Help your aging parent move by honoring memories

If you have an older parent who is moving, you know how hard it is to break the emotional ties to the family home. Helping a loved one move out of a home filled with memories requires a gentle touch. Let's start with the brag wall.  This is the wall (or walls) your parents have in their home that are jam packed with pictures, art, with some loose papers tucked in such as event tickets, or drawings on papers.

This wall presents a few problems for the senior who is moving.  First, usually a move for seniors requires moving to a senior community which means a significant downsize from a single family home. How do you display all these pictures and minimize the amount of precious wall space they take up?  Second, this wall presents a problem for showing the home to perspective buyers. While this wall is a thing of beauty to the home owner, it represents clutter to the buyer.  We want the buyer to be looking at the home, not the family pictures or be worried about what those pictures might be covering up.

Here a few tips to help you move your parent's brag wall to their new home.

1. Consider a Collage Frame. You can reduce the number of frames hanging on the wall by cutting out the important part of the picture and placing it into a collage. In this example I could potentially take 6 different picture frames and reduce them to one collage frame.
2. Some of my clients have decided to reduce their brag wall down to a coffee size table photo album.  They simply took the pictures out of the frames and placed them into a book. The difference is the book was left within arms reach of the sofa...not tucked away on a bookshelf.
3. Use other creative ways to display photos. Such as this picture cube.
4. My favorite, are the digital photo frames. We just got one for my mother-in-law, and loaded it with pictures of the family.  All she'll have to do on Christmas is open it up!  Pictures can easily be added and deleted without using a computer, just use a thumb drive or memory card from your camera. 
5. No matter how you choose to transport your parents or loved one's brag wall, take advantage of the process. While you're puting together the new photo album or collage, encourage your parent to talk about favorite memories those pictures represent. Be available to listen to your parent's stories and honor their memories. This way, you can help your parents process the loss of their home, and you'll have the stories to help them bring their memories with them, no matter where they go.