Awesome! If I could only get my hoarder hubby to get/give/let go of all the stuffs he has. I mean, I clean but he keeps buying stuff so now I buy stuff for in case too. Mostly I give my buys away because I can (soaps, kitty toys, solar charged flashlights ).
I’ve been telling him and his partner/BFF that if he/they die all of their stuff is going to a garage sale at a quarter ($.25) even if the stuff is worth $$$ because… it’s just so much stuff they seldom use. Uh, “they” because they buy a lot of stuff together for decades of buying to offset the price. Car stuff (parts and tools) that is now slowly going obsolete.
I’m not recommending this method to everyone, but it worked for me.
At our last place, we had 3 sheds but I didn’t lay claim to any of them, just used a small area in one for my garden stuff. One day, I couldn’t get to my gardening stuff because Hubs had put more of his stuff on the small area of floor I had left.
I knew that asking him nicely wouldn’t get him to deal with the issue and I knew that just cleaning up would make him mad, so I made dinner and gave him beers until he was just at the right place to pick a fight with him over it. The end result was that he got pissed enough to tell me that he didn’t give a flying fuck what I did with any of it (that was what the fight was over, not the stuff but him not letting me deal with it). The argument was instantly over and the make-up sex happened right away.
I didn’t sort anything*. I didn’t sell anything. I dragged everything I didn’t think was useful to the curb and left it and it all went away. Hubs would watch me doing this but knew he couldn’t say a word because he had already said he didn’t care.
We now have his and her sheds. He can borrow space in mine if I’m feeling nice but he is very aware that I will deal with stuff in my shed as I feel fit because I’m a bitch. (He’s actually happy that I forced the issue, he was getting really overwhelmed with all the stuff.)
*That is a lie for some things. Hubs used to buy a tool for a project, use it once then forget about it for a year or so and then need said tool for a different project and buy another one. I would stack all of the same tools in a pile and pick the best one before moving to the next shed.
We own 2 houses (one of which we bought and paid off in 3 years?). The first house is kaput and either could be a burn down or demo’d. The garage at House 1 still has crap in it.
House 2 has crap none of our kids really want. And it’s not like he put the crap in display cases to be admired. I at least with my extra money… use my stuff or give it away (I’m kinda addicted to etsy soaps from various sellers. I love buying (or Himself buying for a holiday for me) and giving a 6-10 bars to various people.
Uh, drunked so best just shut off my keyboard. Back/butt feeling ok so self-prescribed med is working.6 more days to the Pain Clinic, woo-uh-hoo. Which means ( my location, Iowa) but:
(mostly the No Sleep part but :D)
(uh, first house burned by our local FD as practice… but if a storm’s lightning took it out… thanks Mother Nature! Meanwhile it just keeps moldering.)
I miss having a shed. HOA bylaws here don’t allow any kind of structures in the backyard, other than playhouses and such. I moved in early enough that I was allowed to place my old ‘playhouse’ in the backyard (no kidding, it was a converted doghouse that was built so well that my parents used it for storing gardening supplies). It currently holds my stash of pots and planters. Unfortunately, it’s almost completely rotten at the base. I know it needs to be torn apart, but I can’t bring myself to do it.
Central Michigan here. Thankfully toilet paper shortages haven’t been a thing here since last year.
Definitely have seen the cat food thing though. Went into a local Meijer just a couple weeks ago and they had literally 1 3lb. bag of dry cat food on the shelf and maybe a dozen loose cans laying around. It’s better now but it seems to come and go in waves.
At Walmart there was no ice cream for a couple of days weirdly enough and no bacon. More recently I’ve noticed the chip and pretzel aisle has been dwindling and not being replaced. There’s a specific jalapeno flavored pretzel bite thing that Snyder’s makes that my wife is addicted to and we still see it sparingly in like gas stations and convenience stores but Walmart hasn’t had any in weeks.
I guess I’m TP hoarding again - I’ve built up a supply of about 2.5 months of the good stuff (Charmin Ultra-Soft for us).
My approach is: anytime I’m in a grocery or Wal-Mart, I’ll buy one 9- or 12- or 18-pack, depending on what they’ve got. So nobody looks at me and sees a shopping cart overflowing with TP, just the one pack of TP: I don’t want to make anyone else think they need to hoard. But between one visit and the next, we’ve used maybe 2-3 rolls, so the stash accumulates.
That’s how I’ve handled a lot of my stockpiling - get a reasonable quantity, making sure there’s plenty still there for others, as opportunity arises. Comforting when I read news stories about supply line problems or retailers going back to limiting quantities on certain items.
Helps that we’re mostly not brand-fussy. Especially on basic disposable items like paper products, store brands tend to meet our needs just fine.
This is how it should be done. Panic buying causes hoarding and shortages. The other important thing to remember is to buy what you use. Don’t buy a case of Spam on sale because it stores well unless you like Spam enough to happily eat your way through that case of meat.
We’ve been preppers since way back and as a result, managed to ride out the shortages in comfort. Heck, last year I mailed mom a big box of toilet paper and paper towels.
Just before the pandemic hit, I was near a Sam’s Club, so I stopped and filled a cart with toilet paper.
I have a sauna in my bathroom that I do not use. It’s benches hold huge things of toilet paper and paper towels, pretty much the only stuff I buy at Sam’s. Because tp is something I figure I will always use and would rather not run out of.
I may have posted this before - but March / April 2020 we had persuaded the in-laws to go to grocery delivery (Florida, and they are elderly with loads of health issues, so at very high risk) and their shoppers were consistently unable to find toilet paper for them. Dunno if the stores truly had none, or the shoppers didn’t substitute, or whatever.
Walmart to the rescue. There are plenty of negatives about WalMart - but stuff on their website did not suffer from price gouging the way stuff did at Amazon. Case in point: I decided to order some digital thermometers. Got the last 3 in stock (one for spouse, one for me, one for son at college) for 5ish bucks apiece. The identical unit at Amazon was 15 dollars for one.
So: I found Charmin Ultra Strong at Walmart dot com. Ordered two packages because that got me free shipping; sent directly to them.
It arrived the second Saturday in May. MIL called in glee to say it had arrived. “Best Mothers’ Day present EVER!!!”. Apparently they had just put their very last roll on the dispenser.
Hah - on rereading, i had posted these tales before. Oh well. Still amusing, to me at least)
Here in Hawaii we’re being warned to start expecting all kinds of shortages soon, but that’s due to the current shipping container backlog on the mainland.
Cleaning supplies are getting short. When we run across our favored toilet bowl cleaner, we buy a couple because at least one bottle is getting short.
We’re on septic so use the cheapest, most likely to fall apart toilet paper we can buy. The shelves of cheap stuff are still full, but the nice stuff seems to be in short supply.
We are also seeing delays in our Chewy orders. Running out of kitty litter and cat food would be much more distressing to the hoomans than running out of toilet paper or cleaner. We do have three cats, after all!
What’s a non-racist way of saying “shithole country?” Because that was my thought while grocery shopping this morning. Lots of bare spots on the shelves, much more limited selections across the board. The big observation is that the local Vons (Safeway) just removed an entire display section, a whole aisle deep. Then they moved the others around to make wider aisles and hope nobody notices. That tells me that they are expecting the shortages to be semi-permanent and want the store to still look stocked.
I work in the plumbing industry now. The resin used to make PVC pipe as well and shower bases and walls has been in extremely short supply. Steel fittings for couplings, water heaters, and control valves have skyrocketed. We are seeing near monthly price increases. The counter guys cannot use any price books, even ones from this past summer.
Copper has also seen price increases about every 6 weeks since the beginning of the year.
October will be the first month since March without a water heater increase. Don’t worry though, we have already been told November will be a larger than usual increase.
Parts for a cuisinart. I’m shopping for a new food processor, since my old one finally died, after 35 years of service. And there are all sorts of accessories that exist on-line, in photos. But they are all out of stock.
medical supplies. I was just talking with someone in the medical field and they are really short on certain supplies. I was surprised. Stuff used for testing such as nasal swabs and such.
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