You have previously extolled your lean and minimalist lifestyle, an area in which we’re complete opposites. You’d be horrified at the sight of my garage, and trust me, the basement is 10x worse!
I posted a pic here of getting rid of just a few things prior to my last move:
And those are just the things I could carry out and put in the dumpster myself. There were larger items that I just told the movers to leave on the curb, like a large console Sony Trinitron TV and a portable dishwasher!
Answer #1: Sometimes you just need to show that you really give a shit, and how are you going to do that if you run out of shits to give?
Answer #2 (Firesign): But they’re really great shits, Mrs. Presky!
I have a kabillion jam jars. This is because I home-can jam, and every time a new type of fruit crop ripens, I buy some more jars so I can make new apricot, raspberry, peach, or blackberry jam. But there are still full jars on the shelf from last year, so as they gradually get used up, the empties are added to the stash. If only the jam wasn’t so good! Then I’d stop making it and the jars would be trashed and it wouldn’t be a problem.
I think that if it’s things that you actually use or may use, it’s very explicable. It’s the keeping of tons of items that you will never reasonably use that’s crazy to me.
I have a small number of plastic to–go food containers that I use from time to time but I throw most of them away unless I give one to someone for leftovers at my house and then I just keep the next one that I get. Any other thing that someone could use like if I upgrade a tool or it’s a thing I have that I end up never using, I give it away. Clutter makes me insane.
This.
e.g. Keeping some one-time use plastic grocery bags around for temporary tote bags or for bundling up trash is fine. But keeping 2 dozen when 1 dozen is a year’s supply for your household is just silly. And keeping every one you get every week “just in case” is outright wacky.
It’s the inability to distinguish between “enough”, “too many”, and “stupid too many” that’s disturbing. To me. Some folks’ MMV.
I used to have a big stash of those because I would use them for dog poop bags but once the doggie died, most of them were tossed.
I hate waste as much as I hate clutter. I have been re-using those paper grocery store bags for years. I had one from Trader Joe’s that I had forever. I went in once when they had just made a new design that was “retro” using one of their previous designs that dated to well before any of the employees were working there. They were teasing me because the ones that I had were so old that the exactly matched the retro bag.
That sounds more like a deliberate collection of kitchen mixers than something you inexplicably own.
For me, it’s the plastic tubs that two pounds of yogurt come in. Those tend to accumulate so once I have enough, any surplus goes in the recycling bin.
Coke, Pepsi, 7up ACL (applied color label) pop bottles from the 1950s-1980s.
I collect “off” brand”/local bottler ACL pop bottles. Sometime I will need to buy a group of bottles just to get the one I want which results in getting more of the common brands that I already have.
Probably have close to 100 of these “common” brand pop bottles sitting in crates in my closet.
My sister told me about a story in The Onion about a 5-family garage sale, where they all just bought each others’ stuff.
I, too have more plastic containers than I could possibly use, because I do reuse them for leftovers and as freezer containers.
True, but I think this is not a good example, at least between ‘enough’ and ‘too many.’ Because they are so thin, telling the difference between one and two dozen bags crammed into whatever corner you’ve crammed them into, well, you’d have to pull them out and count them, and why bother?
Now if you’ll only ever need a dozen and they’re overflowing that corner, then that’s too many, but that might require four or five dozen for that to happen.
When I was younger, I went through a couple of cycles of starting nearly from scratch, and I hit a lot of yard sales and stuff back then. But I haven’t gone out of my way to go to one in at least 15 years, though occasionally while doing errands, if I’m driving right by one that looks interesting, I’ll pull over and look if I’ve got the time. But even then it’s rare that I’ll pick something up.
OTOH, our community has a community yard sale each spring: there’s a sign out in front of the neighborhood advertising it, and everyone has their own yard sale at their yard without having to do their own advertising. I just put stuff out by the curb with a sign saying, “FREE STUFF,” and whatever doesn’t get grabbed, goes to the thrift store or the dumpster. Ain’t worth my time to sit out there and try to pick up a few bucks for it.
OK, someone has got to say it: Euros.
Inexplicable, yes, but quite pleasing.
Vintage? You mean like, say, up to 30 years old?
They are practical for growing plants from seed. Fill them up with soil and after they germinate and grow a bit you can plant them with the cardboard tube in the soil and the roots will not be damaged. Then the cardboard rots and disappears without hurting the plant.
Or granny was bonkers or re-living her anal phase, also possible.
In our home the wife and me share those roles. I hate waste, so I avoid throwing things away. She hates clutter, so she tries to get rid of stuff. An inexhaustible source of debate.
She is more patient obstinate than me, so she usually wins in the end. It is an uphill struggle for me: I have to resist every attempt, she only needs to succeed once and the stuff is gone. And of course she keeps on trying until she succeeds! I am miffed for a while, then I forget about it.
Which probably proves her point. But still!
You need to separate the pairs if you don’t want them to breed. It’s sad, because scissors mate for life.
We have an entire kitchen cabinet full of bags. My wife has an irrational fear of losing everything and becoming a bag lady on the street. I can say one thing, she has the bag part down.
I have about a half-dozen boxes of staples, totaling thousands. I hardly ever use them. In fact, I only recently finished a box of 500 that I bought at Hill’s, a department store chain that went belly-up about 30 years ago. (I kept the box as a souvenir.) I acquired many of these while cleaning out my parents’ house, and that was around 2005. They had boxes and boxes of staples. I don’t know why. I took them, and now they’re all mine. They will long outlast me, as will the three staplers I somehow acquired.