I’m enjoying a blog called The Downsize Challenge, whose author posts weekly about her trials and triumphs as she culls through a lifetime’s possessions crammed into her grandfather’s two-bedroom Florida condo.

The Downsize Challenge has raised questions that plague all of us (what do all those keys unlock, anyway?) and fostered a lively competition to see which reader had the oldest expiration date on something in the medicine cabinet (a jar of Vaseline from 1974 took the prize).

It also carries a not-so-subtle message. “I was encouraging other members of my family not to wait 20 years to deal with this stuff, because I don’t want to have to do it again,” said the blog’s author, Julie Lanoie.

The back story: Ms. Lanoie, 36, whom readers here have met before, cares for her Dutch-born grandfather, whom she has always called Opa. He’s 96 and has dementia. She left her job as a community mental health therapist in Vermont when her grandmother died and Opa couldn’t manage alone. Her plan was to move back to her hometown in New Hampshire, where they’d share a house on property her family owned and relatives would be nearby to share the care.

But first, there was that overstuffed condo to clear out and sell. “Every dress my grandmother ever wore,” she said, listing the inventory. “Five coffeemakers. Tax records from the 1950s. Parts and parts and parts of cameras, and boxes of glass slides.” Opa had saved the cords from every appliance that died, thinking it might be useful for rewiring something else; Ms. Lanoie found them all still in a storage closet.

Raised to be thrifty and striving to be green, Ms. Lanoie doesn’t like tossing things in the trash. She advocates “reducing, redistributing and repurposing,” and has learned a lot about which plastic containers can be recycled, which charities want old cellphones and what can be unloaded via Craigslist. That information, plus her strategy of dividing an overwhelming task into manageable chunks — today, under the sink; tomorrow, the linen closet — makes The Downsize Challenge useful.

At first, she just e-mailed friends and family with her updates; now she’s blogging, which has proved useful for her, too. “It was my lifeline beyond this new life I’d plunged myself into,” she said. “It made me feel connected to the outside world, which is always a challenge for caregivers.”

Ms. Lanoie and Opa have moved to New Hampshire now. (Anyone want to buy a condo in Florida?) But she’s still blogging, and her ideas about Stuff have evolved. When she buys something, she thinks about whether it will still be in her household when she’s 90.

“I don’t want to accumulate things that aren’t useful,” she said. “You don’t have to be preparing to move in order to clean out your house. We can be living differently.”