Stuff: "Keepers" and "throwers"

Some people like to keep stuff. "It might come in handy someday." They are keepers.

Some people like to de-clutter. They are throwers.

I am helping a friend downsize his home. It means stuff has to be discarded. The husband is a "keeper" and the wife is a "thrower," so the situation is bad but not extreme. They live in a very nice neighborhood. They put stuff out onto their lawn alongside the street and put a sign on it: "FREE." It all disappeared within a day. People wanted their stuff.

By coincidence, someone else sent me this joke:

I am a thrower, but I am married to a keeper. I get the joke.

There are categories of stuff.

   1. Stuff we need and use, like this computer I am typing on. This includes seasonal stuff that is put away.

   2. Stuff we sometimes use, because we own it. This is the slightly-less-comfortable chair in rooms we don't go into very often and the back-up coffee maker that we have put away because it works great, but we have another one we like better.

   3. Keepsake stuff, like old photos and impractical wedding gifts like silver coffee servers. We put these things away safely on shelves and in boxes. We want those.

  4. There is stuff we happily throw away, like shattered glassware and packaging from Costco. We put these into the trash for weekly pickup.

  5. Then there is the Zone of Contention. This is stuff the thrower wants to discard and stuff the keeper wants to keep. This is stuff that isn't good enough to use but is too good to throw away. These include clothes you would never wear, even to do a sloppy painting job. These include a bedside lamp that is attractive, but it has a fussy on-off switch. It is usable, but we don't like it, so we store it. These include leftover building materials. 

The Zone of Contention is finessed in long term marriages between keeper and thrower by having space. You kick the can down the road to the heirs. What do you do with 11 perfectly good leftover bricks that match the brick on the new patio wall? If you ever need a brick you could buy it easily and inexpensively. But throw away 11 good-as-new bricks? This is what garages are for, then on-site storage sheds when the garage is full, then $70/month storage units, then second homes for category-2 furniture and storage sheds for category-5. 

People my age--72--face the simple reality that sometime soon we won't need stuff at all. We will be dead. We stay put in houses because we cannot bear to part with stuff, especially the stuff in category-2 and category-3. Category-1 stuff would fit nicely in a one or two bedroom retirement facility. My son might want the photo of Debra, me, and Barack Obama because my son is in the photo. There is no way he wants the four-by-seven-foot painting of me in a business suit looking like a financial advisor. The portrait is too big to hang, too big to move, too big to own, and worthless to sell. It is a snapshot of my life, not his.

This is a political blog, so I will make a tiny political point. There is a housing shortage. This house could be lived in by a big, bustling family with teenagers, which was my circumstance when I bought it. But I like the house I live in and the walls here are big enough to display the family portraits I have accumulated over the years. I don't want to give them up. I am staying put. Plus I have 11 bricks in the storage shed that could come in handy.

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