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DoggPickle posted:That's not the kind of stuff that you just toss out like "I need to get rid of some crap" Unfortunately if you've accumulated 15 years worth of this kind of thing, even sorting that much stuff into those categories is a nightmarish challenge. Decluttering guides apparently suggest the criterion "does it give me joy", which is also okay for something like pictures that you don't technically use, but I'd file them under a thing I use too, really. It sounds like you have plenty of time if you're waiting on a dog, so I'd suggest dividing your house into manageable-sized zones (to make it not overwhelming) and filtering one zone of stuff per day, through this filter sequence: 1. Do I use this? If so, keep it. 2. Do I plan to use this in future? *Really*? Is that plan really going to happen, too? Be honest with yourself. Set a low cap on items to keep in this category because it's basically bullshit, if you don't use it now you're probably never going to. Note that if you have a lot of books, at least 90% of them will not be in a keep pile so far. The only surviving books should be reference books, technical books and maybe a small number of comfort books that you like to re-read. You may also want to keep a bookshelf of books for decoration, and that's okay, but don't pretend to yourself that that's not what it is. 3. Is it worth an amount of money in excess of the annoyance of selling it? Ask ebay if you're not sure. For large items, sell on craigslist, otherwise probably ebay (though craigslist can work for smaller things too, without the outrageous fee schedule) 4. Will someone else want it? Give it away, yard-sale it for a token amount, goodwill it. 5. Dumpster. If you have three moving trucks of stuff as a single person, either you're hoarding or you have a hobby of playing one of every large musical instrument there is. Edit: for things like yellowing newspapers, consider framing (under glass) whatever you choose to keep. That should help you realize that it's not worth keeping, or, for the few things that are worth keeping, framing it will protect it from the elements! roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 08:41
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:39 |
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DoggPickle posted:P.S. it's actually my birthday today, so try not to be too mean  Most of your "what about" items are probably not bad to keep. Tools are certainly one of the annoying things that one typically doesn't actually use all that often, but the space they take up is of less value than the cost of re-buying the tools - provided you can keep them organized enough that you can find the tool you want when you need it. Beyond a certain point it makes sense to just say "gently caress it", sell the rarely-used tools and buy new ones if you need them again. Aside: It's endlessly annoying to me that people are too much jerks for a communal tool shed to be a thing (especially eg. it's loving stupid that a row of 20 houses has 20 lawnmowers, all sitting idle and having their gas grow stale more than 95% of the time, 20+ saws doing nothing but slowly growing rust 99% of the time, etc etc.) Good quality solid wood furniture is probably reasonable to keep as long as you plan on eventually moving to a house that has enough rooms to use all the furniture. If you have literally *any* chipboard furniture (Ikea) just destroy it / craigslist it and get a new one (maybe from craigslist!) at your destination, that poo poo rarely survives a long-distance move and frankly isn't worth it. This can also be a viable strategy for good quality wood furniture actually - it's like teleporting your furniture to your future town. It literally costs nothing but time to sell something on Craigslist and later, at a more convenient location and time, buy a similar thing on Craigslist, assuming you both set and accept a reasonable price. It's a price saving vs. a storage unit, and as a bonus avoids the problem of putting stuff in storage then coming back to it 3 years and thousands of dollars later to realize you don't actually like any of the stuff you stored after all and now you're out storage fees and still have to deal with disposing of it all. Used things pricing is a great data point for decisions about large items especially - if you look at how much it's going to cost in trucks, storage fees, effort, good will of friends, etc. to store your used furniture, and compare that against what it would cost to buy equally used furniture (and if you're being honest you should also subtract from this cost what you can get from selling your used one!) you'll very likely find that most things are not worth keeping. Irreplaceable handcrafted things notwithstanding. (And this doesn't apply if you're moving directly into another home where you will immediately continue to use the furniture that moves with you.)
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Mar 10, 2017 05:13
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DoggPickle posted:So I am wavering between selling it or just renting it out. I've kept properties and rented them out, and it's a frustrating pain in the rear end. You can either do it all yourself, which means chasing people for the rent and hiring people to do repairs that are only necessary because the tenant is a clumsy idiot, or you can hire a management company, which means they take a ridiculous portion of the rent and you still have to chase people for the rent and hire people to do repairs yourself because the management company is loving useless for anything but getting a shittily vetted person in there, and acting as an incompetent middleman so the tenant hates you because they ask to get something fixed and you don't even hear about it for two months (and not because the management company is dealing with it, obviously.) Not that I'm bitter.
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Mar 20, 2017 14:09
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DoggPickle posted:I know it seems like I was just talking in circles about the same poo poo over and over... but moving gets about 500% more complicated when you've lived somewhere for a long time. When you're going from 20-something to almost 40 years old, you just gain stuff over time, like you start swapping out your cardboard furniture for real furniture one piece at a time, one year at a time., and you gain things like a kitchen drawer that's full of aspirin, Neosporin, dog nail-clippers. band-aids and 6 kinds of extra batteries. I think that probably the people calling me a hoarder have never owned their own house and haven't had "that year where the weeds go crazy" and that "time that the toilet overflowed and flooded the basement" and that time that "you and your spouse went on a wall-painting binge" etc. I don't have TOO much stuff. I just have a lot of stuff that builds up over time, and I haven't moved since I could do it in a couple of pickup trucks. quote:I will eat a bagel on a full-sized plate and try not to get stupid irritated that it's taking up so much space in the dishwasher.
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Apr 4, 2017 15:24
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DoggPickle posted:I'm outside DC but sometimes I could get my dad to climb up on the roof and change the antenna to get Baltimore stations so that I could watch MacGuyver during a football blackout. I'd miss the first 20 minutes, but that's just how it worked back in the day.
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Apr 15, 2017 02:12
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:39 |
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Waltzing Along posted:Then after a month, throw it all away. You didn't actually need or want it. That's why you rented a big garbage room to hide it in.
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Apr 29, 2017 03:06
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