Not much. We’ve been pretty aggressive and successful about purging stuff we don’t use and/or love since a series of moves ending up in our current house some 10 years ago. We firmly believe in the arts and crafts motto: have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be useful. (Tho I often joke that I may fail on BOTH counts.)
Maybe a tool we bought for one non-recurring use - like a scraper I bought to tear up (likely asbestos! ) tile. It is hanging on a wall in the garage.
Would you count some books we haven’t looked at in some time? We are pretty good at weeding out books we do not want to keep either for reference, future re-reading, or sentiment. The bookcases are not overloaded, and we have no desire to get rid of the furniture.
In our closet we’ve got a very few paintings that we likely will never rehang, but just don’t want to get rid of yet, since we have planty of room.
Our house is not huge, yet it is in no way cluttered. So the few things we have that don’t get used or displayed are all tucked away where they do not bother us or interfere with anything.
Overall, we are quite good at ridding ourselves of stuff we don’t use and/or love.
Do you know what kind of Hammond it is? Some of them are quite valuable. (The famous B-3, its churchy cousin the C-3, and the A-100 in particular. Very rarely people end up with these not knowing what they have. One of the churches I volunteered at ended up with a B3 for free with a Leslie speaker from another church thay didn’t seem to know what it was giving away. I raised my eyebrows at the ethics of this, but, hey, they got a nice $4-$5k organ that gets use in service.)
Nah, but my grandfather bought it in the seventies. I hear it’s gone to an old lady who plays piano at grandma’s church, so she’d have been happy about that. Best not to know if it was worth major bucks at this point!
Pianos and keyboards seem to be a common item here. Ours is a Yamaha keyboard that we bought maybe 20 years ago with the intent of learning to play. Neither of us have done so, and it resides atop a large bookcase in the living room.
In the 14 years we have lived in this house we have never used the oven. Cooking is done on the top burners, the microwave oven, and the air fryer.
My wife wanted a stationary bicycle. It hasn’t been ridden in years and resides in the garage.
I used an old 39-inch Toshiba LCD TV as a computer monitor for years and replaced it with an LED a year or two ago. It’s also in the garage. I keep intending to take it to recycling, but…
Here’s something I actually got rid of recently:
I had a professional recording studio setup in a spare room. I purchased a huge stand-up computer desk from IKEA to hold all the equipment. The bottom fell out of the voiceover business (everybody who’s been fired from their radio job is doing it) and it sat there taking up about 1/4 of a very small room. I finally dismantled it all and gave the desk to my nephew who uses it for gaming. All the equipment is in the garage, boxed up. And we have the room back.
Ah, I skimmed right over the part where you said the organ was given away. At any rate, it’s unlikely it’s one of those models. You see lots of Hammonds being given away or sold for cheap these days as they are particularly bulky and heavy. I’d LOVE to have even a cheap M100, but I just don’t have the room or can justify having it around.
You bake your quesadillas? We always pan-fry them…in a teeny tiny bit of oil. I don’t like them too oily, but you can’t get that nice crispy exterior without a little.
Oops. You doubled your “useful” and skipped your “beautiful.” William Morris.
We picked a nice one up for free from one of my wife’s cow-orkers. Thought it quite the deal. I used it maybe 10x that first winter. Then, several years later with no further use, we were happy to give it away to someone else.
We had an unused treadmill that my spouse sold to help finance another, fancier, treadmill which also goes unused. That wins for “inside the house” in my case.
Out in the garage is a nice wooden drafting table I was given by my old boss when he retired and closed the company. It’s about a hundred years old and heavy as heck. My plan was to use it as a kitchen island type table or similar in a new home but we haven’t moved yet (“in this economy?”) so it sits in the garage. Luckily, it folds more or less vertical so it doesn’t take up a ton of space and isn’t suffering any environmental damage.
Yep, in a hot oven until the edges turn brown. Take a cookie sheet, lay out the tortillas, fill with cheese, then fold over- then put some butter atop each. 350-400 over, for not very long.
That way you can easily make 3 or 4 and not have to watch them like a hawk.
If fireplaces count, then there’s a wood stove in the corner of the dining room that I’ve never used at all since I’ve owned this house. That’s partly because I was advised by the home inspector that I should have the chimney cleaned if I wanted to use it, and I’ve never bothered to do that. But also, I live in California, and IMO it rarely gets cold enough to use it. Obviously some of my neighbors disagree, since I see smoke coming from their chimneys during the winter.
As for things I actually purchased that didn’t just come with the house, there’s also a late 1990s vintage 13" analog CRT television in the dining room, connected to a set of rabbit ears and a converter box. I used to use it to watch the Today Show while I ate breakfast, and occasionally tune in to some live broadcast like The Simpsons while doing the dishes. But at some point I stopped watching morning television and switched to listening to NPR in the morning, and gradually switched to streaming television versus live broadcasts for everything else. If I want to watch something while eating or doing the dishes, now I bring my laptop into the dining room or kitchen and watch whatever streaming service on that. It’s probably been years since the last time I powered on that TV.
Dishwasher, hasn’t been used for 10 years, just handwash stuff.
Treadmill, in the shed.
Piano, upright, I learned to play on it as a kid but I don’t play anymore. Had some fun on it with the grandson when he was younger but I really need to sit down and play.
Pianos are strange things. They can be really beautiful additions to a home, but are hampered by their incredible weight and difficulty to transport. We had a piano for awhile, and it was nice to have, but as a matter of practicality it was eventually given to a wonderful couple we knew who were grateful for it. As I get older, and the prospect of yet more downsizing rears its head, I’m increasingly averse to possessing very large heavy objects.
My ex-wife’s treadmill. She just had to have it, so we got it, and she used it.
For about a year, when she moved out. She took some things with her, but left the treadmill with me. I’ve never used it; it just takes up space. I’d like to get rid of it, and I could rustle up a couple of friends who could help me move it out, but then, where would it go? What would we do with it? Do people still buy home treadmills?
This need is the basis of the dumpster business – those companies who deliver a big dumpster and plunk it on your driveway, and you fill it up with that kind of stuff, and then they haul it away and send you a bill based on the weight of the dumpster at the landfill.
I go through this each and every time I move. The last time, I had so much stuff that the full-size dumpster had to be carefully packed so everything would fit. No random throwing things in – it was packed like a suitcase, not a cubic inch of wasted space. I’m just surprised that the truck had enough power in its winch to haul that sucker on board!
They really are both strange and beautiful. I now own the piano I grew up playing as a child, and I still love to play it. It is old (best estimate on a serial number search is over 90 years old), and looks and sounds it, but it means a lot to me. So much so, that I moved it across-country, and then moved it again to another city. It’s not quite in tune, and likely never will be, but the action (as Ray Charles would say) is just fine.
My friends don’t get it. “Why would you want to play that old thing when you’ve also got an electronic keyboard that is always in tune, that you can set all kinds of patches up on, and works just as well as a modern manual piano?” Well, I’ve been playing it for close to sixty years, and there’s a lot of sentiment attached to such an old friend.
Straying a bit, so to avoid a hijack, I’ll stop here. My piano is the biggest thing in my house, and I certainly use it.
That’s a great story, and I fully empathize. I no longer have the piano we once owned (and I never played, sadly) but the closest thing I have to that sort of memory is a 1940s era console radio with a built-in 78 RPM record player.
It’s big – about the size of a 1950s era television set – but that radio ain’t going anywhere. I’m old enough to remember listening to Bob Hope and Jack Benny on that radio as a small child. That radio has scratches at the base of the console where my first puppy decided to scratch its front paws. It has pushbutton station selectors actually labeled with the call letters of local radio stations (most of which don’t exist any more, but a few of which still do). The panel above the pushbuttons still glows with an eerie glow like from an old sci-fi movie.
No, that old radio stays with me. It ain’t going anywhere!
Maybe that’s an idea for another thread: “What old stuff do you have, that while technologically (for lack of a better term) obsolete, ain’t going anywhere?” My piano, your radio … who knows what others have?
ETA: When we cleaned out my Dad’s house after he died, I wish I had saved his Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman albums of 78s. You could have them to play on your radio/78 record player console.
A barbell someone gave me a couple of years ago. I never got around to establishing the underlying exercise routine. I’m thinking of putting it up for sale on an online bazzar.
) tile. It is hanging on a wall in the garage.