What would Marie Kondo do with all this?

[Knitwit99]

Throw it all straight in the bin? Categorise it and store it in pastel coloured boxes? It's all been in our shed for years and I would so love to just throw it all away but one time we needed a new hinge for the freezer door and found one at the bottom of one of these boxes. All this shit really gets me down. It's my plan for this summer to be rid of it all.

Look through it and take out anything useful and dump the rest.

I had a pile like this and I listed the main bits on freecycle and a couple of people took most of it.
Slowly Marie Kondoing my house but trying not to just fill landfill with the things I’m getting rid of. She wouldn’t say box/categorise unless it’s stuff you definitely need to store/use.

How do you know though? What if we need the spare doorknob which matches all the other doorknobs in a few years time and we can't buy a matching one? What if I need 8m of all-purpose cord with a load capacity of 200kg next week?
I'm generally quite good at getting rid but this stuff has sort of stumped me.

I use this as a way of deciding: if I can replace each item for less than £20 in less than 20 minutes (ie it's easily available) then I get rid of it.

Otherwise it's just turning your home into a storage facility for stuff you might but probably won't need. That's how hoarding starts!

I agree with is it easily replacable. Generic items that are cheap aren't worth the bother and may not be sufficient in quantity. Consumables like silicon go off anyway.
If something naturally breaks over time, would you actually just want to replace the lot by then?
Do you have a realistic intention to use it or is it just the generic hoarders "might be useful".

MK would thank it and bin it for sure. She once got rid of a hammer that didn't bring her joy and used a frying pan to hammer in nails.

If I needed a matching doorknob in 20 years, I'd replace the lot and donate my old ones. Get rid! I

@Paraballa that's a great way of looking at it, thank you.

What if I need 8m of all-purpose cord with a load capacity of 200kg next week?

You’ll probably think to yourself ‘I wish I’d have kept that last week’, feel mildly irritated for about two minutes and then buy a new cord and then life will go on and you’ll be fine I don’t think this stuff is sparking any joy - say thank you and throw!

Nothing sparks joy here. She would bin it all.

I find that when I have dumped a heap of stuff (like yesterday before the bin men came) I will need one of the exact things I just dumped (this afternoon being an example).

I tidy odds & sods into plastic boxes and stack them in the garage, unless they really are no use at all.

Move to a bigger house/build a bigger shed ! We have lots of shelves and labelled boxes.

Our tools are sorted into decorating tools, rotating tools, other tools and consumables. Makes sense to me even if you have to look through 3 drawers to remember where you filed the bradawl last time.

Maybe have 2 boxes, one for consumables, adhesives or something like that and the other for irreplaceable spares. Maybe one for cords if you have enough and you are likely to remember you own one with a 200kg load capacity. I reckon a lot of the stuff in there will have gone off and is getting in the way of you finding the bits you'll ever actually look for again.

In my mind if you can't both remember you own something, and remember where you left it, you might as well not own it.