Sometimes I long for the 70's and 80's when you just binned stuff you didn't want without a second thought about the environment.

[LimitIsUp]

Ugh. Perhaps some of you can relate to this problem.

Lots of clutter - yes its in the spare room and in the garage and loft so its not in my face, but I still feel burdened by it

So much stuff

A lot of it is good quality bits and pieces that could be used by others and shouldn't be tipped, but we simply no longer need it or require it. I just don't feel able to send it to landfill (the guilt!)

I probably could, if so inclined, make money from selling it but we don't need the money and I don't need the hassle.

What I really want is it all gone - in a none time intensive and hassle free way - but I don't want it simple disposed of when its not broken or tat. I absolutely don't want to spend time on sorting it (so no ebay, no garage sales, no car boot sales and probably no charity shop trips either because of the volume of stuff) but hiring a skip . refuse tip wouldn't be good either

What do I do? Other than procrastinate

@LimitIsUp

Local auction house - now there's a thought

Auctions are a good option, if you use a house clearance service then they are likely to be connected to an auction house anyway.

With a house clearance you pay them to remove your stuff, they then dispose of anything that’s no good and try to sell the resf.
One of my hobbies is buying at auction, mostly to buy and sell, quite a few lots are bundles that they have made up of similar items. Those (hopefully) sell cheaply

If you make up your own lots to put in and make them look their best then you’re getting the benefit of anything good that you’re selling. You can set a minimum price, but if you’re just intending to get rid then you can leave it open and see if you do better.

In the current climate many auctions may not be running, or they have changed the way they run viewings and the bidding

See ... I don’t understand why anyone would mend a hole in a sock. Socks are cheap. They are broke so I would just replace. I don’t even own a sewing box

Not all socks are cheap. I get some nice merino ones from costco. They still only work out a few quid a pair, but if I can extend the life by a few minutes of sewing up a hole, why wouldn't I? Plus my walking socks often cost £15-20 a pair and that's certainly not throwaway cheap.

@BarbaraofSeville

How do you sew buttons on or turn up hems

Well it seems fairly self explanatory to me, but there's probably endless youtube videos if you're unsure.

Or if you don't want to do the task yourself, sewing shops or dry cleaners will probably do alterations for a few pounds.

My DM has an all-metal stapler from the 1950s. It's fabulous and will work forever. I can't buy one of those anywhere... except Manufactum, where it costs £153. Now, I want to buy that stapler instead of buying lots of cheap crappy staplers which break after a few years. And no doubt that stapler will still be used by my great-great-grandchildren in a hundred years time. But it's a big leap to spend £153 on a stapler

I've been in the same job for nearly 30 years and some time along the way I've inherited a stapler and 4 hole punch, both of which probably date back to the 70/80s from long retired colleagues. Both are solid as can be and I guard them well, or at least I used to before I was WFH but I'll be slightly pissed off if I ever go back to the office and they've been pilfered and I have to put up with inferior modern versions.

I'm also still using the calculator I did my GCSEs with and that's about 35 years old.

It was in reply to the poster without a sewing box.

I am a sewer and crafter and have a sewing machine etc😊

See ... I don’t understand why anyone would mend a hole in a sock. Socks are cheap. They are broke so I would just replace. I don’t even own a sewing box.

Waste disposal

I think we are going hit peak crap soon with clothes. The cheap supply from Asia is going to dry up and the pollution/water consumption/sweat shops need sorting out. If even basic socks were £5 a pair rather than £5 a pack we might bother to own a needle and thread.
I can sew, but I can't believe how in a couple of generations we got to the point where people literally cannot do simple maintenance on clothes, and the clothes are so cheap and crappy that landfilling them as soon as they need a small repair is seen as a good thing.

It's so wasteful throwing things away just because of a small hole. This week I had a broken zip tag on my boots. It cost £2.50 to repair at the cobblers. I also depilled a couple of merino wool dresses, one Toast, one Jaeger and a couple of woolly sweaters. Why wouldn't you?

It's a shame these skills are being lost.

I darned my socks when I was at uni, because every penny did count back then. I also mend holes in clothes because it seems daft to throw out clothes I like wearing for a small hole. I was shocked at a friend who was going to throw out a pair of jeans because the stitching on a rear pocket was coming away. It would just never occur to me to throw out a whole pair of jeans for something so simple to fix. It made me realise there are things I just take for granted in my life that other people think totally different about.

My feather pillows were a bit stained so I opened them up, removed the filling, washed the cover, refilled them and sewed them up.

I chuck feather pillows through the wash without emptying them, either on a very sunny summer day to dry outside, or this time of year when I can put them over a radiator. They just need punching up a bit to fluff them up when dry. I believe you can put them in a tumble dryer with tennis balls, but I don't have a tumble dryer. My 3 tog king-size duvet fits in the machine, but the 9 tog one doesn't, do that has to be taken in for cleaning.

I have dealt with restuffing cushions with feathers before - it's not a job I'd choose to do again!

My experience of the 80s etc must be different to yours, as my memory is of a time when less was wasted, not more. My dad repaired and fixed things, my mum darned clothing. We didn't just chuck stuff out because we weren't wasteful (and that has followed me into adulthood).

Our village has a "sell and swap" Facebook group. When I have stuff that is still working/useable but that I don't want, I stick it on there for free and it's gone within 48 hrs. The person wanting it always collects.

I work long hrs, but a photo and a Facebook post take no time at all. We decorated recently and had a load of F&B tester pots with only a tiny amount used. I put the partly used tins on the village FB group, labelled as being useful for crafts etc. and they were snapped up.

I think we are going hit peak crap soon with clothes. The cheap supply from Asia is going to dry up and the pollution/water

I think that too. It has to come to an end at some point along with synthetic fibers in clothing. Back in the day natural fibers would breakdown when it went to landfill, now stuff lies in the ground for 100s of years not to mention the polluting micro fibers that break off in the wash. Natural fiber is more expensive but less polluting.

I agree with so many others about you getting your facts completely wrong about the 70s and 80s.
I am still amazed at what some people replace or buy new on a regular basis that I never would, and my Mum and Grandma would be totally shocked about.

I was born in the 70s. My parents had The Waste Makers on their bookshelf when I was growing up. I read it as a young adult in the 90s.
Book written in the 60s.
Incredibly prescient.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/250912.The_Waste_Makers

Local Facebook groups for the area - drag it outside and stick a for free notice.
Wildly popular round here during lockdown- people found all sorts of stuff got new homes and probably previously would have just been trashed

Apparently my Great Granny could knit socks, she died around 1930 so well before my time. But apparently knitting the heal of a sock isn't easy.
It's really not that difficult and there are plenty of YouTube tutorials. Look at #sockknitters on Instagram lot of people are knitting socks nowadays. It isn't an entirely lost art.

It maybe isn't a lost art but it's a heck of a lot more difficult and time consuming than grabbing a pack of 5 pairs along with the milk in Asda.

The effort to knit them alone would make you want to get as much use out of them as possible, hence making perfect sence to darn holes. Much more so than the cheap mass product socks we have now.

Apparently, there is enough clothing on the planet to last for the next 6 generations. Patrick Grant (from Great British sewing Bee is one campaigner for sustainable fashion.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dgcn

Apologies for dodgy punctuation there.

I do think there is going to be a sea change after Covid.
Also many jobs are being automated or computerised - if people don't have jobs what are they going to do with the extra time - apart from Fb, Twitter, Netflix etc. Building or making something has a reward in itself which i don't think you can get from watching tv /being online, unless you are making or writing the content.
And if we do stop buying clothes so much there will be all those designers, models, factory workers, shippers, shopstore workers out of work too.
We will need to find reasons to get up in the morning and ways to find reward.

@Schehezarade

I do think there is going to be a sea change after Covid. Also many jobs are being automated or computerised - if people don't have jobs what are they going to do with the extra time - apart from Fb, Twitter, Netflix etc. Building or making something has a reward in itself which i don't think you can get from watching tv /being online, unless you are making or writing the content. And if we do stop buying clothes so much there will be all those designers, models, factory workers, shippers, shopstore workers out of work too. We will need to find reasons to get up in the morning and ways to find reward.

I hope so, of all the things we've had to worry about this year, the return to indiscriminate use of "disposable" everything has really bothered me.

We had our dishwasher repaired last week.

The repairman told us it could last a good few years yet and that we should run it till it drops, because the ones that are being made at the moment are only designed to last about 5 years total. Even the "good" brands (and price does not always equal quality).

5 fucking years. No wonder there's so much landfill.

@EBearhug

My feather pillows were a bit stained so I opened them up, removed the filling, washed the cover, refilled them and sewed them up.

I chuck feather pillows through the wash without emptying them, either on a very sunny summer day to dry outside, or this time of year when I can put them over a radiator. They just need punching up a bit to fluff them up when dry. I believe you can put them in a tumble dryer with tennis balls, but I don't have a tumble dryer. My 3 tog king-size duvet fits in the machine, but the 9 tog one doesn't, do that has to be taken in for cleaning.

I have dealt with restuffing cushions with feathers before - it's not a job I'd choose to do again!

When I've needed to dry down jackets or sleeping , I've found that beating them up replicates the dryer/tennis ball thing, and is also very cathartic! (I also don't have a tumble dryer).

As an 80s kid I agree that we definitely had less stuff and thinks would be reused and repaired . I remember handmedown clothes being a real treAt whereas now people often really don't want them, as clothes are so much cheaper now (not a good thing environmentally obvs ) jumble sales were really popular and sometimes it really would be of poor quality -tables piled high with old clothes but they'd still make a lot of money .

It sounds a bit backwards to keep buying cheap T shirts to keep factory workers being paid a pittance to make 300 per day.
It would be better if they were paid proper money to make better quality clothing for their local market.
The UK fashion industry has already been massively downsized due to cheap overseas manufacturing, those jobs disappeared in the 1980s.

It's annoying about the White goods being bad quality e.g. fridges

Perhaps the governments need to look at this as well as electric cars as this is clogging up landfill

Yes, the lovely clothes made in Newtown Wales by Laura Ashley, 1980s were excellent quality

Jumpers didn't bobble like now