That was... a difficult time

Wow.

Cleaning up my FIL's estate is turning into a stressful, time-consuming, expensive mess.

And my SIL is a useless bitch. Term used deliberately. She's creating more and more problems and pushing us into expenses we otherwise would not have taken.

Case in point. What got moved up here.

FIL had at a lot of books. A lot, and my standards for a lot of books is pretty high. Most of them on psychology, education, and military history. My inclination would have been to go through the books quickly, take a few, and then donate or try to sell the rest. Because who wants them?

My bitch of a SIL. She claims she needs them for her PhD (the one my FIL was paying through the nose for. No wonder she didn't bother to work, between FIL sending her oodles of money, and the shit-ton of government aid she gets, she was basking in free education, and able to not work...). I would have told her to come get them if she wanted them (she got money from her dad, outside of the estate), but of course MIL, who was down helping dh, is afraid of SIL, and leaned on dh... so they packed up all the books. I think it was over 30 book boxes. Which took a good amount of time. Dh went though most of his dad's papers, and he had to fix the swamp cooler and the gutters and some other issues the roofers (who re-did the roof last autumn) fucked up. They got rid of furniture and MIL did a lot of cleaning. The place was very dusty, sigh.

I flew down last Wednesday. The idea was that I'd help close up the house and we'd leave Thursday.

NSM.

When I got there... the kitchen had not been packed up at all. Neither had one of the bedrooms, which was full of SIL's crap, as well as stuff from FIL's mother's estate. The other bedroom was in better shape, but there were still boxes of stuff (from FIL's mother and SIL from when she lived there a few years back.) FIL's bedroom is "done", they'd said. Hah. Not quite.

And the garage? I asked. Oh, we haven't touched that.

Imagine a one car garage, packed pretty much floor to rafters with Stuff. Some of it junk. Some of it not junk.

Basically, when his mother died, FIL just moved her stuff wholesale into his place, without doing any tossing... I opened a box in the garage, that said something innocuous, and there were books, office supplies, a half drunk bottle of white wine, and a smaller box of souvenir Holy Water bottles. Add in more of his papers, boxes and boxes Christmas decorations, Life Magazines in non-mint condition, and more scouting stuff and... and... and...

Shudder.

I love my spouse. I truly do. I just don't know WTF he was thinking, planning on being out of there so quickly. If they'd spent time on the garage, rather than one zillions of books, maybe.

I must say, I was pissed.

I packed and packed and packed. And tossed and tossed. MIL was scared of throwing away anything that SIL might want, so she didn't toss anything, and she infected dh with her caution. I had to be a bit circumspect... but old kitchen curtains from the 80s, made out of bright yellow polyester? Give me a freaking break. Gone. As well as polyester sheets sets for twin bed that were nasty and scratchy. Why would anyone ever pack those up? MIL was planning on it.

Because of their lack of tossing earlier, and the mandate of not tossing anything that SIL might want, a lot more stuff was carted up here than should have been. A LOT of trash, that both dh and MIL think they can sell. NOOOOO. Not happening. Nobody is going to want this stuff, and dump fees are cheaper in New Mexico than they are up here.

See, SIL is treating this as a free remote shopping spree. She gets to sit on her ass not going to work any longer (because she has panic attacks that she calls 911 on at a few times a week, she goes to the ER, demands that all tests be done, they do a few, but don't find anything, she doesn't follow up with anyone during the day, and just calls the ambulance AGAIN the following night...) and she isn't paying anything to move any of this stuff. The estate is. And dh and I are pretty sure that the estate doesn't have the funds for this, so it's going to be on us. So not good. We made decisions made on the fact that we thought we'd be able to sell the house for more than the mortgage but that is looking less and less likely.

Anyhow, we worked all day Thursday, from about 6am to 11pm, which were the hours dh and MIL had been putting in. In all the time down there, dh hadn't bothered to look for anyone to come help loading or unloading, so I found those, and we had two dudes come in on Friday to load, while I desperately continued to pack, sort, and panic.

We opened a few things from the garage, as described above, but it was pretty clear there was too much stuff there to even evaluate. We took 6 boxes of her books to donate, as well as two stoneware sets, and a few other thing, but that truly didn't even made a dent.I thought about donating it all, but we found the one thing everyone (SIL, MIL, FIL's family from South Carolina) had asked us to keep: boxes of personal papers, letters etc, and photos. Mixed in with the knick-knacks. So no dice on wholesale tossing.

We made donation runs and a dump run. We found a place to take the gobs of food that wasn't expired. We packed and loaded the rest of what had been in the house into the truck. Dh came close to heat exhaustion, which was scary. Temps were in the mid-90s and he was in the truck moving stuff around as the movers who came in to load were ok, but not great, so he had to do some re-arranging.

We decided to clear the house 100% and leave the garage. It's a mess, and there is no way around that, but at least we can start working with a real estate agent to try to get the place sold. If it sells, or whenever we can, we'll head down for a final few days of massive garage clean out.

Only time time I'm going too. [Insert evil emoticon here].

We finally got out at a bit past 8pm. Drove as far as Farmington, and collapsed in a hotel room at 1am or so. Exhausted. The truck, btw, had a nice seat for the driver, but the bench seat for the passengers was awful. Uncomfortable, too high, and it made for a bumpy ride.

Loooong drive up.

Luckily for us, the place I found a storage unit at had a list of movers who could help with loading and unloading. So we got help yesterday unloading (aside from the stuff we unloaded here.)

And here is where I prove that I am a nasty bitch.

One item that SIL screamed repeatedly needed to be brought up is her cedar chest. I think she got it from her grandmother, and she really wants it. I told dh to make sure it was in the total back of the storage unit, so that she could not just come get that and leave us with the piles of books she claimed to have wanted.

We needed a 26ft truck to get up here. There was some extra room, so a 24 footer would have been ok. Much of the reason for that was... the books. So I'm totally lacking in compassion for her. To be honest, for the stuff that anyone wanted or needed, a small u-haul would have been fine. But the allure of FreeStuff was too much for SIL, MIL wouldn't stand up to her, and for dh, it was easier to just pack and deal with later. I mean, he does have a full time job.

The storage place was offering a deal on half off the first two months. We will be out of that unit in two months, and anything left is being fucking tossed. If she can't get to her precious cedar chest... well, too fucking bad. Her stupidity (she has NO IDEA how many books she demanded be brought up, they're dusty and she has allergies, and many of them are a bit dated) cost a lot of time, stress, energy, and money.

I am so angry about this clusterfuck.

What I'm getting from it,though: nobody wants your crap once you die. Get rid of a good amount if it yourself. I'll be working on that. Also, while I love love love books.... Same thing. I'm going to work to buy the ones I re-read in electronic copies, I'll donate the ones I don't want or need, and the ones that are meaningful to me... well, I'll keep them, but at least the number will pared down.

When FIL was first diagnosed, we encouraged him to move up here, and we seriously talked about it when he visited for Perry's graduation. He and MIL (they remained good friends) came up with the start of a plan: she was going to go down there for a month or so, help him sort through the stuff in his mother's estate, and pack up the stuff he wanted. It might have worked... but then SIL called FIL and told him, no he couldn't do that, because she needed her mother available to help HER at a moment's notice for childcare. So FIL told MIL that she shouldn't come, that she was more needed there helping SIL. The clearing out never happened. Every time my SIL says sorrowfully that it would have been So Much Better if FIL had moved up here, I want to slap her. Yes, it would have been. But by being selfish, she prevented him from getting the help he needed to do that.

She truly is a piece of work. When we were in South Carolina for the funeral? She kept on telling people how difficult it was that she'd not been able to see her dad before he died but her "financial situation didn't permit it". Well. I offered to pay for her flight. Several times. I just hated that because it made it sound like dh and I were too cheap to pay to help his sister see her beloved father before his death.

Other SIL "funny". She got a significant amount of money from an insurance policy her father had and that she was the beneficiary of (note that he'd told his cousin and MIL that he'd bought the policy to pay for his funeral expenses, but eh, she was the beneficiary, so no dice on that). She borrowed money for us to pay for her "expenses" around getting to the funeral, to tide her over because she was too distraught to work (FIL had been sending her a lot of money), and we also paid for her and her son's flights to the funeral, plus hotel and everything there. And then she asked for another loan "just until the insurance money came through". Dh gave it to her. A few weeks ago, she gave him a check for part of the money she owed, about a third of the total she'd promised to pay back. Dh figured he'd deposit the check and use it to give money to MIL for coming down to help him. He was going to deposit it so I could write a check to MIL when we met briefly at the airport, but had the brains to text his sister to make sure it was still ok to deposit. Of course it wasn't. I don't know if she's spent all the money she got already, or if she's saving it because of course she can't work the her anxiety and PTSD. Note that I'd have a lot more sympathy for her if she'd do anything in lines of treatment, rather than just heading to the ER several times a week. They even set her up with follow up appointments that she doesn't bother going to. Help has been offered and declined, I think she prefers the drama of mid-night ambulance rides, waking her mother up to come take care of her son etc.

Wow. This got to be a long long rant.

Yawn.

Perry, falling asleep at 11pm last night: "You know how they talk about 9-to-5 jobs? Well, I have a 5-to-9 one".

Which is true. Between rowing with one group, helping with others, and coaching another, he's pretty much non-stop 5am until 9pm three days a week, with a few breaks here and there. Thank goodness Tues/Thursdays he finishes at 4.

Boathouse barnacle, I tell you!

And he's working 38 hours a week. So making pretty decent money. He just needs... a bit more sleep.