A bit of background:
My father worked for International Paper mid-70s through the mid-90s - back when corporate America would still pay to relocate mid-level employees around. He often describes a company event after the last move to Texas where a woman did a double-take after seeing his name tag, introduced herself, then proceeded to mention how she managed relocations and our family held the company weight moved record
three times in a row.
We had a lot of miscellaneous stuff when I was a kid. A
1949 Chevy Carry-All, a cast-iron wood-fired kitchen stove that sat in the garage (or rather "the shop" as it was known), and dad's extensive collection of tools and woodworking equipment (including a number of freestanding machines), and a neverending array of miscellnaeous parts/fasteners/oddities whose origins were not always clear.
But the icing on the cake had to be the contents of what was often referred to as
the aircraft carrier. This was a heavy frame that was about 4' tall, 8' wide, and ran nearly the length of the garage. The interior housed the bulk of dad's considerable wood collection. On the sides were a constantly-changing variety of shelves. On top was more wood, a variety of shelves and drawers, and most of the rest of dad's wood collection.
Oh, and the wood collection itself. Dad got his start working at in a laboratory testing various fabrication techniques for cabinets, plywood, and the like - the samples were tossed once testing was complete and were still plenty useful. He then worked at a facility with an abandoned cabinet factory in the early 1980s where they had tons of fine-grained old-growth pine and cedar that had been written off by the accountants, thus was free for the taking. From there it just snowballed and he started grabbing anything interesting or potentially useful. I suspect that dad had several tons of wood at the high point.
It's probably not helping things now that dad is working at a plywood mill and can buy sheets of plywood from production overrruns at true factory cost and has a true standalone shop to house it all.
So it goes without saying that I have some hoarding tendencies, albeit not to the degree that I'd be remotely interesting to the producers of that TV show. I either attach a sort of sentimentalism to an object or envision some potential use for it. Either way there's a reluctance to dispose of many things - although the latter is stronger.
At a previous job they had this glorious scrap bin full of all sorts of interesting things with potential future value - discarded obsolete/out-of-spec parts, electronic components, trim stock, and other goodies that I plundered. I've also relieved construction sites of useful materials from scrap piles (benefit of owning a truck).
After the folks moved out of the Dallas area, I "inherited" a lot of this junk via a storage unit they left behind and I assumed responsibility for. I've since moved twice and the necessity of paring down the junk collection has helped this process. I'm currently engaged in some de-cluttering throughout the house now that I have some time to spare and deciding that there's never feasibly going to be a use for a lot of this stuff so I need to dispose of it, donate it, or sell it. Some stuff is set aside for the sake of sentimentalism or feasible future use, but most is being donated or disposed of.
It's also difficult to escape the siren call of consumerism in our image-driven society with flashy new goods getting cheaper year after year. I've largely accepted that
more stuff won't make me happier without serving a specific purpose. ie, I don't buy a new flashlight just because - I need an application for it first. I've recently gotten into cycling and have resisted the urge to upgrade components until I identify some deficiency with the current setups. This thinking not only saves money and reduces clutter, but forces one to focus on activities other than acquisition.
I'm also familiar with the "tiny house" movement and find it fascinating, but I'm a bit too entrenched in my current residence and have a few too many interests to pare things down that much. Perhaps in another 10 -20 years.
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