Ever feel like throwing everything in the bin?

Marie Kondo made a career out of this.

If you have several people in the house and each one keeps things that may be useful to them, then you end up with a whole load of crap of which you really don't need

I did but I have reasons to declutter/throw stuff out due to spms, everything I own could fit in the back of my brothers caddy van with plenty space left over (except essential furniture), one pair of trainers, 3 pairs of joggers/3 t-shirts etc..etc.

I didn’t want my mum/bro to deal with my stuff when I decide I’ve had enough

Yes. Especially if you buy quality stuff that lasts but you get bored with it so replace it but because there is nothing wrong with the original you don’t throw it away or sell it second hand/ donate to charity

I horde stuff because it might be useful.

Some times it has been, which has made it harder to bin stuff

My wife is worse for the above than me. Our house is slowly filling. I want to bin stuff, but then won't because it might be useful.

No solution here

I hang on to stuff that I really should get rid of, for various reasons.
It often seems like a real waste to throw something out, and there is the off-chance that it might come in useful some day.

Sometimes I decide to get rid of stuff  via ebay or some other sales route, but the reality is that I never find the time to put it up for sale, or I put it up for sale & it doesn't go. So, it just stays where it was.

I do sometimes wish that someone could come in and actually make the hard decisions for me. I find myself making a determined effort to get rid of junk and then an hour later I've picked up a load of stuff, wrestled with the prospect of getting rid of it and the put virtually all of it back, for another day.

we are a clutter free household.

do a bit of a sweep every 6 months. stuff no wanted/used goes to the charity shop.

i dont even have a bike spares box nowadays.

My ex used to and still does just buy random shite to fill a gap somewhere. The only stuff i do keep hold of are offcuts of wood which I do find uses for.

but there’s plenty of stuff that’s been put on the side/in a cupboard because I don’t want to throw it away or it might be useful one day

A couple of plastic containers with snap lids is useful for left-overs, washing out and stacking in a cupboard every take out tray 'just in case' is hoarding. Personally I have a one in one out policy for pretty much everything, that and a a house with limited amounts of storage space. You do sometimes need to be ruthless though.

Swedish Death Cleaning

i dont even have a bike spares box nowadays.

The internet is my spares box...

I want to bin stuff, but then won’t because it might be useful.

My Mum's house is like this. Full of stuff that is, on the face of it, useful (or with the potential to be useful) but which basically just sits there. She'll sometimes have very half-hearted efforts to clean things up or she'll get absolutely fixated on one issue (usually the one thing that is actually not in the way!) before it all becomes too much effort for her (she's very frail) and she leaves it for another day which means stuff just never gets done. Or, worse still, it gets started but never finished so there's a pile of "stuff that needs to be thrown out" but it's mixed up with normal stuff cos she never got around to the "throwing it out" part.

Problem is that some of the stuff is trinkets handed down so any attempt to throw out a load of old glassware for example is met with "oh but they belonged to my grandma". Apparently the answer that "yes, they might have done but they've not been used since 1995" is still not a reason to bang them all in the glass recycling.

All the time, at some point I decided to collect retro computers. I now have a house full of them. I don't even like them anymore 🙁

7 years ago I put my entire life in the bin and started again. Best thing I ever did.

But here we are, 7 years later. I have a house full of crap and incredibly itchy feet.

When we moved two years ago we took the opportunity to get rid of a bunch of stuff. Since then my approach has been to pre-emptively solve the problem by not bringing more things into the house wherever possible. Replacing worn out objects/consumables is acceptable, but anything new needs serious consideration over days or possibly weeks before purchase.

The flaw in my plan is my MiL and her obvious joy in buying a seemingly infinite amount of stuffed toys for my daughters...

Not in a melodramatic life-changing sense

I mean - you could be quite melodramatic about it if you like

Twenty years and an epoch ago, Michael Landy destroyed his worldly goods, all 7,227 of them, in the just-closed flagship branch of C&A on Oxford Street in London. It was a wildly theatrical event. The mise en scène involved a snaking conveyor belt bearing tubs full of carefully catalogued objects, with a team of blue-boilersuit-clad “operatives” painstakingly disassembling each item, and the artist himself standing atop a high platform flinging items into great bins according to their material, prior to their long funereal journey to recycling or landfill.

Swedish Death Cleaning

Good song, good band 😉

I horde stuff because it might be useful.

Some times it has been, which has made it harder to bin stuff

That's me that is! In the case of one old odd bit of wood it took about 30 years for me to find the perfect use for it and of course that justifies me keeping everything now!

All the time, at some point I decided to collect retro computers. I now have a house full of them. I don’t even like them anymore 🙁

If you want to shift them, I know a couple of people who might like first refusals.

I don't keep anything I don't use - my friends envy my minimalism.

My wife is a congenital hoarder who likes to cover every available surface with trinkets. Every cupboard in the house is full to the point where anything therein is pretty much inaccessible. Hoovering and dusting any given room takes twice as long as it should, due to the need to clear the floorspace and surfaces of accumulated shite. As of Saturday there were 10 hydroflask-style water bottles in this, a household of 3 people. Want to guess what she bought on Sunday?

Mind that scene in The Bourne Identity where he comes home to that huge, empty, anonymous Paris apartment? THERE. I WANT TO LIVE THERE. Or maybe an empty aircraft hanger.

In short, yes, all the time.

Yes the device that I'm using to type this reply

My wife is a congenital hoarder who likes to cover every available surface with trinkets.

Be careful what you wish for.  I have the opposite problem.  My partner is a serial putter-away-of-things which is great in theory but in practice is borderline sociopathic.  Like, I'll want a drink so I'll get a glass out of the cupboard, go take a bottle of Coke out of the fridge, come back to the counter and the glass has already disappeared into the washing up.

It's fantastic that we have a tidy house because I'm terrible for leaving stuff to deal with later where "later" is a very broad variable, so I love her dearly for that, but you cannot let go of anything anywhere near a flat surface or it will immediately vanish (with a side order of denial) only to turn up weeks later inside the food mixer or something.

"Why are my socks in the oven?"

"Well, I haven't put them there."

I'm anal about things having homes, I arrange my spice rack in alphabetical order for god's sake.  Who's the most likely culprit here?  Spoiler, it's unlikely to be the one of us who gets a twitch on if the dill is behind the basil.

I've occasionally wondered what it would be like to have a devastating house fire. One where everything was burnt to a crisp (not people, obviously). I have far too much stuff and only occasionally manage to bin/sell/give away some of it.

We too have stuff everywhere. Hubby won't part with his books, I won't part with a few ornaments of sentimental value. But, next year when I've more time, there's going to be a massive clear out. Items will be thrifted, taken to charity shop and the rest to the tip.

We even have old videos sitting on window ledges, on the floor, on shelves around the house, it drives me bonkers.

The only thing I do hoard is bone china, but these bits and pieces are slowly going to my sil.

But we do keep our clothes as we still wear things from decades ago.

Well at least it's not just me...!

To be honest the total sum of it all could probably fit in a single bathtub sized box and just tucked out of sight, but whenever I think that I also just wonder whether I might as well bin it rather than put it away never to be seen & used anyway!

I do tend to "buy right, buy once" which is generally a good thing, but it does mean that I then look at some of these things and think it would be even more wasteful than it would be to bin something cheap and crap as someone could probably make more use of it.

All the damn time.

Moons many ago, I used to move house a lot (rooms in shared houses etc etc) and piling everything into a car boot load or two to change house was all it took. Happy days.

The household would need 3 bloody artics and a luton now.

Amen. Both me and the wife seem to collect shite/clutter and it drives me mad TBH, Feel like hiring a big old skip and filling it.

Mother in law died last year and was living in rural France so we had little ability to bring anything but the very basic stuff back to UK... maybe obvious to some but made me realise that everything* will one day end up in landfill, its just a matter of time; an item may have some relative sentimental value that gives it a reprieve for a generation but by the time it's passed to my kids, itll be going to landfill.

*caveat being a piece of art/furniture/etc with actual value

Yes. My ex has just moved out and I am recovering stuff from storage to try and fill out what is essentially a shell of a house. I brought back a van-load and a lot of it is garbage. I'll recycle or skip it. I do still need some things to make it a livable place, but I'll try and avoid much of the random crap I/we gathered.

If you want to shift them, I know a couple of people who might like first refusals.

If they are near central belt scotland and searching for stuff I may be able to help 😀 (I hate dealing with postal system/couriers).

Me and Mrs F are at opposite ends of the spectrum with this. She will keep everything and I’m attached to nothing and will gladly get rid of anything that hasn’t been used for a bit. A Kindle, decent speakers and a comfortable chair are all I need beyond the essentials. It’s got to the point where being at home stresses me out. Just shit everywhere!

'Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or, believe to be beautiful' - William Morris.

I have a load of stuff that I intend to sell. I just seem to busy to get around to selling it. There's an Arai Quantum F helmet in the cupboard in the spare room. Only used a hand full of times. Reckon I sold my motorbike over 13 years ago.

As my dad used to say to my gran

" It's going in a skip when you are dead Mum"

Which while true, I thought was a bit harsh

With the exception of books I'm pretty good at getting rid of stuff. My wife is the opposite, she even hoards empty cardboard boxes for everything she's ever bought, just in case it needs to be sent back....

i dont even have a bike spares box nowadays.

Sadist

All these retro MTB's on facebook marketplace for £20 are playing havoc with my clutter issues...

We're not too bad otherwise, loft hatch is screwed shut to prevent temptation

Apart from 60 houseplants and an addiction to maps, of which I have around 300, I'm not too bad. But it is a very small house so not really any opportunity to acquire too much junk and I'm quite adept at ebaying or giving away surplus stuff.

I'm not too bad.  My wife is a huge hoarder. I find it very very upsetting and stressful ?

I've recently begun a binning mission. I'm slowly recovering space from junk that was in the house when I moved in and stuff that no longer has any use. Empty boxes for products I no longer own. Old bike parts that are obsolete and worn out. Tools that I will probably never use again are being condensed and stored in tool boxes. Paint tins to the tip. I need to go through my clothes, I don't buy many but then I don't wear half of the shirts that I seem to own.

It'll probably take me a good while to sift through stuff then sift through it again. I guess I'm looking for clarity with the junk I keep?

I guess I’m looking for clarity with the junk I keep?

I do that too. Sort through, find something ice not used in ages and think "oh I'll keep it just in case..."

And it's only a year later that I finally go "well I've still not used it so it's off to recycling..."

Classic one was an ISIS BB tool. I've not had an ISIS BB for years! But there it was, in my toolbox. There's a mental block to getting rid of stuff like that. It was expensive, it's still in good condition, it shouldn't be going straight in the bin but it's too much effort to take just that item to recycling. So it stays there for ever...

After all, it's not "in the way" as such, it's neatly in a toolbox. Along with half a dozen other tools that haven't been used in 10 years... 😉

Classic one was an ISIS BB tool. I’ve not had an ISIS BB for years! But there it was, in my toolbox. There’s a mental block to getting rid of stuff like that. It was expensive, it’s still in good condition, it shouldn’t be going straight in the bin but it’s too much effort to take just that item to recycling. So it stays there for ever…

Find a local bike charity and put anything like that to one side to take in, I've just had a big clear out of bike stuff I'd been keeping, fames, bikes, etc and in my head I knew I'd never ride or build them back up so someone might as well get some use/value out of them.

I have watched my parents house gradually sucumb to clutter over the years and recognise the same tendencies in myself. I'm a bit of a sucker for things but they and be fairly ruthless with them. If it's not something I regularly think about (unless it's specifically seasonal) then it goes. When we moved back from Oz it was really lovely as we had slimmed out lives right down to what we would pay to ship. It's bloated since though 🙁

I tend to have a big box in the garage and stuff that I should get rid of goes in it.  Very occasionally something comes back out but normal stuff just lingers in there until I get an 80% eBay fee deal or I decide to take it to the tip.

I've got a pile of clothes I've washed for the charity shop but they've not made it out the house since COVID yet, probably as if I put them in said box they'd get damp and manky!

BunnyhopFull Member
‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or, believe to be beautiful’ – William Morris.

Lots of useful stuff that might not get used, and beautiful stuff that's just in the way.

I heard a more pragmatic approach the other day where the question is "do I want the job of managing this?"

Stuff kept/hoarded doesn't just sit there, it takes up space, needs to be shifted when you're spring cleaning/sorting, looking for something, certainly takes up space in your head every time you think you have to much stuff. Gets you frustrated because of how much stuff you have to move it shift through to find the thing you need.

Is it worth all that management of all that stuff to save a visit to Wickes and £5 on the bit of wood you need?

My mum died 18 months ago and her big 4 bed house was full of stuff.

...the abridged version is - don't leave a house full of crap for your kids to sort out - it is really emotionally draining for them...

The long version

It was a nightmare to clear it all - partly because it was really sad understanding why she'd kept all the stuff but just binning most of it.

Basically dozens of trips to the tip and charity shops with van loads of stuff - fortunately it was in North Derbyshire where they have a very lenient vans-at-the-recycling-centre policy.

A van full of stuff went to auction and made about £800 and that was mainly some silver and a coin collection.  The collection of pottery and porcelain was basically worth bugger all - and that was the best of it.

I've still got decades of photos to sort through so I can keep the good ones, plus other personal stuff still in boxes at my house I couldn't bring myself to bin that needs sorting

@Bunnyhop mentioned books, I do keep my books as I do sometimes give them another read if I run out of new ones or the fancy takes me.

So books and off cuts of wood ....

My mum died 18 months ago and her big 4 bed house was full of stuff.

…the abridged version is – don’t leave a house full of crap for your kids to sort out – it is really emotionally draining for them…

This is what I'm dreading - my Mum isn't dead yet and could potentially go on a fair while longer even though she's very frail.

But the house will be a nightmare.

What's worse is she had to go through the same thing with her parents. Every piece of paper in the house needed checking. It could be a sheet of music, an offcut of newspaper or it could be a critical bank or pension statement. All mixed up with no order, rhyme or reason to any of it - piled on tables, chucked in a corner of the garage or shed to "sort out later", it was just so draining to try and get the end of life affairs in order.

I sometimes think about the “what if all this stuff just disappeared in a house fire?” scenario too. Just so much accumulated over nearly 10 years (and two kids) in the same house.

Thankfully both my parents went through sorting out loads of stuff from their own parents when they died. They moved recently but via a year in a little flat while their smaller new house was sorted out. Sold, gave away or binned almost everything bar a few essentials and a small storage unit for some pictures, photos, etc. New house is clutter-free, everything has a place to go, and they’re absolutely loving it.

Just been through very similar with the FILs house. Mountains of random paperwork everywhere, mostly junk but certain things popping up every now and then to keep you on your toes. However from an extremely full house it yelled a couple of bits of furniture and a box of photos. The rest was cleared.

Probably a long way off but I've started the process myself, to help those I leave behind. I no longer need my University notes that my folks handed over last year, some 30+ years after I graduated!

Went through the process of evaluating everything we owned three years ago.

We made the decision to jack in our normal life and hit the road.

Sold everything we didn't want. Ended up selling lots of furniture that I had made. Sold five bikes. Anything that surplus to our needs was sold out given away.

Incredibly liberating process.

GF has a box of "things" at her folks place and a table she loved is at her friend's place.

A mate of mine is looking after my Bullit cargo bike.

Otherwise, everything we own is in our van.

It's surprising how little you need and scary how much shite you accumulate over the years.

Slight digression but Tim Kasser's research in this area is always worth a re-visit:

We’ll all feel an urge to liberate ourselves as the planet Neptune transits out of Pisces and into Aries.

Eldest daughter (23)  is currently tidying her room after we have been nagging her to do for ages. It’s an absolute sh!t tip, so much clutter, the floor is covered and every surface has crap on it.  She’s talking about moving in with her boyfriend next year. We’ve told her, she’s taking it all. Anything left when she leaves is going in the skip so we can reclaim her room.   Certainly aren’t having a shrine to her with dead plants and empty makeup bottles.

It

Drives
Me

Bonkers.

Well I've taken step 1 to having less stuff by...buying more stuff to keep it in.

I've bought a couple of plastic crates and anything low/no value I don't want to throw away but 'might need' is going in those in the garage. If I haven't needed it by the end of the year it's going into a skip!

After writing this on page 1...

I’ve occasionally wondered what it would be like to have a devastating house fire. One where everything was burnt to a crisp (not people, obviously). 

Today a house a few hundred metres away was struck by lightning and was destroyed!

Well I’ve taken step 1 to having less stuff by…buying more stuff to keep it in.

My Mum does that. It helps for a short time until it is overflowing and the rest of the tat piles up around it. I'm going down there in a couple of weeks, there's going to be a fairly ruthless clear-out!

To be fair she keeps talking about moving house as she has finally realised that the place is far too big for her to manage and she's also booked a professional carpet cleaner so the carpets need to be visible rather than covered in tat so I'm hopeful that a clear-out might be welcomed!