I'm giving my house an enema. I feel stupid for asking this...

I'm having my carpets cleaned on Monday.  I'm having a city dumpster dropped in my driveway tomorrow.  I'm going to throw everything I possibly can away before Monday.  I've got two kitchen items, a roaster (sans lid) and a crock pot heating element (sans ceramic insert and lid).  I hate, hate, hate the idea of them going to a landfill but I they simply aren't valuable enough to screw around with.   The same thing could be done with the old style blenders I have.  I never use them.   Not in 30 years.  My kids have used one of them two times to make smoothies.   I don't feel like I can donate them to Salvation Army because that's just handing my problem off to them... 

What sez The Hive?

I need to do this.

Toss them and move on. 

That E36 M3 sits at the donate bin til they throw them out as well in most cases. Cheap chinese BS has pushed small appliances largely out of the thrift market. If it's something SUPER retro it might be worth salvaging but we're talking pre 70's here. Given that the berkeleyin' 90's was 30 years ago (yeah i know, i'm mad too ) i'm guessing they're probably not worth it. You could put em out on the curb with a $FREE but I wouldn't guess it would be successful.

For just a few hundred dollars a roll off dumpster brought to your house is very liberating.  Initially I found myself resistant to actually throwing stuff in.  Once you give in to the idea you might be amazed how much you throw in. 

Rule of thumb, pick out the size dumpster you think you'll need and then go one size larger.  The incremental cost is very litte. 

I LOVE throwing stuff away. That's part of why I've told my parents to quit brining stuff that's been in their storage for years or decades. If you guys haven't cared about for 20 years and it's your parents or grandparents, what makes you think I'm going to care about it? 

This is the big downfall to me buying a house 6 years ago, I've re-accumulated a bunch of stuff I had previously thrown out. 

After getting divorced in 2015 and making a few moves, by the time I moved to OKC at the beginning of 2017........I had a TV and my 3.1 setup, love seat, chair, and end table, bed, clothes, some pots and pans, and that was it. 

John Welsh said:

...

Rule of thumb, pick out the size dumpster you think you'll need and then go one size larger.  The incremental cost is very litte. 

Gotta agree 100%.  I tried selling, giving away, donating a bunch of stuff when I moved.  Had about 5 months to try and make a few bucks and keep stuff out of the landfill.  Put a bunch of tools and items up here.  Filled a dumpster plus a bunch of trips to the dump/recycling center at the end.  If it isn't a high demand item that you can save somebody a ton of money on it's just not worth dealing with and nobody's interested.

Donate. I use two different non profits that call every month or so, and pick up the items. I hate goodwill, so giving to places that actually help people is my preference. Maybe I'm missing something, but bragging about giving people jobs is weird. 

I HATE throwing things away. Just hate it. Growing up my mother used to get mad at me for not keeping my room clean and would come through with a trash bag and throw out anything she didn't think was neat enough.

This did not make me a neater person by the way. It just turned throwing things away into a traumatic experience.

As an adult I am faced with the widespread practice of planned obsolescence, coupled with pollution and climate change and do as much as I can to keep things out if landfills.

About 8 years ago I sold, gave away, or threw out almost everything I owned and moved cross-country on an airplane. To this day I still find myself saying "I need X, I know I have X, it's... wait... nevermind..."

Just start tossing. This is an every other year event at my house. 

If stuff still works but you don't want or need it anymore and you'll feel better about it, donate it to wherever will take it. Anything that's missing pieces, broken, hasn't been touched in multiple years, just toss it.

If it doesn't wind up in a landfill here, it will most likely be shipped across the world to be burned or dumped in the ocean, because recycling really isn't all it's cracked up to be in this day an age. 

As I've stated in other threads, start dating stuff when it goes in storage. If it hasn't been used, touched, or thought about after 1,3,5 years, toss it. 

Take control of your life and space, you don't have a house just to be a storage unit.

AClockworkGarage said:

I HATE throwing things away. Just hate it. Growing up my mother used to get mad at me for not keeping my room clean and would come through with a trash bag and throw out anything she didn't think was neat enough.

This did not make me a neater person by the way. It just turned throwing things away into a traumatic experience.

As an adult I am faced with the widespread practice of planned obsolescence, coupled with pollution and climate change and do as much as I can to keep things out if landfills.

About 8 years ago I sold, gave away, or threw out almost everything I owned and moved cross-country on an airplane. To this day I still find myself saying "I need X, I know I have X, it's... wait... nevermind..."

I feel this. After my dad died when I was a kid, I lost nearly all my stuff. 

Then again several times as a younger adult. 

Then my (ex) wife liked to randomly give my E36 M3 away. Famously she called me one day and was like "do you want your desk?" I'm like- "My DESK? Yes. I want my desk" It was an old steel IBM workstation desk from the 70s. Weighed a ton. Was indestructible. I got home and and it was gone. She say "Oh I thought you said you didn't want it"  What the actual berkeley woman. 

Finally, after she pulled the plug on THAT shambling corpse of a marriage, I packed everything I could fit in the back of a Toyota Corolla wagon, and that's what I managed to keep of my entire life. 

I have stuff issues sometimes. 

z31maniac said:

I LOVE throwing stuff away. That's part of why I've told my parents to quit brining stuff that's been in their storage for years or decades. If you guys haven't cared about for 20 years and it's your parents or grandparents, what makes you think I'm going to care about it? 

This is my family as well. " You've got some space. Here, have some crap."

If it works someone less fortunate may benefit from owning it.  I do dropoffs at a local church sponsored thrift store every few months.  If it has a majority of metal it goes into another pile and the scrap yard gets a visit every quarter.  Clothes are either thrift store or rags depending on condition.  

I've told this story before but it can be told again.  When I bought my first home in 2011, which was a 4-bed 2.5 bath home that I got for peanuts, we had a ton of empty space.  It was great.  Then, my in-laws decided to clean their attic.  All the E36 M3 they just couldn't bring themselves to throw away they loaded into a box truck and filled my open, well organized garage with.  I'm talking musty barbie dolls, ruined sports equipment, trunks of toys and 1 or 2 pieces of usable furniture.  I was so grateful they did that.  It took me years to force my wife to get rid of most of it and I guarantee I still have some of it rotting in my basement now.

Moral of the story, throw it away.  No one cares about your stuff like you do.  I hope my kids throw all my stuff away when I'm gone. 

I am just finishing a three-week cleanup in the shop at work.  I have filled a 3-yard dumpster all three weeks.

I cut up small pieces of 1x to give to dad for wood stove kindling.  Anything 3' or longer gets put on the good scraps shelf.  Anything old, cracked, has staples or nails, goes in the dumpster.  I have shelves of completely useless hardware.  Like seriously... why does a scenic shop have a 5-lb bucket of 3/8" upholstery tacks?  Why did I have 10,000 picture hanging nails?  Why were there two 5-gallon buckets of used drywall screws with painted-over, stripped-out phillips heads?  Or slot-head brass wood screws from 1945?  I called my scrap guy and he's coming over for about 200 lbs of aluminum window frames, drywall screws, bent carriage bolts, brass screws, and pipe cutoffs.

I would suggest doing the dumpster.  If there is anything that has potential value to anyone, set it beside the dumpster - the blender, toaster, crock pot, etc.  Put an ad on FBM for scrap/freebies.  If there is anything with significant metal inside (like the blender) it might be valuable to a scrapper who wants to separate the copper, steel, and stainless.  That will at least keep some of it out of the landfill.  Donating is always good.

It can get daunting - putting energy toward sorting and making runs to GoodWill or the ReStore, and babysitting a FBM ad, but I think it's worth it.  It can be mostly hands off.

Dumpster for trash.  Set potential re-purposing items beside the dumpster and make an ad that you can mostly ignore.  After stuff disappears, either throw the remaining stuff in the bin, or take anything still functioning to a thrift store.

I donate things to a charity that has a meaningful impact. I also buy things at their store.  It's funny when you see things on the shelves that you donated.

I regularly sell stuff on marketplace.  Sometimes the really cheap/free stuff can be a pain...but little stuff adds up to actual beer money. 

I try to fill up an actual contractor bag w/actual junk once or twice a month.  

You live in a world where disposable consumer goods reign supreme. They are meant to be thrown away. 

You only need one blender, tops. If they're really nice, pre-planned  obsolescence items, keep one. And that's still iffy, because even the sturdiest cast iron blender from 1951 will fail, eventually.

"Thank you for being a good blender" to the rest, then dumpster it or take it to a church same day. You can call ahead. They want it or they wouldn't take it. Repeat for all other items. 

Anything remotely metal goes to the scrap yard in one of my quarterly trips. 

Everything else goes to the street with a free sign a couple of days before trash pickup. Most of it is usually gone before trash day.

Anything still there gets picked up by the trash truck. 

I will occasionally drop stuff in the swap shop at the local landfill convenience center. 

Ya'll are making me feel bad. I need to do probably 2 dumpsters full of getting rid of E36 M3. 

I want to go through it all to separate some of the big $$ stuff. I've wanted to for years and I just don't get around to it. 

Our town has a spring clean up day. Take all your E36 M3 out to the curb 1-3 nights ahead of time. People are cruising the streets grabbing it - it is astounding what people throw out, and I'm usually pretty good at getting 90% of it sold within a week. But that 10% is a problem. It adds up. Next year I'm prepping for 3 weeks prior. I'm going to have 1.5 garage bays filled with crap that will go out to the curb. 

Yeah, I think my two dishwashers and the old TV are going to the curb with a "FREE" sign on each of them.

Man I feel so many of these comments. My house is full of E36 M3 that I don't need. Some of it is mine and I don't want to deal with it, some of it is mine and I want to throw it out but it's hard to do. A lot of it is my wife's, more specifically it is from her parents and it has been here for years but we can't come to throw it out. I find it impossible to tell her to do that when I haven't done that with my stuff. A bunch of it is seasonal, we have more decorations and E36 M3 than I can tell you, it is nice people like it but at the end of the day does having a Christmas spectacular really matter? I have books from college, E36 M3 I am never ever ever going to do calculus again why can't I throw out that book?

In reply to NY Nick :

My sister-in-law moved every 1-5 years.  I always helped and one time I complained about the weight of a few boxes.  What's in here?

Those are my college nursing books from 30 years ago.  I told her I would never move those again as it's all now on the internet.  I think they got lost in a non-pay storage unit auction they forfeited.

I donate and sell tons of stuff. 

Often, it's the stuff you'd think would be in demand that doesn't sell, and the stuff that you'd think would be worthless has people beating down your door. 

I'd say old kitchen equipment is probably worth donating. I need a blender as we speak. 

I do not know about your Dumpster companies, but where I used to live they would go through the dumpsters and sort out the sellable items and recyclables. They have a building that was like a big rummage sale with you name it in it.  So don't be too bummed out that it is just going to a land fill.

My wife's mother died and her dad remarried a year later. He moved into the new wife's home, sold the family home and bought another, smaller one for his daughter and son. When I married her, her brother moved out, but all of her parent's stuff from the 4000 sqft family was now in our basement and garage. Then I moved in with all of my stuff from across the country...... 

She couldn't sell or get rid of anything that had belonged to her folks because she'd grown up with it all, was pissed because her mom died, pissed at her dad for re-marrying and even more pissed that she had to move out of the family home into the cracker jack box (it's not, it's almost 2K sqft) And then I moved in.....

We've been married almost 30 years now and there is still crap from her folk's basement in ours. I went thru all my crap and threw out most of it - my next door neighbor had a huge dumpster in his drive while he remodeled his house and he let me drop a ton more in there with his stuff. 

Of course, the other problem is that my wife is an "acquirer" (her term) meaning she likes to buy stuff. For her, it's the thrill of the chase - finding it for 20¢ cheaper than someone else has it. And Ebay and Amazon became enablers......She lives for the delivery driver to drop the latest acquisition on the front stoop! Fortunately I've been able to redirect her to buying things we actually need (like food, clothes, meds for us and the pups and so on) and not so much just "stuff" (Thank dog Tuesday Morning went out of business!) and she's slowly been coming around to getting rid of the folks stuff, but only if she doesn't see me throw it out..... if it's gone then  well........I guess it's ok.......

We're getting older now and I would like to lighten our load considerably but I'm part of the problem, having also added a lot of tools and equipment over the years that I still use.....I don't want it to become my kids problem if I can help it.