A Sentimental Journey: What to Do If It’s Special

Sentimental items are especially difficult to know how to declutter and organize!

Decluttering is hard work, and it isn’t for the faint of heart. Now that I’ve been helping clients bring order and simplicity to their lives and their homes for over five years, I have a pretty good handle on not only the physical demands of the work, but also the emotional struggles. Someone may be going gangbusters and letting go of boxes and bags full of their belongings, but as soon as they come across a box of mementos, the momentum slows down and all logic is pushed aside. 

“But it’s special!” is a common refrain of clients who can’t seem to part with items like all of their grown child’s school papers from kindergarten through high school, their own trophies from middle school sports in the 1970’s, their great grandfather’s rusty tools, or the pregnancy test, hospital ring, and circumcision rings from their three grown sons’ births. While the items you’re keeping may not resemble these examples (all true stories), it’s likely that you are holding onto at least a few belongings because of their sentimental value, even if you know it’s probably time to let them go. 

Since items with sentimental value can be an emotional landmine, I recommend that you have some guidelines for dealing with them objectively. Following are my top recommendations for how to handle possessions rich with nostalgia.

Use It or Display It

If an item is truly special and makes you smile and relive special times, don’t relegate it to the depths of a box in the corner of your attic or basement. Figure out a way to use it or display it if possible! You’ll get a lot more joy out of actually using your grandmother’s ceramic serving dish as a serving piece than you ever would out of keeping it boxed up. Isn’t that why she made it anyway, to be used? 

If you can’t use or display all of a collection, try keeping a small subset to use or display and let the rest go. Some examples include saving a single representative (or a few) of a china set, a collection of Madame Alexander dolls, or antique jewelry. Let these treasures find a use somewhere, even if it’s not in your home. 

Separate the Memories

In order to effectively handle these decisions, I recommend a shift in mindset. The basic reason we tend to have trouble parting with an object with a rich history is that we associate the object with the memories. For whatever reason, when we see this particular item, we are reminded of people or events in our past. We may fear that if we release the item, those memories will be lost forever, and this thought is too difficult to bear. So we hold on year after year, eager to hold onto the precious reminders of our past. 

While looking at the memento may trigger wistful memories, the memories aren’t literally attached to the object. The memories exist independently, “stored” in our minds and in our hearts. We don’t have to hold onto the object to hold onto the memory. Yes, we will lose some of our memories with age, but there are other ways to hold onto the memory that don’t involve keeping all of our sentimental objects. 

You could take a picture of the object. If you want to be reminded of it, you could use the picture as a screensaver on your phone, tablet, or desktop. You could add the picture to a set of pictures on a digital frame. You could even print a copy of the picture and display it somewhere. You could also write or record a story of the object, which could be stored in a similar location (physically or digitally) as the picture. Get creative with this step! 

Transform It

I struggled for years to figure out what to do with my wedding dress. Neither of my grown daughters had any interest in using my 1980’s style dress (can you blame them?). With a Pinterest search, I found several ways to transform the dress. I had a seamstress make a pillow that now sits on our master bed to see daily. I kept a few small pieces for a daughter’s potential use as a bride’s bouquet wrap or a hairpiece. Since my husband and I were downsizing, I needed to go ahead and take action. I couldn’t stuff that giant box somewhere in our loft to deal with later. I had to go ahead and complete the project. Watch out for the aspirational clutter of projects that you’ll get around to “someday.” 

Know Your Limits

Limiting how much you keep is probably the piece of advice I give most often. When you consider how many sentimental items we “produce” over our lifetime, you realize we literally can’t keep them all. Our space is limited, and our house isn’t supposed to be a museum. It needs to hold things that are useful and aesthetically pleasing to us now. 

If you limit what you keep, you’ll keep your collection of sentimental items to a manageable level. You’ll force yourself to keep only the most significant. After all, not everything is equally special. 

Here’s a description of how to practically accomplish this step. Let’s say you have ten large bins of sentimental items. In order to best use your space, keeping one or two bins is ideal. You’ll need to pull out every item, choose the most valuable ones, place in the two bins until they are full, and let the rest go. I can’t promise it will be easy, but it will be worth the effort. 

Give it Another Life

One of the best ways to honor something special is to let it have another life. Your keepsakes that have been in storage for many years could bring significant value to someone else. Imagine the joy that another owner could experience. Think about the item being used in a new location in a new way. 

One of the most difficult things for me to let go of were my trophies from middle school, high school, and college athletics. They represented lots of sweat equity and treasured memories. But I finally had to realize that lugging them from around in a bin wasn’t serving me well. I removed the metal plates and donated them to an assisted living facility, who repurposed them as awards for residents. It brings me joy to think of their new life!