Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 01, 2022

I can see I was in the wrong line of business!

I’m house hunting. I have enough furniture and goods to furnish an entire home in my storage unit. My storage company raised my rent from $107 to $191 for a 10×10 unit just 4 months after moving in, without any notice.

They’re PODS People.

People hang on to too much stuff. We are in the process of cleaning out my in-laws’ house. 85 years of STUFF. They’re great people, but I think collecting STUFF for 85 years and then expecting your kids to deal with it is a little selfish.

I helped a single mom move out of the homeless shelter, most of her things were in storage. There were brown recluses everywhere on those boxes!

And, of course, the Christmas decorations will start going up today!

Many humans become acquisitive over the years. Sometimes it’s stuff that is useful when needed but not other times, sometimes treasured family memories, sometimes just whimsy. Unfortunately, when the time arrives to jettison the bulk of it, tapping into that ‘garage sale’ vein is very hard, as the folks who might buy it already have fully loaded boxes of their own.

How’s THIS for sad: Some of the storage places here have had issues with people renting a unit … and then sneaking in at the end of the day to sleep there. Hou$ing co$t$ are astronomical and this is the best they can do.

I have seasonal stuff and don’t like climbing into an attic. Cellar is used as workshop so I got a locker and it is climate controlled even.

We have three or four totes — LARGE totes — filled with Christmas decorations, including one just for 43 Nativity scenes, but for Hallowe’en we spend a few dollars for candy and I break out my Jason Voorhees hockey jersey, hockey mask and plastic hatchet to greet the trick-or-treaters. And I’ve never spent a dime for a storage unit for ANY reason. If it doesn’t fit in our basement, it fills the trash barrel.

We’re retired and downsizing-in-place to minimize the burden on our distant children. We got rid of the expensive storage unit. We’re making money selling locally and online, donating useful stuff, and visiting the dump monthly. Boxes of old papers were shredded, the important ones filed. Next the jewelry will be divvied up and passed along now (why wait?). Then boxes of photos to sort. It feels so good to clear out drawers and cupboards that quietly accumulated junk through the decades. Our kids won’t have to shoulder the heavy work we did dissolving our parents’ households when they passed. Highly recommended while you still have your health.

Now, now, you know the rule: He who dies with the most stuff wins!

$100 worth of junk in the garage, preventing $100,000 worth of cars from fitting in the garage.

After 35 years as an independent building contractor, which meant saving every leftover because “we might need this on the next job” (we did use quite a bit of it), the process of selling, giving, and disposing took a number of months. The governing criterium for saving anything was that I had to know exactly where it would be used within the next six months, with a commitment to follow through and use it. As for things I might need in the future, there are people that will store these things for you. They charge a reasonable fee and the items are like new! They’re generally called “store-keepers” and they operate businesses called “stores”. Sure I’ve had to buy items I threw away several years ago but I didn’t know which items I would need and I haven’t been cluttered with hundreds of items I’ll never use. And a real plus is that I was able to find the item. There’s even a guy at the “store” who helps me find it. So liberating….

We just moved to a smaller house and my wife is going crazy trying to find places for all of her stuff. Better than the $650 a month we were paying for storage units.

In some locales you can rent holiday decorations.

Now there are companies that do outdoor seasonal decorating.

They own the decorations, put up the displays, take them down again, and store the stuff. It’s a great small business for people who enjoy and are good at it, and the results are more aesthetically pleasing than those who keep collecting whatever is trendy every year, and insist on including Rudolph, Charlie Brown and Elsa into their annual nativity scenes.

Even scarier is all that seasonal trash ending up in a landfill. Our only decoration was contributed by the experts; spiders!

Some of the decorated yards this year were really insane! And often they looked like an unorganized collection of random pieces.