Frankie, as a former antique dealer who has done her share of sales, your timing on this coincides well with the basement we are cleaning out to have our ''Sale'' with! Your observations are right on. You know those things that were saved in boxes were probably family gifts the owner felt they couldn't give away. Broken or dirty stuff that's been neglected is just sad. Knowing how much work there is to selling off old stuff always makes me want to make it easier on myself. I helped my parents with their estate sale. Mom thought it was too overwhelming and she never dealt with the contents of her house until that point in time. She was a depression kid, and her stuff represented her life to her. Most of it wasn't particularly valuable, yet she had far more difficulty letting it go than she should have. She didn't have any practice at culling, and though she knew most of that old stuff wasn't worth much, it was physically painful for her to let it go. When we cleaned out our garage, to have a staging area for the basement stuff to sell, my DH wanted to save two windows that ''we might need if'' something happened to the others. I put my foot down. I'm allowing him to keep the bicycle he refuses to get rid of that has been hanging (out of the way) in the garage that he hasn't ridden since we've lived here. (It's a symbol of his youth, long before we met. Since we'll have been married 27 years soon, it's old and not particularly valuable...Only in his mind!) I figure it resides there as my bargaining chip, which I've used many, many times as a point of reference. Since it isn't taking space away from anything else, it's useful to me for that! I have an assortment of tablecloths too; you can bet I'm culling them for my sale. I have parts to pieces I've been looking for since we moved here 11 years ago. I hope to find them in the basement when we clean it out. If I don't, they're GOING. I'm trying to have a good attitude about this, knowing I'll find some treasures that were lost and found. It's going to be great to reclaim the basement real estate for a re-purpose, other than storage. The only problem I can see with this is that it may involve another remodel, but I'm not going there for a good, long while! In the meantime, there will be room to figure it out. I've had so much stuff come and go in my life I don't attach a lot of importance to it anymore. If it's useful or you love it, sure. Most doesn't fit in that category. Otherwise, you just have to deal with it at some point. When it's all said and done, it's only stuff. It's so refreshing to lighten the load!

Spitfire, pretty much my entire family is like that, very frugal Yankees. Furniture, rugs, lamps, etc. were/are only replaced when they get too ratty and worn-out to keep using, or broke and couldn't be repaired. Grandparents grew up in the Great Depression - both sets of grandparents married when the men came back from WWII, saved up and built modest houses around 1950. Pretty much everyone in the family just didn't have the money to be redecorating just because something was no longer considered "stylish". So a bedroom might still have 50-year-old wallpaper on the walls because it wasn't scraped or gouged or badly faded, so there wasn't any point in buying new paper. Although I do remember both grandmothers having very up-to-the-minute-for-1950 bathrooms, one had the robin's-egg blue fixtures complete with the metal-legged console sink and matching tile and the other had goldenrod yellow fixtures, but neither one would have dreamed of remodeling just to change the colors even though the style mavens considered them outright horrible thirty years later. I think a lot of it rubbed off on me, because I see little point (for me) in my decor having to constantly be "fresh" and "updated", it simply doesn't matter to me - I would just like to get things finished and be able to go on to other things to spend my money on. ;-) Practicality also trumps style in a big way in our house. We recently purchased a sectional (wow, brand new furniture, woowoo, but I'd been watching CL for quite a while to no avail) for the most effective use of space in our small, awkwardly-designed living room and I chuckled at the saleslady's comment that although of course you could still BUY them, sectionals were very "out", and we really should be getting a sofa-and-loveseat... even though that's what we were getting RID of because it wasted precious space! (DH and I bicker lovingly over the corner spot. Wonderful place to nest with lots of pillows and a warm blanket.) ljwrar, I would do any number of horrible things :-) for the kind of original features in your house, since my ca. 1900 house was almost completely stripped. Treasure them! If you replace the original light fixtures, wrap them well in acid-free paper, box them up carefully, and store them for a future owner to put back if they wish.

Hmm...I was agreeing with you that not everything is worth saving, and that it sounds like your baths don't have much charm, but that its hard to help you out with DIY or on a budget without knowing what they look like. If you had the budget to gut the bathrooms that's one thing, but if you have a limited budget that usually means working with some things you don't like much, keeping things that you can't change. But what are those? On GW you have to have a thick skin, people will say things you don't like. People will make their own assumptions about things especially when you give limited information and no pictures. Its a holiday weekend and you got two responses, one giving relatively sound general advice to work with the house, which isn't bad advice based upon the limited information you gave, and one "shame", which yes, is harsh and makes assumptions. Two responses on a holiday weekend when dozens of people who normally post aren't around and you're ready to stomp off in a fit instead of waiting around to see what further responses you get? I think your best bet would be to go to a store that has a lot of home magazines and kitchen and bath magazines and get your ideas from a format that won't judge you or give opinions you don't want to hear. You can get a lot of great ideas that way and no opinions to offend you. I'm serious, not being sarcastic...if you can't just brush off comments you don't like and just restate your case without getting defensive immediately, I don't think this environment will work for you

DH and I bought our house about 18 months ago. At the time, everyone told us we were crazy to buy such a large home for essentially just the two of us. But now (and at Thanksgiving,) I am especially glad we did. DH has his office in the great room, which was a former home business office for the previous owners. It is on one end of the house, has pocket doors to close it off, and is almost soundproof. Perfect for his many conference calls each day. Our basement is finished, but mostly empty. It is the perfect place to tinker with the dollhouse. I also have a desk down there where I take my now online botany class. Here is an interesting note about that. Before everything closed, I was taking the class in person, at Longwood. There was a lot of normal classroom chatter between the professor and the students, in a structured, but loose way, if that makes sense. It was fun, filled with comraderie, and the material, while dense, was doable. Now that we're online (Zoom), the class feels more difficult--there is no banter, no visualization of hands collectively raised, suggesting others might be struggling with a point as well. Now I simply take notes and feel overwhelmed. Yes, our professor does ask if we have questions, but it's different, and more distracting to ask. Not sure this is making sense, but I imagine our college-age kids might be going through something similar. My ds is home from college and learning online. He prefers to work from the desk in his room. I do notice more stress in him after classes and he is a good student.