stuckinstuff

Stuff Is Disappearing Soon

There's going to be some missing stuff soon.  We're having a garage sale this weekend.

My wife and I spent a little too much time tonight heatedly discussing what items might not get sold.  My  plan is to sell a lot.  And she wants to, too.  It just turns out that I need to avoid selling any of our wooden German toys.  To be honest, I'm fine with that.

The goal is to rid our house of hundreds of items.  Pretty much everything is going to be priced at either $1 or $5, with a few high-ticket (but still amazingly inexpensive) items thrown in for good measure.

What's left will be swapped... more on swapping soon.

Consumed - PBS Marketplace Special

The PBS show Marketplace is running a special series, Consumed.  The program asks the question, "Is our consumer culture sustainable."

I caught a good part of the first episode on my way to and from The Home Depot.  Ironic, yes.  Yet I was purchasing energy efficient light bulbs for our garage.

One thing I'll be looking for as I listen through this series is any commentary on the effects of consumer culture on non-environmental matters.  That is not the focus of Consumed.  And so I will not blame them if they avoid discussing issues like unfair labor and the unsatisfactory nature of materialism (though they did touch on the latter indirectly some).

Let me know your thoughts.

Update #5 - 100 Thing Challenge Gets Practical

If you've heard me say it once, you've heard me say it - oh, I don't know - two times?  Getting rid of stuff is the hardest part of the 100 Thing Challenge.  I'm estimating I've been living weekly on only about 60-63 of the 100 personal items I'm keeping.  You'd think getting rid of that huge list of stuff I'm, er, getting rid of would be a snap.  Not so.

When I first started the 100 Thing Challenge I had noble ideas that went way beyond the practical.  Not only would I get rid of the dozens and hundreds of unnecessary things I've accumulated over the years, but I'd get rid of all of it in style.  My plan was to pull in extra family income through eBay and garage sales.  And what I donated was going to go to specific charities - the shoes to a shoe charity, the clothes to a clothes charity, the toys to a toy charity, the electronic gadgets to an electronic gadgets charity.

Um, can you say AMVETS?  Today the AMVETS truck is suppose to drive up to our house and haul a huge load of stuff away.  We like AMVETS.  In addition to being what appears to be a good charity, they also come by the house and pick stuff up.  They drive BIG trucks.  So they can pick up our BIG pile of cra stuff.

So today the 100 Thing Challenge lost a little bit of its innocence.  Pragmatism beat out ideology.  But let me assure you that once I don't have so much stuff interfering with my life, I plan to jump headlong into the theoretical.

Update #3 - The Challenge’s First Hurdle: Sentimentality and Stuff

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve taken up the 100 Thing Challenge.  I’m hopeful.  I think it might just be possible to reduce my personal stuff to 100 things, allowing for the few inconsistencies in the way I count.  It has taken me a few weeks of trying to reduce my personal belongings for me to identify some of the burdens of the 100 Thing Challenge.  The last few days I’ve been struggling with sentimentality.

I will tell you a little about myself.  I am not a pack rat.  I’m pretty much anti-pack rat.  It is very difficult for me to keep stuff around.  Even the stuff I should keep I often throw away, like the love-letters my wife (then girl friend) wrote to me in college.  I chucked them all back when I was stupid.  But what would I do now if I still had them?  Would I reduce them to make room on my list of 100 things?  Sentimentality is a pitfall for those interesting in living a life of simplicity.

Now the trouble caused by sentimentality is particularly acute for many of us living in the western world.  For generations the western world has prioritized stuff.  And it still does.  That means that our birthday and graduation and anniversary gifts are often things.  (When was the last time you gave someone you cared about a present that you could not wrap?)  And often the most valuable inheritance from a loved one is some thing.  We hand stuff down from generation-to-generation because it has “sentimental value.”  Stuff is often the catalyst for meaningful sentiment.

So I’m struggling a bit with sentimentality.  Where do I draw the line?  Do I keep the Father’s Day gifts my daughters give me for one, two, five years and then reduce?  I just remembered that out in the garage on my workbench is a small New Testament KJV Bible.  I never read it and rarely touch it.  It’s the Bible my grandfather carried with him when he fought in WWII.  And I’m pretty sure my father carried it with him in Vietnam.  Neither my grandfather nor my father talked much about their experiences in war.  And I was not in the military.  Honestly I’m not even sure why this Bible should be sentimental to me.  But it is.  And so I need to figure out what to do with it.

I’ll keep you informed.

Thinking Out Loud

Someone sent me an email recently asking a few challenging questions about my 100 Thing Challenge.  There are some good points here, so I thought I’d publish a bit of the email and make a little (?) response:

1. 2 Bibles? If you have a good reason for it, then certainly, but duplication seems anti-thematic at the moment.
2. Speaking of duplications, 2 belts and 2 pairs of dress shoes (black and brown). I would suggest pick a color and eliminate the other.
3. Regular journal and a hiking journal? Why two separate?
4. Can one or the other backpack (work and weekend) handle both jobs?
5. I am assuming that "watch" is in the tools category. I don't know the accuracy you need in a compass, but any Boy Scout will remember how to turn an analog watch into "Where's North?" indicator on a sunny day.

There is a small theme of redundancy in the 100 thing list of stuff I’m planning on keeping.  (In fact, I just remembered that I forgot to add another knife.  A really amazing knife my folks brought back from some mountain village in Europe.  So two knives.)  I guess the question would be, Is there room for redundancy in a concerted effort to reduce, refuse, and rejigger?  As the 100 Thing Challenge gets under way, it is mostly about reducing.  Refusing and rejiggering will come once I’m down to 100 things.  So put another way the question is, Does redundancy and reduction make for contradiction?

Honestly, that is a good question.  I’m not sure I know the answer.  StuckInStuff’s tag line of sorts is “positively cautious about stuff.”  In my writing, I’ve tried to emphasize that some stuff is good.  And the “goodness” of some stuff is not only an attribute of its unique place in my collection of possessions.  That said, clearly I’m also suggesting that abundance is risky.  Too much of a good thing, as they say, is bad.  So just running down the list:

IKEA 2008 Catalog - Ambivalence Never Looked So Good

Like you, I too received the 2008 IKEA Catalog this week.  Oh my.  What to do?

Don’t you wish you had a dime for every thing pictured in the IKEA Catalog?  Not just the IKEA furniture and frames and rugs and cabinets and dishes and bath towels, but also all the stuff that IKEA’s way over attractive Scandinavian models litter their houses with.  This has been a busy week for me.  So crazy day-long blog projects are out of the question.  But I bet if I counted all the things in the 2008 IKEA Catalog and multiplied them by ten cents, it would baffle all our minds!

In fact, since I’ve been throwing around sort of rash challenges of late, I’m making an IKEA Challenge.  If some IKEA deity reads this StuckInStuff.com blog post and offers me one U.S. dime for every thing pictured in the 2008 IKEA Catalog, I will count all those things and announce the results on this blog.  Moreover, I will take my payment in the form of an IKEA gift card.  Further still, I will remove from our house all furniture, pictures, bookshelves, kitchen utensils, textiles, garage shelving - everything except our piano and our clothes - and replace it all with IKEA bought items using only the amount of money on the IKEA gift card.  And finally - though I don’t know exactly how - I’ll find a way to incorporate the IKEA Challenge into the 100 Thing Challenge.

IKEA creates so many feelings of ambivalence for me.  You cannot argue their commitment to quality, good-looking furniture at a reasonable price.  And the designs of their furniture and other products give an impression of minimalism and frugality.  Though some how, for me at least, a trip to IKEA rarely ends in either.  Even though I truly have hit the end of my stuff rope and I am clearing stuff out, even so, yesterday I enjoyed browsing the 2008 IKEA Catalog.  What’s that about?

Disclosure: This post has been written at an IKEA Jerker Desk.

100 Thing Challenge

Yesterday we set aside today for cleaning up our house.  That would not be so bad if by “cleaning up” we merely meant dusting and vacuuming and putting a few things away.  But we had bigger aspirations.  All in all, it went pretty well.  I got our porch cleaned and new porch lights installed.  I got the new dresser set up that my in-laws graciously bought for our older daughters.  I got the cardboard that the dresser came in chopped up and put in the garage with the other piles of cardboard.  And my wife and children did a lot of cleaning up, too.

It’s just that, in grand scheme of things, it does not seem like enough.  We have a lot of stuff.  And honestly, it is difficult to purge.  What goes?  That is a hard decision.  But I have an idea.  A spontaneous idea that might change my life forever.  I’m calling it the 100 Thing Challenge.  And I’m taking it.  Here is how it goes.

I’m going to only keep 100 things.  All the rest gets purged.  Sold.  Given away.  Traded ;-)  Some how, all the other things will no longer remain in my possession.

This seems like a good idea to me, but I want to be realistic and proceed with caution.  So I’m taking it slow.  First, I’m only going to take the 100 Thing Challenge for my own personal things.  Stuff like my car, which is mostly mine but which my wife uses sometimes, does not count.  And I’m not going to include clothes at this point, though I am considering that next.  And anything that involves physical exercise gets a pass for now.  A few things might count as one thing.  For example I have a collection of Marklin toy trains.  I’ll need time to consider if the collection counts as one or each item counts as one.  For now, the whole collection is one thing.  But that’s about it.  Guitars, iPods, camera equipment, watches, trinkets of all kinds, and more.  All those things count as personal possessions.  And I’m going to finish my 100 Thing Challenge with only 100 of them.  I’m giving myself till the end of August to have my 100 things and to  have gotten rid of everything else.

Will She Make It Through?

First, find the child in the photograph.  Next, ask yourself whether you think she will make it through.  There is so much stuff for children to navigate in our modern world.  Even supposing that you are a neat freak and never let your garage accumulate boundless stuff, the world offers unlimited stuff.  Some children must negotiate a stuff-filled garage, avoiding trips, sharp tools, and hamster dropping.  Nearly all children in the West must find their way through a world of stuff.  How will they make it through?  Who will guide them and protect them and share the burdens and joys of their journey?