My Recycled Life — House Is a Museum

My mother, a frustrated artist, turned her suburban home into her own personal museum. She painted most of the walls white like an art gallery, the better to show off her art collection, and furnished the living room with eight tall glass display cases packed with still more art, crafts, curios, collectibles, antiques, mementos, memorabilia and relics of her life.

I love displaying those things as much as she did, but I don’t like the prospect of living in a museum. I don’t like those glass display cases — they’re hazardous. Two years and two estate sales later, though, all eight cases are still where they were, and all serve a useful function, serving as much-needed storage space in a house that remains packed with lifetimes of accumulated material goods. Each sale has emptied out a few shelves, but each time the shelves have simply provided new spaces for clutter cleared from other areas of the house.

At this stage the easy choices have been made. The obvious trash has been trashed, the obvious donations donated, the most saleable items sold. One entire case remains, taken up by the family collection of bottles and glassware. Another case is stuffed with relics from my mother’s childhood — some of her dolls, her antique doll tea set, animal figurines, baby spoons, decorative plates — that I haven’t found a buyer for. What I call the “united nations” collection — Asian, African, Latin American curios — fill a third case. Keep going, there’s more: heirlooms from my father’s family, relics from my childhood, sports memorabilia, basketry, pottery, rocks, shells, figurines, souvenirs, tins, candleholders — and that’s just some of what’s on display in the living room. Wait ‘til you see the rest of the house.

One or two buyers from auction houses have expressed interest in the glass display cases, but only the glass display cases, nothing else. I can’t sell the cases without somewhere else to put the contents. One estate-sales man offered to have workers come and pack the contents into crates and move all the crates and cases into my garage — for a hefty price, of course. That would crowd more things into a garage too crowded already, and it doesn’t address the primary issue — how to ultimately dispose of the cases or what they contain. 

Since moving in I’ve been struggling to make the house less like a museum and more like a living space. Most of the rooms have a new color scheme. The living room has been painted a sandy, sunny Southwestern peach, displaying Western art from the family collection. Most of the bulky Danish mid-century modern furniture has been sold, and what’s left leans to the functional and minimal. Those glass cases are (still) proving to be a major challenge. Maybe by the end of 2022 all my family’s personal museum collection will be re-housed, in my home or somebody else’s, and those buyers can come and get the cases, if they still want them.