You have a drawer? Mwaahahahaaaa! I have two cloth grocery bags and one of those little storage cubes (not little like plastic box you put in the cupboard little, little like the little cube that can double as a small chair little). I don’t even know what half of them are for. Probably devices I no longer have. I want to join your club! Do we get 1 year, 3 year, and 5 year buttons the longer we’re cable free?
The way I understand it is that “hoarding” isn’t defined per se by the exact amount of stuff you have but whether not you have a pathological need to keep it. So if you have a house full of crap, you know it’s crap, but you’re too busy to clean it up and would be happy if someone did it for you, that’s not hoarding, it’s laziness. True hoarders want, deep down, to keep all the stuff.
Interesting. I was picturing it as some sort of a municipal thing, like being required to have your car inspected to renew its license tabs.
I…have a C64 computer hooked up. And while I do have Impossible Mission, I might be interested in any other game disks that you have. Drop me a PM if you’re willing to part with your precious, precious disks.
I didn’t know my husband posted here! 
Here’s how I have figured out how to solve my mini-hoard problem. If I have literally not touched the item in an entire year, not one fingerprint on it, then it has to go. Now, I’m not so good about the exact time frame but I’ve had a stack of unopened looseleaf lined paper on the end of my bookshelf. I looked at it and thought “I have literally not touched that stack of paper since I put it there when we moved in 3 years ago”
Once I thought of it like that, I had absolutely no problem tossing it out.
There’s a point at which “I might need that” is not cost-effective. Sure, in 5 years it might be handy and you might even say “Wow! I’m glad I kept that!” but is it really worth keeping it for that long? How could you know it’s still good? Is it really worth 15 minutes in gas and a few bucks to keep something that only maybe might have usefulness some unknown time in the future? What if you kept it for the rest of your life because who knows?
I’m getting rid of a CRT computer monitor this weekend that I haven’t touched in two years. It’s a good feeling, like peeling off a scab, to get rid of these old items now.
??? It costs me nothing to keep something I already have. If I had an old CRT monitor I’d probably want to get rid of it, but it would cost me nothing to keep it, and I’d probably have to pay to dispose of it unless I waited for somebody to have a free e-waste day, and then it would still cost me gas and time to take it in.
It can cost you in dust accumulation, in crowding out something else you might like better, in hiding something behind it that you forget about, in a vague feeling of oppressiveness that you can’t even pin down until it’s gone because you’ve hauled off the clutter.
a few small scales are handy like a postage scale, food.
having parts for yourself or friends is a good thing.
Dust will accumulate whether I have it or not. It’s not crowding out anything now, and there’s little chance it will mysteriously grow if I don’t get rid of it. Nothing will get hidden behind it unless I put it there. And there is no “vague feeling of oppressiveness”, whatever that means. So again, it costs me nothing to keep it. Anyway, the specific claim was that it would cost 15 minutes worth of gas and a few bucks.
/shrug. Well, OK then. I was semi-rhetorically suggesting other possibilities of cost or that may apply to other people reading this.
Well gosh, sorry I was so specific then 
It feels great for me to get rid of stuff I have literally not touched in over a year. If I haven’t even touched it, obviously I don’t need it, probably don’t even want it anymore. So you can happily keep your dusty old computer components and I’ll happily toss out something I no longer need.
I was simply describing a method by which I turned my “But but but I might need it; I have to keep it forever!” hoarding-type thoughts into “It’s obvious I’m not keeping this for a good reason any more”. Thought it might be helpful for others is all. Your metric for what to toss out is obviously a higher bar than mine.
There is a lot of stuff you will use again even if you haven’t used them within the last year, for example survival supplies (major electrical outage), tools (lots of people do remodeling type projects but not very frequently).
It feels great for me when someone suddenly needs something, and I can stop, think for a moment, and then pull out what they need. You might feel better when you declutter, but I feel better when I know I’m prepared for just about anything. Including the Zombie Apocalypse (soon coming to a message board you know!).
That’s what it’s like for me - my house is messier and fuller when it’s full of kipple (I’m a “leave everything out” kind of person - the less there is to leave out, the tidier my house looks).
I misread this as “having parts OF yourself or friends is a good thing.” :smack:
There is a slippery slope that true hoarders slide down, I think - I think they keep everything because they think they will need it some day, or it gives them a false sense of security to have everything they’ve ever gotten in their house. I wouldn’t say getting rid of everything you haven’t touched in a year is the way to go, but it’s a good start for a guideline. I might not have touched my portable air compressor in a year, but I’ll still keep it for the occasional home repair project I’m going to do. A sweater in my closet that I haven’t worn in two years and is completely out of style - off to the local charity you go!
When my son began crawling/ walking, I elected to organize my mother in law’s bathroom since she had tons of bath products and pill bottles on shelves within toddler reach. She starting fighting with me about it.
I took a closer look and saw that most of the pills and medications had expiration dates sometime during the Reagan era. She screamed, cried and yelled at me to leave her stuff alone.
That’s when I realized, nope she’s not just a messy person.
She wonders why I never bring her grandson over.
I will note that I do have disaster supplies, but they are relatively small, organized in bins/bags, catalogued, and rotated through. So many of those items do indeed get touched and even used within a year.
Hijack: Amusingly, I had just emptied out a 6-gallon water jug (preparing for the move, an empty jug is obviously easier to move than a full one) hours before we had a water main break in the neighborhood. I was kicking myself because we had no idea how long it would take to fix (turns out only several hours) and I didn’t know if we’d need that big source of water to wash up in, etc., the next day. I did still have a few cases of water bottles, though.
It’s not pathological hoarding, it’s smart, long-term investment.
Sure, those old PC motherboards, parallel printer cables, 4K x 1 RAM chips, 1200 baud modem cards, floppy drives, and blank cassette tapes aren’t worth anything now, but just wait. Wait long enough, either they’ll come back, or get more valuable as they get rarer.
Mark my words.
Meanwhile, anyone want some old PC motherboards, parallel printer cables, 4K x 1 RAM chips, 1200 baud modem cards, floppy drives, and blank cassette tapes? They’re just cluttering up my basement.
I like this thread better than the “Big Hoarder” one. Sure, I got more stuff than I need, but I do throw out stuff (and I’m increasingly careful about what I “let in”). It’s just hardish to do.
I was clearing out my main computer workbench area Sunday. (Some work we had done on the floor above resulted in sawdust all over the place. Not good for electronics.)
Lot’s of small stuff. A dozen or so pieces of PC100 type memory (64, 128, maybe even 256Mb!). It all went.
But it’s the deciding, as I’ve mentioned before, that’s the nuisance. I found one of those PS/2 to AT keyboard adapter plugs. I already knew I had one right at hand so I chucked one. Easy. But why even keep the other? Nothing remotely AT keyboard-like around anymore. I think. Am I sure? Blah, blah, blah. Keep it another day or two in case I can think of a reason to keep it. But it’s going.
I just hate going thru this mental process over and over.
But my previous post has inspired me to start one big task: All the cables in a given category go in place. Then I’ll throw out the spares or unwanted.
And I do have spares. E.g., years ago a thrift store had a shopping cart full of A/V cables. Really long, good quality ones. For a buck or two. I’d buy one or two when I went in. (That was a good place for cables, adapters, etc. Really miss it.)
But with recent upgrades, swap outs, etc., I rarely need composite cables at all. So, into a pile the extras are all going. I think that I’m going to end up chucking at least a dozen including all the crappy thin ones.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I also disagree with the one year rule. Right now I am going thru my old VCR tapes and copying to digital the stuff I want to keep. Both the tapes and the VCRs (including Betas!) haven’t been touched in quite a while. But I’m glad I’m doing it. I think I threw out 150-200 tapes without even bothering to view them based on labels. I don’t need copies of Wayne’s World or Empire Strikes Back recorded off of cable. If at all. But there’s some real gems in there plus a few family tapes.
But once this is finished, do I get rid of all the VCRs and the family tapes? Then I would have to get rid of my Sony Betamovie BMC-110 camcorder. The first consumer standalone camcorder! (People can’t even sell these for $10 on eBay.) Etc.
So I was inspired to clean off another shelf in the computer room today. I discarded the boxes for every iPad we’ve bought, all empty but taking up shelf space, manuals for Visual Basic 5.0, Windows 2000 server security, and owners manuals for a TV we’ve replaced, a laptop we no longer own, and some devices I don’t even remember having.
Next stop the pile of disks. Unfortunately I need a garbage bag for those, not recyclable here 