The best way to avoid throwing stuff out os to not buy it in the first place. Being really cheap helps me here. " Do I really -really need this?" Planned obsolesce sucks. I had the same cel phone for 6 years, would still be using it but you have to have LTE these days or your phone wont work.
I've always kept my garage very well organized...
...until I came home a few months ago to find that a row of tattered, dusty old Girl Scout troop leader stuff running from my rolling tool box to the end of the garage and about 1.5' wide X 2.0' tall had just been dumped down on the ground in front of my shelves.
Do you know how next level angry can actually be disappointment?
I just stared at the junk for several minutes and eventually thought to myself "wow, you just traded your husband for this crap...you really don't place much value on me".
There have been several "last straws" but this really was the "last, last straw".
I'm in the middle of a complete house rebuild. Both my wife and I have a lot of stuff, and we had a tiny house with basically zero storage space; it had two closets in the whole place. The result is we had stuff all over the place. We went into it thinking it would be a renovation, but six dumpster loads later, our whole house was hauled away! The place was too far gone to renovate, so we decided to build a new house that's more than double the size and actually has storage space.
That said, when we were moving out and putting things in storage, we could not believe how much useless garbage we had accumulated in 12 years of living there. Each one of those six dumpsters had crap from inside the house sprinkled in there, and I can't tell you how many dump runs we did just tossing out stuff. We took the opportunity to purge a lot of it, and it felt great cutting ties and starting over. It was liberating!
On the flipside, we did keep a lot. We both collect things (video games, records, die cast cars, musical instruments, Christmas things, and probably more) and that doesn't help matters. When we move back in, I have a feeling that we are both going to sell or toss even more. Also, after we move back in, the garage is next to get fixed. Right now, it's full of stuff from the house and the things that were already in there to begin with, and I'm looking forward to purging that before we rebuild it.
Sometimes, you need to take a step back and look at the big picture and even ask others before you can see that it's OK to toss stuff.
Well, we were able to get the carpets cleaned. Took three days (off and on) to get stuff sorted then moved outside but only three hours to get it back in the house. Now comes MORE "filtering" of boxes to figure out what can leave in donations or trash. I've still got a carload of stuff to take to Salvation Army.
I was going to take two old desktop computers to a local computer store to be recycled, but at the last minute I realized there might be sensitive stuff on that hard drive. Any opinions on how seriously I should consider that?
I think the kids are drawing a valuable lesson from this about not letting their respective piles become overwhelming...
In reply to stroker :
Just pull the drives out. Good, heavy duty magnets in them.
I don't know if this is the most correct way to deal with hard drives, but I've always driven a nail through them after pulling them, and then tossing them in the trash. The rest of the machine I would send to a place that recycles PC's as has been mentioned.
If you have the time I cannot encourage people enough to watch this show. The link is to Peacock but they are also being shown on the Bravo network.
The gentle art of Swedish death cleaning
Totally worth the time. Each episode highlights many of the challenges people go through when they are dealing with an overabundance of stuff. Not all of the episodes are about the main character's potential death but they all deal with the emotional attachments we make to things. The 3 advisors offer some solid advice on how to process not only the items, but also the loss that often accompanies them.
This is timely...
We've been in the current house for over 20 years, so it contains all the accumulated stuff from my kids' entire life to date. Plus my mom helpfully getting us stuff we don't need, or relocating crap from their house to ours-seems like a common thing.
I did toss a ton (felt like it at least carrying it upstairs) of old holiday decorations. I figure if she hasnt seen it in 10+ years, we don't need it.
Im kind of hesitating on tossing the old apartment-grade furniture, as both kids will (hopefully) be successfully adulting soon. Then there's car parts, tools, etc.
We'll have to check out the Peacock show
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