Cleaning out 60 years

Over the last year, my family has helped my father clean out my grandparent's home. They didn't pass away, but they did need to be moved into assisted living. As they are now in their 90's, their health had taken a turn for the worse, and they needed more help then just themselves at home. So that left a packed home that my dad was trying to clean out on his own, while still working a very full time job. We took 2 full days over the course of a month last spring and just tackled the majority of the house. Because they lived through the Depression, they felt the need to keep pretty much everything, "you never know when you might need it". There was much of it that was just trash, like the cooler cardboard box that the holiday ham or turkey came in for every holiday from the company my grandfather retired from. No joke, every. single. box.  Or every peanut butter jar plastic lid for who knows how many years. But all of that had to be sorted and thrown away. To make the job even harder, we needed to go through every pocket, drawer, stack of stuff, because we would find money, or important papers just stashed in all of them. But overall, we found some very neat things. 

In the basement was a tiny little bathroom, one of which I had absolutely no memory of. The medicine cabinet looked like it had not been touched since the 70's.

I found the original house key. 

This was a small figurine that my dad had won at a Halloween costume contest. I thought it was interesting, but even more so when I flipped it over and saw the "occupied Japan" marking. 

Company seals from 2 of the companies my grandfather did work for. 

A silly poster of my grandfather from a company party. It was just too funny to not take a picture of. 

When I would go to my grandparent's house as a grade schooler, there wasn't much to play with. But one day my brother and I discovered this game in the basement and played it many many times. It needed to come home with me. 

In fact we discovered many many old games that were very interesting. We now have a bag of them to go through and decide if we will play them or sell them and give the money to my grandparents.