Posted by pseudolus 5 days ago
Then I inherited a second car, which for various reasons is barely practical to keep while it works. It lives outside so that the stuff in the garage (a clutter of far too many bicycles, mostly) can stay accessible. But in winter, it is possible - barely - to park the car inside, with bicycles hanging only inches above it. Some stuff had to be disposed of to make this possible, and I fear some additional stuff will have to go this fall. But you have to set yourself limits or the stuff will grow infinitely.
Meanwhile premium locations all over town are sprouting Dymon Self Storage units. That's the local brand of "premium climate controlled storage". There's one less than a mile, as the crow flies, from my house.
These days, I live on a large enough piece of land that I could pretty easily construct such a building. However, I've stopped myself because I've realized that I just fill up whatever space I have. If there's room to store something, you can just put it there and plan to deal with it later (of course, later almost never comes). I'm the type of person that has a hard time getting rid of things that I paid good money for or that have sentimental value, and as I get older I'm increasingly envious of those people who have less hesitation about throwing stuff out. For some things, selling is an option, but that has its own set of hassles.
I have a garage like you that has one stall full of stuff - family bikes, tools, a table saw, grill, etc. Stuff that we do use, though some of it is probably not used enough to justify the space it takes up. Every time I clean up the garage now I try to make a point to get rid of some things, though all that does is tend to break even with the new stuff that inevitably gets added.
If you have the storage then by all means keep whatever you value. If it would require paying a recurring fee to keep it, then it better be worth it.
I have promised myself that I will not leave that kind of accumulated junk for my kids to sort through some day, but I honestly wonder if I will get around to doing my own purge. It hasn't happened yet.
I took the same lesson from clearing out my parents things. What I'm trying to do now is to clear out incrementally. Doing a full sweep is way too easy to defer to future me and therefore never happens, so I try to do a small amount regularly. My big box of cables (another recent thread here) is a rich source of material that will keep me busy for a while. Pretty sure nobody will appreciate going through that.
Also just trying to notice things around the place that I really don't need, books I'll never read again, boxes that have not been opened for years. A little bit at a time. Removing each one gives a small sense of achievement.
Yes. When one is young it is difficult to appreciate this, but later in middle age this becomes very precious. Store everything, your future self will be happier for it.
My great aunt died years and years ago (RIP) but as recently as a few weeks ago my brother and I cleaned/emptied a garage where she had hidden some stuff.
More soap bars.
I don't need the physics/chemistry: I know that soap is a stable molecule. I suspect some of the soap bars were dating back to WWII.
My great aunt was also in the "waste not / want not" camp. But as she lived through WWII as a teenager, she was in fear of ever missing things again. Hence the soap bars.
Not to the extreme of the story about the soap, above, but: Something in my mind was changed a little bit more every time I'd go to the store and there were empty shelves. So now I do things like always have a few weeks of TP, and I freeze things like bread and bologna.
I never did that at any point in my adult life leading up to COVID: If I ran out of something, I just picked up more later at the store the next time I was nearby (or any other time; lots of things were 24/7 back then).
They just recently cleared out the attic and unloaded my childhood stuff on me, and I gladly took it all back.
I know this is in conflict with a lot of modern parenting for many reasons. Our primary goal was to create independent, autonomous, fully functional adults capable of funding their own lives and determining their own future.
Other than renting a U-Haul and driving 2,800 miles, there weren’t many options. Which I even suggested, to which my parents insisted they were happy to hang on to the stuff until it was easier to do the handover.
>never created any expectation that their childhood home would serve…facility, extended stay facility or even exist.
Sounds like a pretty sad mindset to me. Between me and your kids, I wonder which are happier to visit their parents?
I get that some people even at 25, think they haven’t got a so-called “permanent address” except Mom and Dad’s (and I’m not being derisive, I have dear friends who felt like that), but none of us have a permanent home and I think it’s best if we mentally think of ourselves as not being “only temporarily here” as early in life as practical.
As children, my siblings and I didn't have a lot of stuff, and our family didn't have a lot of stuff either. It certainly wasn't our intent to traumatize and stunt our children and this doesn't seem to be the case. I will certainly ask them.
Parenting is hard and there are multiple approaches that lead to successful outcomes. Your approach worked and I am happy for you. Congratulations on your successful approach.
This heavily implies that the children of other "modern" parents are dysfunctional adults. As they say "to throw the stone and hide the hand". The funnier thing is that your parenting style is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon.
I agree it is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon, but not sure what is funny about it. Societies and systems constantly change and evolve. This is part of progress, and yes, can also cause setbacks.
My use of the term "conflict" might be what is triggering. Maybe "bucks the trend" or "not in line with" would be better.
Many approaches to parenting are successful. I presented my approach. Others work.
I agree that it has been a generational thing. It was called the "Me Generation." Me, me, me. In the animal kingdom, parents abandoning their children to be completely independent is mostly common among insects, lizards, and amphibians, and is associated with large litters and a massive death rate among them. It's not modern, it's a feature of creatures that are lower than mammals.
What's triggering is the fact that you've decided to brag about your superior parenting in public, and claim the evidence of that is that you have told your children that you're done with them. Nobody asked you, and you're aware that normal people don't do that to people that they are close to (hence the need to lecture.) Everybody raises their children to have the ability to be completely independent and self-sufficient. You just think you're uniquely successful at that, and that it somehow would be the child's fault if you've failed.
Your kids didn't ask to be born, and if you don't rescue them from their failure (at least initially), it will be a reflection on you. If we are in the same social circles, and I know about this, I will judge you. Even hearing you explain it, and your feigned confusion (I guarantee you have this conversation all the time), would make me wary of hiring you into a management position.
I'm not a lizard. I want everybody I care about to be self-sufficient, and I also don't want them to try to be unless they actually have to be. They have resources available to them that are not always being fully utilized, and when those resources can give them an advantage in any context, I would be angry if they weren't used.
There are always limits to self-sufficiency, because there are massive advantages to abandoning it: that's what we call civilization.
> I somewhat expected my post would generate this type of attack
Also, for all you knew at the time you replied, OP could've still had stuff in their parents' attic because they joined the Marines at 18 and was even more independent than your own kids. There was a lot of projection onto a trivial story.
Plus "must be a generational issue" just sounds like more of the same "my generation was responsible/good/normal unlike kids these days" meme that gets repeated by every generation as they age and is tiresome to hear as an explanation for everything.
It doesn't matter how high performing your kids are if no good opportunities exist. So while we hope the world will allow our independent, high performance kids to succeed on their own, we're planning on having to provide unique opportunities via resources/connections ourselves to make that happen. Accordingly we're treating our house as something of a family estate, to be held in perpetuity and they can live in as long as it's good for them. It's not about keeping them as forever-children, it's about providing a base with a secure perimeter from which they can marshal their resources. For instance, we're right in the middle of two major metros. So if they land an unpaid/underpaid but prestigious internship in one of them, they won't have to worry about housing.
We weren’t quite in the same position until much later, and I am somewhat envious of your position. Best of luck!
College students both are and are not autonomous adults. It's not really practical to bring all your stuff to college housing, and you don't always graduate into a good job market where you can go directly to the workforce and a nice place where all your stuff fits. Not everyone can afford to, and that's fine, but if you can give your kids an easier transition to full autonomy, it seems reasonable.
If moving while the kids are in college, it's nice to keep their stuff somewhere.
(And yeah, for college this just isn't practical: college accommodation is temporary, tiny, and students have practically no money. Taking all your stuff with you to college is a lot of effort for very little gain).
No room for that in college dorms. I would wait until they graduate and have jobs.
I was pretty pissed when I went off to college and my parents threw away my 80s computer that would now be considered a classic.
Only tough part is determining which one they’ll be!
If it were me as the college student though, I would find it fair if a summer were declared the Summer Of Claiming Your Crap, and all stuff that I actually wanted had to be in designated storage bins that I’d commit to come retrieve after college, and the rest would be donated.
Donating it without consulting me would have seemed like a betrayal, no matter whether I actually needed it.
75 y/o MIL is still fighting my wife to take her middle/highschool 'stuff' back to this day. She won't throw it out though.
At 20-something after college, no, they probably don't want it.
When they are 40 or 50, they will desperately want it back.
Until the kids figure out where their life will take them they can't know. I have some heirlooms that I'm really glad to have now, but when I was in college living in dorms I wouldn't have had space for them.
You have no clue what somebody else finds important and will throw the wrong things.
I'd understand if they really needed to get rid of it, but the conversation must be had!
Once they are out of college and on their own though they need to figure out what to do about their stuff.
The entity in the best position to know how to secure the premises is not liable to do so at all in some states.
Oh, and don’t get me started on ballooning but opaque rental rates.
I wanted to pay up front for 2-3 years of storage but most places “couldn’t” quote me what the rate would be beyond 3 months in advance.
Such a scammy industry.
> An estimated 19.1% of U.S. adults had any anxiety disorder in the past year.
[1] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disor...
I think more than anything this is the ooze you get out of the sides of societies that focus so terribly much on consumer culture. Advertising nowadays is absolutely incredible at driving the creation of what feels like "needs" in people. In my thirties I started transitioning to a woman, full time, and as a result I've bought and donated shit tons of clothes. This experience has made me realize how bizarrely attached I am to those clothes, and also to so many other things I own that I wouldn't have remotely called sentimental. Yet between growing up in a heavily consumerist society, and my environmental side, I feel so much regret and shame when simply throwing things away. Worthless things. Things my rational mind knows damn well I have no use for, that have no reason to exist in my home.
Mind you I'm someone who is familiar with facing down my inner demons. I can't fathom trying to deal with this if you're not someone like me who has gone to lengths to educate myself, to get therapy, and not only gone those lengths but had the resources to do so!
Then I watch hoarders and I see these old, broken down people who have massive, beautiful homes I would love to have, and they've stacked every room to the ceiling with... shit. Sometimes literally shit, but more often it's just junk. Things that were on sale. Each thing advertised to them, promised that it would make them the person they were meant to be, or to help them lose that weight they've been trying to lose for 50 years. That piece of furniture that would finally complete the room. And they did that on, and on, and on, and now their beautiful home is ruined, and most of the stuff is too. And oftentimes the person themselves are harmed too, with early onset illness and injury.
America needs to get our shit together. And worse still we've exported our disease in great quantity to the rest of the world, both as trash, and as the vacuous hollow culture that consumerism drives.
Go to any warm state in the country and ride through the parking lots at night. If you are the observant type, you should see an astonishing number of folks living in their vehicles.
And home ownership is not only downward, but no longer part of the American dream for most people now. Storage facilities for many, are a place to lay down, or rent hope that things won't always be "this way".
We need to fix this. It's not just drugs and mental problems anymore.
When you say “we need to fix this” no one can agree what “this” is. There is no one “this” and it becomes a morass of generational systemic issues, localized problems, competing views on economics, morality, government and more. It reminds me of when tech people show up to “fix” education. It just isn’t a single issue.
I agree we need to fix something, but as soon as I think about the big picture it feels futile and I have been involved in efforts for decades.
Yes, "fix" is a weaselly word, and 'futility' might be more appropriate if the subject has similar etiology to many of our other problems here.
At minimum, tolerance is due to the ones not causing significant problems. In my opinion, a substantial portion of the US will experience homelessness in the near future, but that won't discuss well around here. And note, I am from Florida. The East Coast version is quite different, as well as most of the median state situation. Very different. Especially in places where drugs are not the impetus.
The housing problem feels so daunting that I struggle to understand how one could help move the needle. Knowing which organizations to volunteer with or places to donate that actually improve the situation would be a helpful start.
Only you can really define what is productive to you, but people are always needed for running the shelters, working in the kitchens and more. It isn't glamorous at all.
People need to be transported from one facility to another, to medical appointments, to court, to counseling and more.
I currently work with youth at risk, helping them finish their high school degrees and families who are right at the brink of falling into serious problems.
I can't really tell you which organizations to volunteer, as there is a spectrum of them; some are religious like the Salvation Army and some have social and political agendas that may not align with you. Without recommending or condemning, for example, you will find organizations who work with pregnant teens who are anti-abortion. This may not be for you. The same goes for sexual and gender identity issues.
One thing that seems very unpolitical to me, and it is how I started, was volunteering at a local shelter. If you have more affinity with helping women, there are shelters that deal with them. If you have more affinity with dealing with people with addiction issues, there are shelters dealing with them.
Because of my background in the military, education and addiction, I find affinity working with veterans, addicts and at risk youth.
The problem is daunting, and the needle feels unmovable most of the time. In the big scheme of things I feel powerless, but I know reducing local misery is possible and is something I can help with.
EU:
1.1 million homeless people https://www.feantsa.org/files/Themes/Overview/2025/ex_summar...
Divided by a population of 451,990,314 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_U...
= 0.00243
US:
745,652 homeless people https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2025-...
Divided by a population of 341,784,857 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
= 0.00218
It's been 30 years since anyone sold a new carbureted production car in the US, for just as long cars have had OBDII, and it's been 50 years since cars were sold without catalytic converters.
There was a time, immediately after those technologies were developed, when older cars polluted significantly more than newer cars, but modern engine designs have been around long enough that cars old enough to be big polluters are expensive collectors pieces.
There may be an occasional car with a blown head gasket or piston ring polluting excessively, but they won't run for long in that condition. Thanks to CAFE standards increasingly limiting the availability of smaller vehicles in the US, the average 20-to-30-year-old gasoline engine probably pollutes less per mile than the average 0-to-5-year-old gasoline engine.
Downtown in US cities parking is prohibitive, but that is only a small part of the city. Most of the city you can park for free. You want to move the car every day just so it doesn't look abandoned, but otherwise this is a cheap way to live and you get transportation as a bonus.
At my current place (apartment in a suburb about 10km from the city center) our parking would cost ~180 USD per month. From a tech worker perspective it is not like unaffordable, but definetily a luxury for most of the population. The median after-tax income in Sweden is like 3k USD.
That tax I mentioned before also makes very old beat-up cars not worth keeping (which is the intent of the tax to be fair).
One of the main upsides of living in a detached house in Sweden is not having to pay for parking. But even so the increase heating bills in winter can easily cost more than a car installment depending on your HVAC and insulation.
Like god forbid some dude live out of a 2002 Town and Country that parks at a revolving series of strip malls eats a quart of oil every 2k.
The tent cities and the rows of campers are a different story (i.e. the density is the problem).
I think it should be permissible to allow some dude to live out of a 2002 Town and Country that parks at a revolving series of strip mall. I currently work with several people who use a similar method to keep themselves and their kids off the streets.
The phrasing might be bad in that I was pointing out the overall bleakness of the overall situation; no insurance, no registration, no maintenance, but the intent was to show that they are teetering on the brink of falling into an abyss that is very difficult to come out of, not that they were some sort of anonymous nebulous mass.
The main thing I have been struggling with personally with working with this issue (housing, addiction) over 25 years is that it is such a huge, seemingly unsolvable problem that no one is able to address systematically and when I think about the big picture I feel overwhelming helplessness, but find hope working in much more local situations.
The car comment was just an observation to the parent comment, with some additional commentary on how it isn't at all a big luxury, rather a bleak situation where the car owner is in a very precarious situation. Reading it now, I do see how it could be misconstrued as some sort of zealotry of people of a certain bent, but I think I am might be bent the opposite way of what you think!
The entire sentence after that came across like a giant dog whistle for the kind of people who are never out of arms reach of their clutching pearls. The only word you missed was "blight". I was expecting it to be followed by a call for some sort of government action.
Might just be a reflection of the language of whoever your social circle is but it came across real Karen-ey
I’ll use the word though; our inability to provide housing and basic essential services to our fellow human beings is a blight.
When people are falling into homelessness, they keep the car for longer because (a) it generates income, either directly through something like Uber or by getting you to a job on time, (b) lower cost of ownership and (c) it serves as shelter in a pinch.
Additionally, rent can easily be inaccessible for the employed. And for those who don't have vehicles, 'just moving to a cheaper area" is not a practical option.
For example, if I’m living out of a car I’m more likely to use EBT to buy some bags of chips I can toss in the car rather than some cheap chicken and fresh veggies or eggs. How would I store chicken or cook any of it if I live in a car?
Yes, I know there are solutions here like small fridges and hot plates. But those cost money and require time and effort. Again, scenario is living in a car or the streets.
People repeat the myth that healthy food choices are expensive (they aren't) and time & space consuming to make (they can be) so often that most people believe it. But it just isn't so: you can eat at McDonalds every day, and if it's only a part of your diet, it's healthy. If you can get fibre and some vitamins elsewhere, and aren't overeating, the protein and calories in a fries and a hamburger are fine. Good, actually.
Healthy foods are simply principally marketed to, sold at a large markup to, middle to upper class Americans so they believe that's the usual market value.
Now, it can be expensive in time, effort and equipment for struggling, hard working, irregular shift workers. That's a different issue though.
Food deserts don't exist if you have a car in any American city since it is never that far to a suburb. (if you don't have a car getting is much much harder)
I have done the above - as a contractor working in a place a significant distance from home on a short term job. There were a lot of people like me in the cheap hotels I was staying at. OTOH, none of us were homeless - the homeless generally have other issues making them homeless and so even though that options would be cheap and work that doesn't mean they would be able to do it
There's at least one benefit to China dumping solar cells and other stuff all over the world: even as a homeless person... at least as long as you got a car, an EcoFlow Glacier and a shit solar panel are less than a grand, and it provides both a refrigerator, a small freezer and a way to keep your devices charging.
But that gear would have been infeasible even ten years ago - the status quo outside of luxury campers for six figures was absorber refrigeration [1] that needs a heat source - either powered by natural gas, which has challenges relating to safety as well as high consumption, or by electricity, which was lead-acid batteries back then.
The power density of lithium cells today is what makes that possible in the first place.
Poverty-homeless people however are a different thing, agreed on that. If you don't have a lockable place to store stuff you might as well have nothing at all...
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
IMO high housing prices are destroying civilization.
It's like a game of musical chairs. There aren't enough houses to go around. You go around and the music stops. Everyone scrambles to their nearest chair. Obviously the person on crutches will be the first to fall out of the game. The rest then talk about laziness, drugs, bootstraps, and all the rest. But add 1 more chair and there's no problem, even the dude with the broken leg can sit.
Also the chair, if actually built, would be so expensive that one legged guy can’t afford it. His best hope is someone with a worse chair takes it, then he tries to take their seat, but there’s already a dozen two-legged guys in front of him.
Everyone wants to blame existing landowners and sure they share part of it but the lion's share of the blame ought to be directed at do-gooders (land owning or otherwise) who are unwilling to be honest (with themselves, or in the internet comments) and admit that every policy that "looks good" based on the one sided statements presented in abstract by its peddlers.
Each one of those policies is part of the system that gets us the results we have and the peddlers all share in the blame.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard”
Maybe you need 5 chairs? Here in SF supply has fallen decades behind the demand curve to the point it may be impossible to catch up even if all you did was build build build.
decades of reasonable, consistently applied housing policy led to the creation of islands of wealth, surrounded by oceans of poverty. ergo, this is the purpose. this is how the people there want to live. I left many years ago when I realized the futility of it all.
What buys you a trap house or an apartment with hallways that smell like piss in SF or the Valley will buy you a mansion in 90% of the country at least.
Actually, there are. In Germany for example, we have millions of units left empty... the catch is, these are in (extremely) rural areas. Areas that used to be populated, but no longer are because the government has let them fall extremely behind in modern amenities. Some even do not have cellphone service.
Normally, you'd expect people and companies to do a pricing arbitrage and move where housing is cheap, but unfortunately, when there is no local employment or the infrastructure does not support remote employment, or other crucial requirements (safe potable water, electrical grid, grocery stores, schools, some sort of entertainment) are lacking, this does not work out any more.
In many places in Europe and Asia, the govt will essentially pay you to go live in near-abandoned villages and revitalize them.
In USA it’s just ghost towns. See also Detroit
The problem is better described as "There aren't enough homes where people want to live". We have plenty of houses, even in america. The "where people want to live" part largely comes down to density, zoning laws, and the fact that for most people their primary residence represents their entire net worth and it would be materially impactful if the price went down (by building more/better homes nearby). So everyone resists building.
But it's okay, if you resist building for long enough then your town will eventually collapse and your house will be worth nothing anyway. Many american Towns are essentially insolvent and can't afford realistic upkeep prices for services like sewage, roads, good schools, etc., and are living on borrowed time until infrastructure collapses and nobody wants to buy there. See Strong Towns the book.
Infrastructure is a major deal. You can't really exist as a member of modern society without broadband Internet, unless you're Amish or whatever and even they have begun to shift attitudes. Starlink changed the calculation quite a bit, and it definitely helps, but other things such as cellphone reception and emergency services that arrive in a reasonable time are also important.
I have no clue what the overall balance of housing looks like, but surely it doesn't help that big chunks of the housing market are being deprecated at the same time.
The economy has hyper-concentrated in a small number of cities and regions.
Telework has helped a little bit to reverse it, but it’s nowhere near enough and it only works for some industries and roles.
Huge surprise: it makes prices go up. More money chasing the same goods.
We will do literally anything to fix housing shortages but build housing.
Of course now we’ve decided to start dumb penis length measuring contest trade wars with our main suppliers of raw building materials. That will help.
See I’ve had this insane wild idea for years that homelessness could be related to inadequate housing supply.
Wild I know. People not having something being related to not enough of that thing.
But we have to stop those developers! If there’s ever a food shortage will people be saying “stop greedy farmers?”
Actually they probably will. Not enough food so obviously farmers are causing it and it’s a conspiracy. I’m sure that’s what the TikTok slop and Xhitter rage bait would say.
I'm at the age where a lot of friends are starting to deal with parents passing away, and it is very stressful for the next-of-kin to not only have to deal with the grief of loss, but then have to figure out what to do with houses and storage units full of junk. Some attempt to pick through the crap to find the 0.1% with legit sentimental value, others have more energy and try to do yard sales / estate sales, but most just call the truck and haul everything to the dump.
I don't know where people get this idea that their children are going to appreciate garages full of falling-apart furniture, "fine china" and 1970s era stereo equipment. If you want to pass on something to your children they will appreciate, pass them a cleaned-out home or pre-arrange a junk hauler.
I have all sorts of “stuff” I would give away to someone who can use it. I just don’t want to spend 3 hours per object doing so via posting on Facebook marketplace, having 8 people flake out on pickup, and a Saturday afternoon killed because I need to wait around for someone to show up.
It gets worse with more esoteric things like nerdy electronic gear which is absolutely worth something to the right person, but that person happening to be in my area and also searching for that particular bit and bob at that exact moment are almost nothing. Some of these things can be hundreds of dollars if you need to order new or off eBay.
I’d be fine with giving it away to a reseller if I could. Just very difficult to throw it away since it’s so wasteful.
Maybe inheritance will have to start jumping generations due to how people die older and older. Nobody needs any inheritance anymore when they are 60 years old or more, unless they want to use it as blackmail to control their own children.
We live in an era of immense wealth and convenience relative to them.
There's little nobility in throwing out your fourth set of perfectly serviceable bed sheets or the nicked pair of nail clippers in the guest bathroom. Which leads to accumulation, like moss on a tree.
Then when you pass away and other people have to go through it all, they don't need those items because their household already has those items. I don't need 3 more flashlights and a kitchen table because I already have my own!
The house sold more quickly than expected, so they were in a panic to move out.
They're not hoarders -- in fact, the house was always impeccably tidy, and not at all cluttered.
They had to get rid of SO much stuff. My dad was an only child, so he had kept so much stuff from his father before him. My mom was one of many, but the eldest, and the family archivist, so she has the photos and old movies and stuff.
Ultimately the biggest problem is their children (my sister and I) DON'T NEED THEIR STUFF. We're adults in our 40s and 50s. We have houses of our own, filled with furniture of our own. Smaller houses than our parents', smaller garages, already more cluttered than our parents'.
Yes, we took on some keepsakes we love, we took on some furniture to upgrade our own. But mostly, there just isn't room. I don't have room for 2 generations' worth of accumulated tools, no matter how handy they may be. I don't have a house full of empty walls waiting for artwork and pictures. We're already storing heirloom china from my wife's side of the family that we haven't touched in the 10 years we've had it, we don't need to store another set of heirloom dishes we'll never use at dinner parties we'll never hold.
As generations get spaced further and further apart, the heirs no longer need stuff to start lives of their own. As property gets more expensive, our homes get smaller, so we wouldn't even be able to use all the stuff if our homes were empty!
As a data point, I counted all of the chairs at my parents' house. 44. 44 chairs. We thought it was hilarious, so we told my in-laws, and they counted chairs at their own home -- also 44!
There's so much of it that is unremarkable. It fits into their house+garage, but it consumes a great abundance of space. There are, IIRC, 3 generations of China, each with its own China cabinet -- and I wouldn't know which dead person they once belonged to anyway. Tools. Furniture. Stacks of rough-sawn hardwood lumber, and logs.
I have enough furniture. I don't need rolling toolboxes full of mixed hoarded socketry, unsorted wrenches, and rusty tap-and-die sets in inch-standard sizes. The bench-mounted belt sander my dad made from scrap 40 years ago is cool and all, but it's been over 25 years since he's bothered to have it set up, it was always finicky to get running true, I've never suffered for a lack of using it.
If I ever move stuff like the tools and the lumber, I want it to be the very last time it ever happens -- and then I never want to see it again.
The China is particularly daunting: For as long as that stuff has been sitting around on display at their house, it has been both too nice to ever use and also too good to get rid of. (If the time ever comes that I want my own set of nice China for whatever reason I might, then: It's easy to get.)
I will work hard to dissuade anyone else from taking anything that is physically big, just on the basis that nobody needs that kind of curse in their life.
But I fear that others will find that a lot of this stuff will be too emotionally-precious to depart with. It will then be "temporarily" relegated to a storage facility until enough years go by that someone finally gets sick of paying the bill and it all gets sold to the highest bidder, thrown away, or donated anyway.
That expensive trip through purgatory seems like such a waste of money and effort.
My parents found one familiar, in particular, that wanted a huge (and extremely nice) china cabinet. After moving that, they put claim on more and more things. Great! Some neighbors also helped take things off their hands -- it would be great if they had a use for it, but I half think they were just taking things to be nice and help my parents; either to sell or dispose of later, which is also kind.
I'm so thankful that, in addition to making the smart move to move to a retirement home before it's too late, they also did the hard work of downsizing rather than leaving my sister and I with this chore a dozen years in the future. None of us have ever had a storage unit, although my parents just took on a "temporary"; I think 8x10ft unit. I know 2 things in there are for me, I just couldn't haul them in the one car trip I had time for. (and, unrelated, I'm living in a small apartment during construction on my house, so I don't have the space for a few more months).
I _do_ suspect that temporary storage unit will become relatively permanent, which is honestly probably the least-bad solution here. On the other hand, my parents are frugal and have lots of time on their hands, and probably opposed to storage units on principle, so we'll see :)
But that's just one sale on eBay for a thing that I know well, and that relates to an interest that I have.
Maintaining many sales on eBay is hard work, and maintaining many sales on eBay for stuff you're just trying to get rid of is a mountain of work.
And quite frustratingly, it's easy to find people who have strong opinions about other people's junk.
A house I bought once came with apartments upstairs, and one of them included a General Motors-designed fridge from the 1950s or 60s.
It worked well and the hardware was in good shape. It was free of meaningful rust. It was quiet. It would've been a great and simple restoration project for the right person, and some boomer might have eventually been very happy with paying quite a lot to have it softly purring away in their nostalgia cave.
I didn't want it at all. It was in the way of the process of turning the cheap clapped-out house I'd bought into a place where my family could live. It was just junk to me; vintage refrigerators aren't my bag.
And everyone who came by and saw it went through the same sequence: First, they admired it as an odd and somewhat beautiful anachronism. Then, they asked if it still worked, and opened the door and poked around with a melancholy sense of astonishment.
After that, unilaterally, they came the same revelation: "Well, you can't just get rid of it! That's worth a lot of money!"
Fine, whatever: If they think it's worth money, then they can certainly have some of it. I'd first offer to have them sell it and broker the deal, so we'd both make some cash from what was obviously something worth selling. "Go ahead and sell it," I'd say. "You want a 60/40 split? How does 80/20 sound? Let's chat."
Nobody took that deal. It was too much work for them to conceive of actually doing it.
And then, I'd offer to let them just have it, on the condition that it simply disappear and that it never be returned to me again. After all: If it's worth so much money, then it's a great bargain at the low, low cost of free. For a long time, nobody took that deal, either: This was also too much work.
---
Eventually, a couple of gristly dudes of indeterminate age came and hauled it down the stairs and into the bed of their pickup truck.
They didn't pay a dime for it, and they didn't scratch up the walls or those steep, tall stairs in any meaningful way.
They sold it for scrap, I'm sure, and it probably got turned into new Chevrolets or something... and I just don't care. The important part was that it finally disappeared and was never seen by me again.
I was very happy that someone finally took the deal. But that deal took years.
One man's trash may in fact be another man's treasure, but getting those two men into the same room at the same time can approach impossibility.
Yeah, you said it. I've also got a QX-949, but luckily no vintage refrigerators.
As much as the over-built, last-a-lifetime quality is a big component of owning of these old appliances, I can imagine how that fades when it's an object that weighs 800 pounds instead of 80.
I'll have to decide whether to fix those, and whether to use appropriate[1] LEDs or find some correct incandescent bulbs, or just leave the lights dead, before it gets sold.
Thoughts?
(I'm strongly in favor of low-color-temperature white LEDs. They should live ~forever if not pushed hard, and they should look the ~same as the tungsten bulbs did in 1970-whatever. But low-CCT LEDs are tricky to find, and they're often designed with light dispersion characteristics that don't match those of an old-school light bulb.)
Nobody has that idea. People want to hold on to all their stuff, and they would bring it with them in death if they could. But since you can only travel with very light luggage from this world to the next, they tell a nice sounding lie that they're keeping and amassing stuff and wealth for their children when they die.
If they really wanted to help their children, they would do it while still alive.
My parents are still convinced I should keep the china set they gifted us for our wedding decades ago, because "What are you going to do if your boss comes over for dinner??". It's never been used.
Surely you ordinarily cook up at least once nice meal a week; eat it using the nice dinner service and bring a little elegance to your life (and who cares if you break a plate or two, it died doing what it was made for).
Some of what glitters _is_ gold!
A lot of old furniture is better than all but very expensive new stuff. My kids like my parents' and grandparents' furniture.
Are you genuinely asking where they get this idea? People are getting downvoted for giving plausible answers.
The simple one is they appreciated getting it from their parents. It's only very recent that everyone has a surplus of everything, including the parents themselves.
I'm kind of glad my parents didn't just throw a lot of stuff away.
I'm in my 40s. Both my parents are alive, and have a house full of stuff. I live in a different house, 3.5 hours away at highway speeds, full of different stuff. It doesn't really matter to me if my parent's dining room table is a nicely crafted table - I have a nice table, and I don't need two dining room tables. Getting it to my house is a tremendous hassle. Picking between them is a tremendous hassle. And then I still have all the other stuff - the hutch, the chairs, the couches, the beds - and only one sibling to split them with.
"Rampant, commoditization consumerism" didn't cause this, longevity, freedom of movement, and independent living caused this, and I wouldn't trade those away for an heirloom table.
They had beautiful, carved wooden dressers and wardrobes from their parents that they, naturally, did not appreciate and take care of, so they turned into garbage and were thrown away when they became too dilapidated to move to another building. They were replaced with the standard fare particle-board-and-laminate Ikea-type trash that I definitely do not want. It's falling apart already and they've only had it a few years.
If they had maintained the furniture they were given by their parents, I would love to keep them around in my home and give them to my children when I pass, too. But I don't want cheap, mass-produced garbage from my parents simply because it belonged to my parents.
My wife and I are both the youngest in our families, and all of our extended family uses us as a dumping ground for stuff to they're too guilty to throw away or donate. About 10% of the time it's something actually useful, 90% we already have a better version of whatever it is or simply don't want or need it.
No, I'm not taking my father in law's perfectly good TV. I have a TV, and the one he bought was mediocre at best when it was new.
Look, I'm not saying there aren't reasons for it. Obviously the economic value of a TV is now low. If you're posting on HN, chances are you can afford a new TV in a day's work, which may be less overhead than storing a TV for when you or someone else might need it in the future. At the same time, this is a historical abnormality. A television is a miracle device made with extremely advanced, relatively speaking, technology. 50 years ago, it would have been insane to snub your nose at that. To you it's a disposable good, to an older generation there is no reason to view it as such (and, I'd argue, this cultural value of disposability that is being forged is extremely bad and not actually sustainable for our society long-term).
It isn't an artifact of modernity that people don't want stuff like that. And as for stuff that is an artifact of modernity, the generation entering their 80s today lived through the widespread adoption of color TV, the moon landings, the space shuttle, cable TV, mainframes, PCs, CDs, VHS, DVDs, the internet, cellphones, smartphones, and freaking microwaves, never mind all the advancements in autos. You'd think someone with that lived experience would understand that times change and their kids might not want all their old stuff for the same reason it's been sitting unused in their garage/basement for decades.
My diagnosis is it was boomers who wrote the script for "The Goonies", specifically the line "Goonies never say die!". They came up in an era where rampant consumerism was encouraged and even directly subsidized as a political policy, hell it was how we beat the commies! Hard to be a good consumer past a certain point if you're too aware of your own mortality.
Do you need and can afford to keep somewhere another 6 creaky chairs, a big worn out dining table, bags of old clothes that don't fit anyone, outdated and broken electronics that probably don't work anymore, and so on? Even memories like pictures and videos are sometimes too much. They used to be a couple of photo albums, half with people you wouldn't even recognize, now there are TB of digital ones.
By and large the kids already have perfectly useful goods but no room for more.
Kinda legit: Most people who lived through the Great Depression learned a "never throw any possibly-useful thing away" ethos as a survival skill. And they often taught that to their own children. And stuff became obsolete far more slowly back then, and furniture repair was a normal things, and ...
More commonly - "leave it to my children" is an excellent self-delusion...er, I mean psychological dodge, if you don't want to deal with the physical work, time required, or mental grief of proper sorting and disposal. But note that the "mental grief" may not be internal to the person deciding to procrastinate. If some of their family really don't get along with each other, then paying rent to put off the angry family drama may be their least-bad option.