Rambling: A good home for the stuff? Or when to let that go.

Mals of Muse in Wooden Shoes mentioned this blog in a very interesting post about stuff and clutter and dreams. Which reminded me of how little I've been doing in this blog. Which made me decide, all righty then, get moving.

So, a quick ramble on a clutter topic that I've been thinking about:  The "good home" trap. And the trap of finding a home at all.

I've always thought that I have a reasonably immunity from the perfectionist extremes of the "good home" idea. The idea that you're going to keep that chair until you find a person that you know, and you know how they'll use the chair, and you know how they'll take care of the chair, and you know that the six people that you'd prefer to give the chair to really really don't want it, and so on. My attitude when presented with that problem has always been, "Just give it to the first person who'll take it!"

And, yes, I am free of that level of "good home"ness, but I'm not altogether free from it. How do I know that? I know that because I have things that I'm perfectly ready to get rid of, never want to see again, but they're not gone yet. They should be gone.

• The clothes? Nice warm decent-looking clothes; surely we'll remember to drive the car to the donation shop eventually?
• The kitchenware? I fell down on getting back to some Freecycle takers; I'll find their names and offer it to them. Maybe.
• The books? They're waiting for me to get around to selling them at the used bookstore.
• The driveway Free pile? It's raining today; I'll try to remember to put stuff out when it's dry.
• Those cleaners and that cutlery? If we put them in the driveway Free pile, some child or pet might hurt themselves.
• Those curtain rods? Did we ask the neighbors if they want them? If they said yes, we can't put them in the driveway Free pile. Did you remember to ask?
• Those chairs that are broken but could easily be repaired with a couple of brackets but we'd still have no use for them but nobody took them from Freecycle last time but they're perfectly good? How many times do we retry Freecycle?

And so on, and so on. There's a lot of stuff in this logjam. It needs to break. More extensive use of the Free pile, rather than spending time with Freecycle and giving to charity shops and selling used books, is one part of that. But I think that the second part is more extensive use of trash bags. I already trash dubious stuff, but I think that it's time to start trashing more of the Perfectly Good.

Image: By Hyenda. Wikimedia Commons.