Yesterday, the final stage of my house repossession happened. The first was the purchase, the second was the title transfer, the third was the refinance, and the final stage is the move-out. My former co-owner finally moved out of the house, taking only the most important things along. Of the unwanted stuff, first dibs went to a friend and second went to the movers. The remainder was left behind for me to deal with.
The first thing I did was change the locks. I had purchased a re-keying kit and really botched the first deadbolt lock while learning. One thing I learned was that my locks were 6-pin, and the kit was for 5-pin. This resulted in the 6th pin spring getting jammed up in the cylinder. The end result of fixing it was a 4-pin lock. The other locks were fixed efficiently, but I still feel a bit suspicious, so they will probably eventually be swapped out with new ones.
The next step was sorting the left behind material. Things had to be sorted into donate, trash, shred, and keep piles. I was surprised to see there was actually very little for the donate pile. That is, until I made it to the closet. I filled up 3 lawn bags of clothing, and probably half of the clothes still had the price tags on them – incredible. Two full lawn bags of just hangers. The trash pile is huge.
I got quotes from companies for mobile document shredding. The price varied from $65/bin to $85/bin. A bin is a 95-gallon toter, which they say is about 10 document boxes or about 300 pounds. So that’s not that bad of an expense. I will probably schedule that in a week or so.
As far as the keep pile, it’s pretty much limited to office supplies and maybe some other things that are useful. I did find a $20 travellers check. Haven’t seen one of those in decades. I have to figure out how to cash it.
Fortunately, I have a very large unused room (the former garage) to stage all these piles. There’s no shortage of drop boxes for donations, so I can spread the wealth every night. It’s going to take months of disposal in my weekly garbage bin pickup to clear the trash pile out. At the same time, I’m going to rid myself of other decorations and things from the past. This is a fresh, new start.