Cleaning Out the Garage

[ChainGangGuy]

My garage is full of junk and clutter. I cannot wait until springtime for an apt Spring Cleaning, I cannot delay this until some trite date such as the first of the new year. It's time to clean things out, to cleanse the garage, by removing all those extra boxes. By my calculations, there are a total of 198 boxes -- a shameful number. This past year I let my guard down and the garage eventually became a dumping ground. It is no fault but my own. Returning the garage to a state of order will be a slow herculean task, and, while an aggravating, boring job, it'll feel so wonderful to finally step back into a clean, tidy garage, one I can be proud of.

[Donald Ebinsen]

1. What do you actually need, what do you have that if you lose it you either must replace it immediately or if you don't have it creates a strong probability of severe problems or disaster.

2. What do you have that is important to you or is not really critical to have but would be inconveniencing to not have AND is expensive to replace.

These are the no-brainers to keep.

Now, go through the stuff that you have a reasonable chance to need to use AND keeping them around is less expensive than the cost of buying them again over a one-year or 6-month period.

This should probably be no more rhan 10% of what you have. The next thing is then anything you aren't likely to use within a year and can afford to simply buy it again. That you can just dump.

For the future: When you box something, write the date on it and seal the box. If you are searching the garage in the future for something and find a still-sealed box a year old (but unrelated to what you were looking for), strongly consider tossing it. If it's 18 months old and still sealed, toss it without considering its contents.

The idea being if it's sat in a sealed box for a year or more and you haven't used it, it's clutter and you don't need it.

Point #1 allows you to make exceptions for seasonal or emergency equipment. If you box up equipment for shoveling snow in spring and the following winter there isn't enough to need to unpack it, it's reasonable for that to sit for two or even three years. But using the "one year strong recommend" and "18-month mandatory" discard rule you can get rid of a lot of things which would otherwise pile up as unnecessary clutter.

Most clutter is not important or necessary stuff; a lot of it is things that if we need it again we could just run down to the store and buy it again. And there can be benefits if you find a way not to have to keep things where a substitute is usable, or getting someone else to hold onto it.

A kot of people became suspicious in the late 1980's when Sears-Roebuck became the first retailer to introduce signature pads for credit transactions, no longer had customers sign paper receipts, and the only paper generated from a credit card transaction was the receipt the customer got which had their scanned signature. But Sears wasn't trying to pull anything on customers, they simply wanted an electronic record. Someone at Sears realized something: if you don't have a piece of paper you don't have to store it and you aren't filling up warehouse space with paper records.

Something similar might apply with repect to stuff we keep. If there is a tool or non-consumable item that costs $5 or $10 and you use it once every three months, it might be simpler to buy it, use it, then give it away or discard it and buy a new one in three months. Or consider giving it to someone who can use it more on condition you can borrow it back for the one use every few months.

[pinback]

If Jonsey re-enabled the Tdarcos account, why don't you just use that to post your eighteen-page rambling nonsense replies instead of putting it on poor Donald's resume?

[Donald Ebinsen]

If Jonsey re-enabled the Tdarcos account, why don't you just use that to post your eighteen-page rambling nonsense replies instead of putting it on poor Donald's resume?

I wanted to answer his question but I was worried I might make it too long; I didn't have the time to shorten it. I had to learn that there are rules on how to decrease clutter. Most of us keep too many things and it is damned hard to learn not to keep stuff that we really don't need to keep around or can reduce the amount we do keep.

And on another issue. please stop confusing me with someone else. Who do you think I am, anyway, Lester Snow or someone?

[someone, not AArdvark]

Are you believing yourself?

Asperger's AND Schizophrenia? Man, that's rough.


THE
NOT
AARDVARK

[ChainGangGuy]

I would like to thank Mr. Ebinsen for offering up some words of advice. Emotions are running high here at the CGG Household, but hopefully they can be channeled and harnessed for getting this job done. I'll check in sometime Saturday to see how I've progressed.

[Flack]

I admire people who are able to park cars in their garage. My first couple of houses had two-car garages and the last two have had three-car garages and at no time have they ever been able to store more than one car. Getting a car inside my garage currently consists of a real life game of Tetris, and only happens when hail is on the way.

[Tdarcos]

I admire people who are able to park cars in their garage... Getting a car inside my garage currently consists of a real life game of Tetris, and only happens when hail is on the way.

When I was doing mobile notary back when I could walk, I would mention to some of my customers I could tell they were really rich and have lots of money. When they asked how I determined that, I said, "Because you actually use your garage to store your car instead of as a storage facility."

[ChainGangGuy]

I said, "Because you actually use your garage to store your car instead of as a storage facility."

I store my car inside my garage. Also, we're down five nearly six boxes as of last weekend, hopefully with more to follow this Saturday and Sunday. I've got a long road ahead of me, but I try to remember that each little step is a step in the right direction, towards a clean, manageable garage.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

What's been the hardest item to get rid of?

[Flack]

Also, we're down five nearly six boxes as of last weekend, hopefully with more to follow this Saturday and Sunday. I've got a long road ahead of me, but I try to remember that each little step is a step in the right direction, towards a clean, manageable garage.

Good job, brother! Every little bit counts! That's awesome!

[Flack]

What's been the hardest item to get rid of?

My two triggers seem to be "things that are difficult/impossible to replace" and "things I spent a lot of money on but aren't worth anything now."

In the "things that are difficult/impossible to replace" category, I have a box or two of computer, car, and music magazines out in the garage. Do I read them regularly? No. Have I looked at them in the past 10 years? No. Would it be a pain in the ass to replace a 1989 issue of Truckin' Magazine? Yeah, it would. I don't need them or even read them, but the thought of dumping things like old magazines that may not be archived anywhere makes my stomach hurt. I have a lot of music magazines with great headlines ("Kurt Cobain found Dead!") that are tough to part with.

In the second category, I have 3 or 4 large tubs of CDs. Last time I checked, you could get a buck each for them on a good day on Craigslist. Each time I consider selling them I think, why bother? I've considered trading them in to some place like Half Price Books or something but each year that goes by their value drops even more and at the end of the day it just doesn't seem worth it to do anything with them. Same with 1,000 DVDs.

[co]

In the second category, I have 3 or 4 large tubs of CDs. Last time I checked, you could get a buck each for them on a good day on Craigslist. Each time I consider selling them I think, why bother? I've considered trading them in to some place like Half Price Books or something but each year that goes by their value drops even more and at the end of the day it just doesn't seem worth it to do anything with them. Same with 1,000 DVDs.

why not just drop off that junk at goodwill so they can do the work of selling them for a dollar or two for a good cause? I doubt any of them can't be downloaded in torrents. It's probably almost 10 years since I owned a cd, shortly after Napster they were all gone. First I realized that the jewel cases were a waste of space so recycled them and put the cd's either in a booket if I cared about them or a spindle if I didn't. I had planned to copy them over if I wanted to keep them but realized it wasn't worth the time and effort when downloading was easier. The only use I had for physical disks went away when the xbox360 I bought from evil jack straw finally died.

If I need portable media i've got a ziploc bagful of flash drives I got for free from business conferences or just use my phone. In fact, the only times I can remember even needing portable media were as a backup for a business presentation or to update firmware for my horrible samsung bluray player home theater that only has an ethernet connection and will never be anywhere near my modem (by the way, never ever buy a combination consumer electronics device, especially from samsung. What the fuck good is a bluray home theater that doesn't play bluray disks?).

"things I spent a lot of money on but aren't worth anything now."

One of the few truly valuable things I learned in college was the economic concept of "sunk money". It says that it makes no sense to base future decisions on past expenditures and it's been pivotal in my life in everything from "do I fix this damn car again or buy another?" to "do I keep this box of junk I haven't looked at for years?"

[ChainGangGuy]

Also, we're down five nearly six boxes as of last weekend, hopefully with more to follow this Saturday and Sunday.

Make that eight boxes.

[Tdarcos]

the thought of dumping things like old magazines that may not be archived anywhere makes my stomach hurt. I have a lot of music magazines with great headlines ("Kurt Cobain found Dead!") that are tough to part with.

You know, for maybe $20 you can buy a cheap flatbed scanner/printer. I purchased a Canon MG2420 at Micro Center for that; in fact, because I didn't have a regular USB cable - all of the USB cables I have are for sub miniature connectors such as cell phones and cameras and all of the printers I have owned have been wireless - the 20' cable to connect the printer to my computer cost more than the printer did. And I still have a working XP200 that won't print but still works as a scanner; I bought the MG because it only weighs about 8 pounds; if I ever want to go somewhere to scan documents I can carry it.

But the Canon comes with a nice scanner package, it will do continuous scanning, you choose the file name to start, whether to save as an image file or as a PDF, click the on-screen button and it scans the page, saves it as the file name + "001", then allows you to click on a button either to end scanning or to start the scan of the next page, with each additional page image saved increasing the suffix number automatically. So if you want the magazines accessible if you ever want to look at them again, scan them at full color 300 DPI and you can just look at any page you want. Then you could get rid of the originals since all you want is to look at them, you don't need to have the paper copies on hand.

If you don't already have one, you can buy a wireless scanner/printer or fax machine for less than $60.

In the second category, I have 3 or 4 large tubs of CDs.

Rip them to MP3s at 320K bits per second variable and the sound quality will be as good as the original while not taking huge amounts of space. Or since disk space is really cheap these days, leave them as uncompressed WAV files. Again, you don't need the CDs, you just need the music from them. I ripped basically all of the disks and 45s I owned years ago, plus you can often find almost any song that isn't brand new on YouTube.

[pinback]

Yeah, Rob, what the hell is your problem??

[Flack]

Nothing, I was just laughing at the fact that Tdarcos posts the same thing every so often. Time to reboot him again.

http://www.joltcountry.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6529

[pinback]

Yeah, Paul, what the hell is your pr-- wait brian DONT

[RetroRomper]

Could we get an update from CCG? For example, I'm wondering if he decided that burning down his garage was simpler than sorting through 100+ boxes?

Inquiring minds want to know.