Basement Purge Part 1

January 28, 2013 by Jesse K on s/v Smitty 4 Comments

So this weekend my Bride and I began the purge of our basement. Our house is only about 800 square feet. Small by modern house standards. I think my cousin’s kitchen may be bigger than my whole house.  We separated our stuff into 4 piles: trash, donate, sell and keep.

Here is the trash pile.

I would estimate at about two, maybe three, cubic yards.  That’s three cubic yards of crap that we wouldn’t even donate but for some reason we felt the need to store.  And half of this stuff was probably from college!  That means we moved it from our parents’ house, to our apartment in Mansfield, to our apartment in Weymouth and finally to our house.

On top of that, I threw out another three cubic yards of trash from the garage last month.  That makes a total of six cubic yards of trash.  That is a pretty sad statement that we had that much trash in our house and didn’t feel like hoarders.

Next weekend we should hopefully get rid of the donate pile, probably another three to four cubic yards of stuff.  I think I will need to borrow a work truck to bring the donations to the Salvation Army. This is primarily old clothes and shoes, some sporting equipment, pots, pans, some house decorations, etc.

The sad part of this is we “cleaned out” the basement last winter.  We probably threw out two cubic yards of trash and we filled the back of my work truck with stuff for Salvation Army (three cubic yards).

That means in the last year, we will have gotten rid of 15 cubic yards of trash.  Below is a photo of a 15 cubic yard dumpster, to put this in perspective.  How is it we could fit this much unneeded stuff in our house?  And that is just unneeded stuff that we think has little to no value.  We still have piles of stuff that we think we can sell.

RANT… This is the trappings of a consumer driven society.  We put artificial values on the “stuff” we surround ourselves with.  We give of our time to work for dollars to buy things that end up in the trash.  I guess “The Narrator” had it right when he said “Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something like clever coffee tables in the shape of a yin and yang, I had to have it. I would flip through catalogs and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’ We used to read pornography. Now it was the Horchow Collection. I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever.”  This is one of things about myself that I am trying to change.  This is part of the new me, the new us, that will live more simply and thus live more on the water.  Perhaps we should just take those few things that really matter and blowup the house.  Go “Tyler” style.  END RANT

Soon it is going to be time to learn how to sell stuff on eBay and Craig’s list.  We tried to sell a couple of things on Craig’s List in the past but without a lot of luck.  Although we did sell our first boat, Splash, on Craig’s List.  Based on our friends’ (Tom and Nancy) experience, I don’t think we will be adding too much to the cruising kitty.

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