Have you ever seen one of those pictures where somebody gets all the food that a person or family would eat in a week/month/year and pile it all up to make some point or other?   How about non-edible stuff?  Ever wondered what it would look like if everything you ever owned had been kept rather than thrown away when it broke or got replaced by a new model?

As a visual metaphor for the modern consumerist lifestyle it could be quite fun – all those old TVs, video recorders, cameras, books, magazines, board games, kids’ toys, sporting equipment, ornaments, and everything else all piled up…  it would look a lot like my loft actually.I do hoard stuff a bit anyway, but even I was amazed by what I have found so far.  One problem is that if something is perfectly serviceable I can’t bring myself to throw it away.  Then again, if it breaks I can’t help feeling that maybe it could be easily repaired and also can’t bring myself to throw it away.

So it all goes upstairs.  Out of sight, out of mind. Until the prospect of moving house looms on the horizon, and I decide it really is time to let go.  E-bay would be one solution, as would car boot sales, but I really don’t have the patience for boot sales – or the inclination to get up early on a Sunday and a historical disagreement with PayPal makes E-Bay difficult, even if I could be bothered with that.

So far we have given seven large boxes of stuff to a neighbour so she can car boot sale it, and made so many trips to the tip that I have lost count and still the house seems to be full of boxes – and I have only sorted out one of the two lofts.  Fortunately it was the larger and more full up loft that is now nearly cleared, but even so, it seems never-ending.

The electronics skip at the recycling centre has had enough of my stuff to stock a small 15-year-old branch of Dixons.  There was a 17″ CRT monitor, at least 4 old printers, hubs, a Zip drive, several CD-ROM drives, odd circuit boards, cables and all sorts.

The local car boot sale is likely to soon see a Sega Megadrive 2 (in its box!), a Sony Playstation, a VHS-C camcorder, several board games, including a Dutch language Monopoly set, jigsaw puzzles, books, VHS tapes and other assorted treasured possessions.

The activity has now slowed down a bit, which helps.  I was trying to get the place totally in order so that it was habitable and attractive to anybody interested in moving here, but halfway through that process we managed to arrange a move.  We are looking at a timescale of 6 or 7 weeks now so I can take it easier – hence spending the best part of a week sorting through old photo albums.

The scary thing is the shelves.   I have taken down shelves from 4 rooms, one cupboard and the upstairs landing.   There are several distinct stacks of planks: I don’t even want to think about the total lenght of shelving I now have stacked up, or the fact that recently it was all full.  I have been lobbing all the support brackets into a heavy-duty reusable supermarket carrier bag and it is now too heavy to lift.

I know for a fact that there will not be enough wall in the new place for all of it, even if I was allowed to put shelves up everywhere, which I won’t be.   The place is going to be quite minimalist apparently, with anything untidy like bookshelves banished to the spare bedroom.  That’s fine, the only issue is going to be how to fit a spare bed in there as well, and what to do when Chrystal finishes Uni and the spare bedroom isn;t spare any more.

Cross that bridge when we come to it.  It might involve a shed-based library 🙂