Posting to keep me honest.
I've been having renovation work done on my house for what seems like years. Actually, now I think about it, it really has been years. In the past week I've finally moved into the last space. So I have no more excuses for clutter, or random boxes of stuff, or things that don't have a place.
It's all been slightly complicated is that due to circumstances, over recent years I've become the last repository of a lot of family things. While I've whittled down the furniture to what's exactly right for each room, and it is finally in the right places, there are a lot of smaller things that I've been mostly ignoring up until now but really need to deal with.
Some of it I will keep. That's principally about three or four drawers' worth of antique linens, which are a mixture of the practical (I'm working my way through a lifetime's supply of cotton and linen bedding) and the very pretty (lace and embroidered table cloths, and so on). These can be kept at no trouble to me in the spare bedroom dresser, and used/admired/repurposed as appropriate.
Three boxes of unneeded office supplies are currently offered up on Freegle. There is some random old currency (10 mint condition, adjacent serial numbers, 10 shilling notes, people) which should sell. There are a few pictures I don't much care for that can go to auction and will sell for pennies if at all. Then there are all the random bits and pieces which I don't want, aren't worth much but don't want to just throw away - lots of old (vintage/antique, but nothing fancy) keys which don't fit anything, a pair of post office scales in old money, a clay pipe, old fountain pens, sealing wax, desk bits and bobs, old wicker baskets and wooden boxes. A job lot to auction, maybe?
The time consuming task is several boxes of old papers. I may be able to send to auction a lot of antique postcards and photographs (over 100 years old), or possibly find an archive to donate them to. The research into ancestors needs to be read and sorted, so that some of it can go to a cousin. The rest will need to be recycled.
It's all the decision making that is the difficult thing. Which is mostly not about what to keep, but how to get rid of things responsibly without trashing the environment. There are so many possible answers to each individual item- pass it on to family and if so to whom, sell it, and if so how, donate it and if so to whom, send it to recycling, burn it on a bonfire, put it in the rubbish.
Oh well, here we go. I'm setting myself a deadline of before Christmas. Christmas 2018.