Savers, Collectors...PACKRATS!

I have discovered an amazing solution to this problem... I quit buying worthless crap that I dont need... It is truly liberating to not be a slave to the retail stores... I buy food and occasionally clothes as needed... thats about it.. i already have everything else I need: a tv, laptop sofa and bed... my apartment needs nothing else...

I suppose this makes me a bad american as I am not endlessly buying cheap Chinese made crap and doing my patriotic duty to contribute to our exploding trade deficit... (aside from buying a prius... )

 

HA! My husband and I are both artists... and while I do keep my share of sentimentals & art projects, he has gone way overboard. He thinks that someday he will be able to use all of the little knickknacks he's been collecting since high school. A couple of times a year I do some closet cleaning and insist he help otherwise I can't be held responsible for I might accidentally throw away. I suppose it's about that time once again. :blink:

 

Same here. Now if only I could get rid of my husband's stuff and get him to change his purchasing ways. His 'stuff' is starting to migrate from the extra room (dubbed "his room for his stuff") and onto the hallway countertop.

 

I'm on the west coast and I have a two car garage for one car.

But I live in an older home and also have a full attic.

My solution? Periodic triage and eBay. People will buy all sorts of worthless stuff on eBay. I'd rather sell it cheap and mail it (at their expense) than throw it away.

 

I just threw out a microbiology lab book 25 years after taking the class; kept the hardcover hematology book. It might come in handy some day, you know? I can find a use for anything, so everything has value and is hard to throw away. I'm the queen of <strike>crap</strike> clutter and the princess of piles. People who think they have a house full of junk come to mine just to make themselves feel better. I feel very uncomfortable in spotless, sanitized houses. They're just so boring!

 

Unfortunately, the creative mentality looks at something and says "I can use that for......" and so it goes!

one trash/treasure I have an HP cp1700 that a friend gave me. it tries to print but doesn't. any clues?

 

I lived for 18 years in a house in rural North Dakota. One upstairs room (not an attic) quickly became my storage room. When it filled up, a downstairs room became a "temporary" place to put stuff. By the time I left, there was only the narrowest of paths through each of these rooms, and the rest of the house was full of bookshelves which had turned inward to make room for more bookshelves. All full to overflowing.

I wanted to reduce the clutter, but could not bring myself to part with any of it. I was so sure that I might want each individual item at some time in the future, and that I might want to re-read each book.

When I went to Mexico to learn Spanish I sold my house and had no place to store stuff, other than in my car, which I planned on parking in a neighbor's barn. I carefully selected one car-full of stuff to keep. (A Civic wagon, storage space similar to the Prius.) Some of my choices were poor ones. I contracted with the realtor, at my expense, to dispose of the rest. The result was that when I returned, 6 years later, I had only what was in the car, much of which I discarded as useless.

My garage today contains my two cars, the recycling, which I haul away a couple of times a year, and an air compressor for the tires, and only a few other very small odds and ends, such as the propane cylinder for the emergency stove, my hiking poles, and my hiking books which still need to be greased after the summer's hiking.

I'm doing pretty well this time around... knock on wood...

Before I was born, my parents had a garage, and friends would ask to be allowed to store stuff in it. Eventually it filled up. Then one day it was empty. Thieves had broken in and stolen absolutely everything. My mother felt awful: all her friends' things gone. But nobody ever returned to ask for their stuff back. Just like my storage rooms, people were unwilling to part with stuff which, in fact, they never would want to use again.

 

I am pack rat poison. Where I go, stuff just 'disappears'.

It happened just so a few months ago when my wife went to visit her parents for a few weeks. She came back to an empty garage. EMPTY. Well except for her old art which has charms on it, and my workbench loaded with tools and stuff. That's different.

 

In my perfect world I'd own a house with a dedicated library and floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves in every room (including the kitchen and bathrooms). Not living in such a world however has forced me to admit awhile back that it was time to cull my book collection. It's hard to do - and a process I'm still going through. I built up the collection over many years and I love having a personal library. I've learned to get a bit ruthless though - I've been giving away or selling books that I know I won't re-read, or that can be easily replaced or that I simply don't have any particular attachment to. I'm still buying and acquiring books - but I've tried to be good about following a "one-in-one-out" rule.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(moxiequz @ Sep 11 2007, 03:10 PM) [snapback]510852[/snapback]</div>

I have a similar dream house...
Have you heard of bookcrossing.com? From the site:
At BookCrossing, you can register any book you have on the site, and then set the book free to travel the world and find new readers.

Leave it on a park bench, at a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym -- anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel next. Track the book's journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person.

Join hundreds of thousands of active BookCrossers daily in our many forums to discuss your favorite authors, characters and books in every genre throughout history right up through current releases.

Help make the whole world a library and share the joy of literacy. Reading becomes an adventure when you BookCross!
***
I'm trying to get organized enough to free some books into the wild...

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Rae Vynn @ Sep 11 2007, 04:21 PM) [snapback]510887[/snapback]</div>

Thanks for the pointer to the site! Very cool idea. Looks like my corner of the Bay Area could use some books in the wild too...

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Rae Vynn @ Sep 11 2007, 04:21 PM) [snapback]510887[/snapback]</div>

Thanks for the pointer to the site! Very cool idea. Looks like my corner of the Bay Area could use some books in the wild too...

 

My annoyance is the speed at which my basement is filling up with cheap plastic crappy toys from China. And there's NOTHING I can do about it. My wife is getting better at not buying more useless toys for the 1 & 4 year olds. But the relatives! What can you do? You can't tell them no or throw out the crap they buy the kids. They help watch the kids for free! Every birthday and holiday, the piles of crap grows. And I get "Aaron will soon be playing with that!" so I can't throw that away! All that, and they play with our tupperware in the kitchen more than anything! Or coasters off the living room table. Or annoy the dog for fun.

Crap....It sucks! The entire basement is a giant rectangle of plastic toys around my poker table in the middle. We're talking 50 by 15 feet.
None of it will have any future value. I'll I can do is secretly throw away little things here and there as they are broken (or whatever other excuse I can come up with). Or when no one is looking. "Gee haven't seen it. sorry!"

 

My annoyance is the speed at which my basement is filling up with cheap plastic crappy toys from China. And there's NOTHING I can do about it. My wife is getting better at not buying more useless toys for the 1 & 4 year olds. But the relatives! What can you do? You can't tell them no or throw out the crap they buy the kids. They help watch the kids for free! Every birthday and holiday, the piles of crap grows. And I get "Aaron will soon be playing with that!" so I can't throw that away! All that, and they play with our tupperware in the kitchen more than anything! Or coasters off the living room table. Or annoy the dog for fun.

Crap....It sucks! The entire basement is a giant rectangle of plastic toys around my poker table in the middle. We're talking 50 by 15 feet.
None of it will have any future value. I'll I can do is secretly throw away little things here and there as they are broken (or whatever other excuse I can come up with). Or when no one is looking. "Gee haven't seen it. sorry!"