80% of the house is papers. There are so many of them that having my dad go through even a small section of them seems impractical, just far too time consuming for his timelines (he's got 1 month to move out, say). He's got several research projects that he's passionate about, lost car titles, it's just a mountainous mess. I'd like to convince him to let us gather every sheet of paper, box em up and put em in short term storage nearby just to be able to handle the rest of the house and have some students help him go through the papers in the coming weeks, or something. But he's very cagey about those! I also don't know how long that would take.
We have 6 hours today (me for 6 and him for 3, for 9 human hours) and 4 tomorrow (8 human hours). How should we structure our time ? |
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