Cleaning the Old to Make Room for Our New

So as I mentioned before, our house was built in 1947 and hasn't changed much since then. The previous owners lived in the house for 40 years and were big DIY'ers. Unfortunately, that means we've discovered lots of little surprises as we've settled in. According to our neighbors, the previous owner sold off most of their possessions after his wife passed away, but he left two rooms completely full of furniture, pictures, bedding, and clothing. So we spent the first few months of our ownership just going through these things and cleaning everything out. It was way more work than I thought! Multiple spiders lost their family homes as four boxes went in the trash and the Salvation Army received half a truckload of donated goods. It was also just a really weird thing to do. I'm pretty ruthless when it comes to cleaning out my own things, but going through someone else's stuff was just odd. I felt seriously bad throwing out someone else's memories without their input. Everything was also really dirty as the house had been empty for several months and those rooms had been sealed off. It was icky. And sad. My one hesitation to buying the house was that it had a sad energy to it. I'm not one who really believes in "energies," but something in this place was off. As we've finally finished cleaning out the old stuff to make room for our new, I've noticed the place finally feeling more like ours. But maybe burning some sage wouldn't hurt...