In the movies, the adult child returns home and their room is exactly as they left it.
What have you done with the room when you’re pretty sure they’re not going to live at home again?
What about all the trophies gathering dust? Put them in storage or trash them?
We moved houses to a different house after our D graduated from HS. That said, we had her set up “her room” in the new house. It’s sometimes used as a second guest room but we wanted her to have her own space so it would feel like home.
We keep her trophies in a memory box.
We aren’t at that stage yet, but we’ve discussed with both that they’ll need to decide what they want to do with their stuff when their dad retires in three years, as we will be greatly downsizing and they won’t have rooms anymore. They’re sentimental about some things, but I’m guessing a box or two each of mementos and then clothes/books, and that’s about it. No attachment to furniture or anything like that as they’ve always had minimal and second hand.
Our older child has told us that anything left in his room can be given away or whatever. His closet and dresser are empty except for a few things he does use when he visits. The bookshelves still have some books, but not as many.
Second kid is working on what she wants kept. Closet is also empty. The biggest issue she has is a huge collection of teddy bears.
Re: trophies…I took the little brass plaques off of them and put them in a picture frame for each kid. No one wanted the blank trophies (even though they use exactly the same soccer ones now) so they went to the dump.
We had a couple of pieces of their art framed each. Everything else…took a picture and it’s on a disk.
We know we can ditch the CDs but we have a huge collection one kid had of classical pieces…and we just haven’t gotten around to that yet.
Under bed boxes are empty…and really need to be donated!
This is a sore subject, as my husband’s parents kept his room exactly the way he left it when he moved out, for over twenty years (until they sold the house). He kept telling them to throw everything out, he didn’t want any of it, but they refused to do so. We jokingly called it his shrine.
I want my daughter to feel comfortable when she visits. I have kept her room mostly intact. At some point, I changed the curtains and bedcover to simple white (from the colorful ones she had). I use her dresser and closet for our off season clothes. The shelves house her books and some of her knickknacks . I use her room as my yoga space (now that I can only do zoom yoga).
She didn’t do any sports, so no trophies, but I have her middle school graduation academic awards and her HS graduation cap still on the wall. I also have some of her artwork up on her corkboard. I feel like it is a fair compromise. She lives in a limited space and I have the extra room.
When we downsize, I anticipate still having a bedroom she can use when she visits. I would keep some of her stuff in it (definitely her books).
I wanted to add, my daughters’ sport (gymnastics) had medals instead of trophies, and they have so many of those! Luckily they are small and even taken all together don’t take up much space in a box- they both put them away when they graduated high school.
I kept my daughters rooms as is until they had their own place. At some point they stopped viewing my place as their home. As sad as it sounds, it happens. I have moved multiple times since they went off to college, and one of the moves was overseas. They picked out stuff they wanted to keep and rest I threw out. At my place I always have a place for them to stay, but it’s not their room. I am lucky that both of them live within 30 minutes from me now. We see each often without having them sleep over.
Lol. My dh and ds hit the road slightly after 4:00 a.m. for the 1,800 mile drive out to campus for ds’s freshman year. By 5:00 a.m. I was in his room cleaning out. I left what was on the walls, but the trophies, awards, memorabilia, and piles of crapola that were on the dresser, nightstand, etc, all got sorted and tucked away out of sight. That made his room much less “kid-like.” While it was still his room, it became a second guest bedroom for us to use when he was not home.
When he was home winter break of his junior year, and we knew we would be downsizing that spring, I asked him to go through his belongings and purge. We were going to need separate storage anyway (at least for awhile), so I told him to keep whatever he wanted. He didn’t really get rid of much at that point. I also walked him through our house and asked him what we had that he did not want us to sell in our living estate sale. The only thing he asked was that we keep ALL the Christmas ornaments.
When he came to visit us at our new place after we moved, we had him go through his stuff that we had put in storage yet again. We, too, still had items in storage at that point. He purged a LOT on that pass. Many comments of, “Why did I want to keep this??” Over time I mailed him some of his remaining things (yearbooks, sheet music, photo albums made by his grandmother) in flat rate USPS boxes. We eventually got rid of our off-site storage and now only have one large plastic tub, one small plastic tub, an accordion (
)and a sound mixing board of his here. His room here is just our generic guest room.
I am certain he wishes we hadn’t moved - or that we had at least stayed in the area in which he was raised. He still has many friends there. If we’d stayed in our old house and not down-sized and moved out of state, I imagine his room would not have changed much at all because there would have been no incentive or need to do anything different with it.
I’m just going to trash everything they don’t take when they move out, except for a couple of sentimental items. Then I will perhaps try redecorate, with a nod to how their rooms looked.
As for trophies, what trophies? Unless you count the medal every kid got at the annual Soccerfest. 
The full sized oar I won rowing crew in college is still in my parents’ house because it was taken there after college and we left it behind when we moved to the US 20 years ago. Finally have to start thinking about what to do with it now my mother is considering downsizing. We did at least bring the drinks cabinet that my grandfather made out of the boat I rowed in.
Very cool ideas.
I’m just referring to my own kids and their lack of trophies.
However, my husband did find my son’s fake ID when he was moving the desk out of son’s bedroom today, so that also kind of counts as a prize. Lol.
Our college kid (oldest) reduced bedroom to two bins when packing up for school. This was because third child wanted that room. Everyone was very practical about it. When home now, college kid gets the “office” with an awesome IKEA pull out sofa with a 4” memory foam pad and private bathroom. Doesn’t miss smaller no bathroom bedroom one bit. Loves new digs. When S21 leaves, youngest wants his room (continual upgrades around here!). So we will likely reduce to a couple of bins again. I like that they are all so practical and unsentimental. I wish I was like that.
One of my goals when second child leaves for college in August is to really clean out some closets and drawers and all the accumulated junk in ALL the house. We will be here for another 10 years before retirement, but I’d love to have things sparser. The weight of the stuff after being here for a year of pandemic is annoying me.
We moved to our “retirement” house when our son was a senior in high school. The new house has a casita which became his apartment. He was on the crew team, so I decorated it with a rowing theme:
When he graduated from West Point, the Army came and moved every stick of that furniture and all his belongings to his duty post in GA, leaving me with an empty space that became my she-shed. Here are the “after” pics:
I spend a lot of “me” time in that space. (DH may not enter without knocking first.) When our son comes home, that’s where he stays, but there are no more memories there for him, and he’s definitely never coming home to live again. 
Before moving to this house, he cleaned out the room he grew up in, boxing only those few things that meant something to him. The rest of the stuff he valued was at boarding school, but those rooms are small, so not much to ship home after graduation. Again, all of it went with him when he moved to GA. His baby things and elementary school things were already boxed and put away, so there was very little that followed us here to the new house.
@ChoatieMom , I love your pictures. You have a great decorating gene! Thanks for sharing those.
When oldest moved out, his room was a mess. I set out to make it another guest room. New carpet, filled in a gazillion holes in the wall from posters. Bought a bedroom set. I did keep some trophies, pictures and framed a couple collage posters I had made of him and friends. I don’t think he liked it. Second son was texting him pictures of his empty room in various stages as I was redecorating. I don’t feel bad because it needed it badly. He was a slob anyway with keeping his room nice, and never seemed to care how it looked.
2nd son is meticulous in his room, displaying stuff, hanging his clothes up. I left it the same as he really liked his shelves and setup. Plus, I didn’t need it to be another guest room.
That is one of the best looking kids room I have seen.
I recently throw out the 3-4 trophies that were mine and my husbands. His were little league baseball and mine was a math trophy!
This is something I’ve been contemplating this last year, since Older S graduated and moved out. I’ve got most of the kids’ childhood/teenage stuff neatly boxed and labeled in the attic. They will get those when they move into a house or we move into a smaller place. He took most of the rest with him. It’s just miscellaneous stuff now. I’ve thought about boxing up the rest and redoing his room. The paint is 15 years old. It could use a refresher, but so could the rest of our house. Nobody is ever going to stay there except him. It’s $$$ we don’t need to spend, so why bother? I have a lot more space than I need anyway, and there are plenty of other items that need doing and I’d like to do. And so it sits.
Re: trophies. Older S’ are boxed in the attic. Younger S’ are still on his shelf, but he still sort of lives here. The worst offender is me. I had several trophies growing up that my mom saved and gave me. But for ~20 years I ran in 6 local races/year, and almost every woman gets a trophy in those. And there are plenty of other races as well. A few times I donated several back to charities who could reuse them. I gave a couple to H’s school that he had replated for school PE awards. And some went in the dumpster. But I still have about 20 left - the ones that meant more to me. I would throw them away, but I think it might be neat for the great-grandkids to see that that old lady in the nursing home once could do something. We shall see how long they last.
This thread makes me laugh. For years I didn’t understand why my mom, who lives nearby, world nag me incessantly to get the boxes of “my stuff” out of her attic. Then my kids moved out and all of a sudden I GOT IT 
D and her family live nearby, and she’s been good about taking her things a bit at a time. S (the packrat) lives in another state; when he visits, getting him to sort through his nostalgia is not an easy task. So, when we went to visit him a couple weekends ago…we crammed all his stuff into our Explorer, and left it at his house! It’s amazing how quickly he’s sorted through it… 
Agree…the “stuff” leaves more quickly when the kid lives nearby and wants it.
We were thrilled this winter to have our closeby kid take three bins of Christmas decorations…her ornament box, her nutcracker collection, and a third box of things she took from the house like a tree skirt, placemats, towels, etc.
Hoping she fetches the Easter stuff soon!!
We told our kids so long as our address is their permanent address we would consider it “their” room. Once they moved for good the room would be considered guest’s room or used for another purpose. So far our oldest DD is married and has a home of her own. Her room is our guest room. Her stuff we have been moving to her home as we visit. Our youngest D is a grad student and still considers our home her permanent residence even though she is only here for maybe a month out of the year. Her stuff is in her room or we have kept things that might help her establish her own place. We have plans for her room but it will likely be a couple years.
