Hoarding - Springing Ahead

mcculloch29

Out today, all to my friend - a unused fitted Egyptian cotton double sheet, my friend was so grateful as she only has two.
95% of a 50ml bottle of perfume (Ralph Lauren 'Notorious') which is lovely, but not 'my' scent, which is CK One, a recent copy of Yours magazine and a book I knew she would enjoy.
My friend loves using good perfume but is on a restricted income and had run out of everything.
She found she was really upset when one of the girls where she works was wittering on about her bottle of Jimmy Choo. Said bottle would cost 2/3rds of the wages from that part-time job. Now she has a perfume that in price, competes well with Jimmy Choo.

catshark88

Well done everybody on great progress and some really interesting insights.

Your friend must have been really chuffed mcculloch, well done you!

I sorted out a load of kid clothes yesterday, which I always find really hard for some reason. Some got passed down to my youngest, a very few things went into the (v large) "sentimental box" and 2 big bin liners went to the charity bin. I have to get those bags dealt with straight away as I hate seeing them in the house. Odd, moi?? Anyway, tis done.

Today I'm going to have a final round of throwing out my own clothes. I want to move to a capsule wardrobe. I also keep changing size (up sadly), so I'm only going to keep the odd really loved item if it doesn't fit. If I don't love it, it can go and I'll buy new when I magically lose 3 stone.... ;-)

Have a great day everyone.

GreyQueen

:T Bravo, McCulloch, how lovely to give both necessary and luxurious things to your friend, you've lightened your load and brought joy to her, well done you.

Last night, as I'd cleaned the shelves in the plastics cupboard whilst it was temporarily empty, I was waiting for them to dry before putting them away. My kitchen wall units are only 11 inches deep and this unit is 18 inches wide. But I discovered that I had reduced the bit taken my plastics by 50%!

OK, it's not a pure gain, because there are plastics going in and out of use constantly, such as the ones presently in fridge and freezer and in the food cupboard, but there are clear open spaces inside a cupboard.

I felt the need to keep going back and peeping at it, just to be sure. I checked this morning when retieveing the sandwich box for my pack-ups and no rogue items have crept in overnight, either.

Last visit to Mum's and she decided to turf out 3 Tupperwares, coloured lidded bowls in various sizes and I was fossicking for them in her kitchen cupboards. Found the small and the medium but the large was nowhere and we could only conclude it must have been donated previously and she didn't remember. Or it ran away to sea, anything is possible in the realm of plastics.

Now, Mum's kitchen is small, even with the former coalshed converted into an annexe. The counters are heaped high and unusable and the cupboards are full. When I was plastics hunting I noticed that the shelf of one large cupboard was three-quarters full of about 25 stoneware cups and saucers, and that the upper shelf of a wall unit was full of matching skinny mugs.

As she has frequently spoken of frustration about lack of cupboard space, I tentatively mentioned these unused items could leave. The mugs have to stay because they're bone china. The fact that we have lots of mugs, inc some bone china for those who have preferences, and that these are far too skinny for the household's tastes for large volumes of tea and coffee is irrelevant. They are a good quality material and therefore are keepers.

And the stoneware cups and saucers get used if we ever have to have a lot of people around all at once, people who presumably are in greater numbers than the two complete unused (bone china!) tea sets which live in the china cabinet and the mugs (inc some very attractive bone china ones!) in regular use. And all this in a very small house with a very small family, most of whom are anything from 15-80 miles away.

Sooo, tea-parties in excess of 60 persons are covered, and things which need cupboarding are in a mess on the counters, a mess which is anything from 2-3 feet deep, is unsightly and greatly impairs the efficiency of the kitchen.

There's a Kenwood Chef in there, dammit, and it's inaccessibility is inhibiting the production of cakes...........:p

As a fall-out of the plastics cupboard project, a basket which was corralling some of the stuff can go, and have decided that the set of measuring spoons which seemed like such a good idea from another chazzer a year or so ago aren't used at all and can go, so the donation pile is building nicely.

Onwards, my beauties, onwards.

Picklepot

I get in a right pickle with the multiple quote things so excuse me not using it.

I love this thread ..you all understand when i don't understand it myself really. I have carrier bags (lots) that i could easily put a few items in a day(easy isn't it?). I drive (fairly regularly) past a CS with a car park and easy drop off. I have no excuse so why is it so difficult?

Nix143 I too have a box thing!! All these flattened boxes in the loft with dates of a year hence when the guarantee has run out and said item could not be returned anyway. Last month i had a vacuum direct from manufacturer. Cat had great fun in there and was a temporary excuse for the box to hang around. Now its flattened but why??? If i ever had to return said item the box would never reconstruct again . As for the ikea bag yes i have similar but have a sock thing in my bags. I will not chuck out single socks because i feel i will always be looking for the other so i wait til they are old and throw a pair but its futile because the mystery of my missing socks is probably to be found with that of greyqueens plastic lids :rotfl:

Greyqueen i so umderstand where you are coming from with your grandma's sideboard.

My dad died many years ago (it would have been his birthday today and he would have been saying ''exactly 6 weeks til christmas to the day!'') When he died one of the hardest thing was to clear his cupboards which were packed with new gifted items saving them for 'best'. This is my dad who was so conscious of' make do and mend' who asked my mum to 'turn' his collars and would be caught darning his socks. There were gifts of shirts and socks and shaving brushes and jumpers all still in their wrappers. Some shirts had been there so long they were the ones with pins in the collars before the plastic clips took over.

So i still have to get this job done and change my ways. One thing i am struggling with is how you blend being frugal with stopping yourself hanging onto things?? I am trying to be as frugal as possible as i want to change jobs possibly change career and retrain but the temptation to hang onto things for this reason makes letting go of stuff harder. Then we all get those moments when you say 'its a good job i hung onto that...' and that reinforces the need to keep things.This morning for example I had a bag of old specs/glasses which i was going to donate..sometime somewhere..didnt some charity have them?..saw it on some bit of paper?. Anyhow i went to a small time independent lens/glasses retailer. I took said old pair of (broken glasses) as an example of the style i wanted. He ooohed and aahed they are designer he said (were they?:eek:) and that he could fix the broken arm and put new prescription in for a quarter of the price of my usual optician. Good job i didn't throw them away.. gulp and so it goes on....

Nix143

Picklepot Ah the sock bag....... my son is 20........ there are socks in there from when he was about 6 judging by the size of them.....

GreyQueen

Picklepot wrote: »

So i still have to get this job done and change my ways. One thing i am struggling with is how you blend being frugal with stopping yourself hanging onto things?? I am trying to be as frugal as possible as i want to change jobs possibly change career and retrain but the temptation to hang onto things for this reason makes letting go of stuff harder. Then we all get those moments when you say 'its a good job i hung onto that...' and that reinforces the need to keep things.

That's one which I have struggled with all my life.

I have never in my life gone hungry, or shoeless, or been neglected, or unloved, but I feel that my life has been stalked by the spectre of a woman I never knew, my bio-gran (mum's mum), an appalling woman from whom Mum was eventually taken away into care.

It was rough growing up in childrens homes in the late forties-early fifties and even when in foster care, there was beggar-all to go around and everything was a struggle. Mum hangs onto things in a way which isn't healthy and becomes very stressed by lack. I have a diluted version of the same issues.

If I don't watch it, I have the urge to hang onto everything until it is an indisputed rag or scrap, and could easily end up looking like a bag lady if I didn't exercise some self-discipline. I also have to tell myself that holding onto stuff which I can't realistically use isn't a balwark against future hardships.

That clothes I can't get into, or which are so inappropriate to my age and lifestyle that to wear them would be to court public mockery, the shoes which are so downtrodden that they damage my posture, that books which were fine for one reading but aren't of sufficient merit to hold their interest for a second visit, that music I liked in the 1980s isn't my taste now........you get the picture.

Those things aren't going to save me if things get really bad, either in my personal life or in the whole of our lives, such as a re-run of the 1930s Depression.

The decluttering writer Don Aslett (funny and astute, any of his several books are both sidesplittingly funny and very profound) writes about this phenomenon. About how once we have disposed of something, we have it in the forefront of our minds, and are positively inventing a purpose for which we could have used it, so we can beat ourselves up over getting rid of it. But we probably wouldn't have used it anyway, we're just kidding ourselves.

He suggested that if you're holding onto excess Stuff in order to feel safe, that you understand that this won't protect you in a Depression. The only people with excess money to buy your Stuff will be the filthy rich, and they'll have too much of their own Stuff to look after anyway.

You can stockpile cash and food to see you through a crisis, but it's better to also invest in skills, good friends, keep close in with your family, to aim to be a productive member of society, these things will save you.

Worn-out and knackered Stuff won't. It'll just be a terrible burden. The tougher life is, the more sleek and flexible we need to be, and people staggering and crawling under a huge burden of Stuff are neither of those things.

And think of how holding onto worn out Stuff could be positively harmful, such as trying to milk that last bit of use out of your slippers, and having a bad fall, or letting the car tyres go a bit too far and having a crash.......

catshark88

GQ, on how I empathise with growing up with "good quality" items forever retained.... My Mother has so many beautiful, hardly used mugs, but we always use the hideous 70s ones that WILL NOT BREAK...

Picklepot, I've struggled with the frugal/ declutter one too. I was a member of various MFW challenges over a couple of years and really spent almost nothing which was not absolutely necessary. It is difficult now that we have a bit more cash, to spend a little more, let things go and accept that if I DO suddenly need something I haven't touched for 5 years and have decluttered, I could buy another one later.

I've found that CS and gifting to friends really helps. I'm not chucking out, I'm passing things on. I think it was GQ that described it so beautifully with books, letting others read them, not keeping the unused on shelves.

So, my expensive shoes that just didn't fit, we're not a hideous disaster, they were a mistake that I made, but which have brought joy to a friend and earned me some lovely wine as a thank you, enhancing a friendship and providing a nice bottle for an evening in with DH.

GreyQueen

Catshark, there's a cartoon in Don Aslett's book, Freedom from Clutter, which has a woman in a feather duster standing guard over a picture which is hanging from a wall, face-to-the-wall.

The caption is something like it's far too good to look at!

Ouch. I quote from memory because I haven't seen that book for some years. I know more or less exactly where it is; in the bookcase in the corner of Mum & Dad's living room. Where books are stacked double-depth on the shelves and where there are several large boxes of books, about 4 ft high, stacked in front of said bookcase.

Losing a decluttering book among clutter, how appropriate is that?

Here's a linkie to an essay about the just-in-case items:

http://www.theminimalists.com/in-case/

Lots of superb essays on that site, concise and beautifully crafted. I like it a lot.

jk0

Hmm. Isn't getting rid of 'just in case' items the opposite of 'preparedness for when SHTF':)

I have a whole bedroom full of shelves of just in case items. Mostly electrical bits & bobs I have collected since I was about 10.

Many times something in that collection has got me out of a jam when a tenant phones to say something or other isn't working.

I'd hate not to have my 'hoard'.

thriftwizard

jk0, there is a difference, and quite a big one. It's hoarding when you find you're giving up much-needed space to 2-year-old newspapers just in case someone wants to refer to a sports report in there. It's hoarding when you can't find the tool you know you have somewhere, because there are too many "just in case" things obscuring it. It's hoarding when you lose track of what you've got, but you can't bear to part with any of it, no matter how unlikely it is that you will ever need, say, a used Barbie hairdressing head again - previous owner now 19 and not in the slightest bit inclined to touch anyone else's head!

There are genuinely useful things that aren't in everyday use that are well worth keeping; I'm no minimalist. And curiously, I think that hoarding & preparedness spring from the same basis; an awareness that life isn't all sweetness & light, and that harder times may be just around the corner. And it's only sensible to have some supplies to fall back on, like your electrical supplies. But hoarding is a real and nasty issue; it's stopping me having any kind of normal life at the moment, whilst I try to fight the tide of clutter caused by my own & other people's instinct never to let go of anything that's interesting or might come in useful one day!