a week at Grandma's house

Last December my grandmother passed away... she would have been 91 in two weeks. She lived a very interesting and full life. A month ago we finally began what will be a very long process of cleaning out the house she left behind. My mom, my brother (and his family), and me and my family took a week off and met in Ohio to start cleaning.

This house is amazing. It has a total of 4 floors. A basement, first and second floor and a large attic. Because she was such a huge collector and because she had lived there since my mom was little, it is crammed-pack full of "things." I always remember it being full, but in the later years of her life, Grandma was less able to manage the clutter and had let all the stuff get out of hand. Just sifting through the layers is bound to uncover years and years of history (specifically since she was an only child and still has many previous generations' belongings in boxes around the house, she was a member of a ton of organizations, like Eastern Star, DAR, DAC, church committees, library board, museum curator, former teacher, etc., and she survived two husbands).

Here are some pictures to try to show what we are facing...
Stairs to the third floor (before & after): Grandma's room (before & after):

Hallway (before & after): Library (before & after): Den (before & after):

Attic:

In that week, we filled an industrial dumpster three times... mostly full of old food (some as old as 30 years), magazines, and bills and receipts that she had held onto over the years. We took four van-loads of clothes to Goodwill, including probably over 100 pairs of shoes. We sorted through stamp collections, coin collections, doll collections, Boyd's Bear collections, decorative plate collections, postcard collections, and so on. And the problem is that it seems like we barely scratched the surface.

I hard to imagine an end in sight, especially since it is so far away and difficult to carve out the time that it will take to make progress.