A man with one garage knows where his tools are. A man with two garages is never quite sure.
That’s the hardware version of Segal’s Law.
Take two garages, a basement, and a son who borrows tools at will. Add in decades of hardware accumulation from D-I-Y home projects. Season with a habit of leaving tools wherever I last used them. Top off with limited storage space and an increasingly faulty memory.
The result is chaos.
These days, every significant D-I-Y project starts off with a 15 minute stream of questions. Don’t I already own a blank? Where the hell did I leave that blank? Is that the blank that broke five years ago, or did I buy another blank to replace that? Didn’t I lend that blank to somebody? Which toolbox would I have put that blank in?
Honey, do you have any idea where I would have left my blank?
And, for those of us in the Washington DC area, the inevitable “I know I bought that blank at Hechinger’s. It hasn’t been that long since they closed. Has it?” (Answer: 23 years.)
Increasingly, I’ve come up with one-size-fits-all answer to all of those pesky questions:
Just buy another one.
Even though I’m pretty sure I already own one, even though it’s inherently wasteful to run to the hardware store at the drop of a hat, arguably the biggest time-saver for the aging and disorganized D-I-Y enthusiast is just to shell out for another one of whatever you’re looking for. Search for five minutes, and if it ain’t where you think it should be, just buy another one. It’s quicker.
The time of reckoning, hardware version.
I turn 64 this month. I’ve been on a rampage to reduce the amount of stuff that I own. Call it my home-grown version of Swedish death cleaning.
It’s no great secret that once you qualify for Social Security, much of what you own can be expected to outlast you.
Some of that will be great, quality, usable, heirloom goods. True assets. Something that a relative or a stranger will enjoy after you’re gone.
But much of it is just crap. If not crap to you, then crap to anyone but you. E.g., a toilet plunger is a useful, perhaps even necessary, device. A good one is practically indestructible. But is somebody going to want mine after I’m gone?
Crap is not one large, amorphous category. Household crap comes in hundreds of distinct varieties. Absolutely the best categorization I ever saw was in the book “Clutter’s Last Stand“. The author (Don Aslett) was the Marie Kondo of his day, and the book is well worth the read for the listing of different types of clutter alone.
Your own personal pile of crap is going to be most evident in whatever area of life you tend to go most overboard. For some people, maybe it’s clothing. Perhaps books, or art, or glassware. Stamps, coins, guns, cars. You name it.
My personal crap avatar (crapvatar?) is the coffee can of mixed fasteners. Bolts, screws, nuts, and God only knows what else. All the leftovers from all my D-I-Y projects, conglomerated into one great cloacal mass of hardware. Too good to toss out. Not worth enough to sort through. Occasionally useful.
Unambiguously crap once I’m gone.
As part of this round of cleaning, I am consolidating all my hardware and tools, with the idea of getting rid of as much as possible. Following the process outlined by KonMarie, I have started by gathering all I own, from all its various hiding places. The first step to recovery is to face the full extent of your excesses, hiding nothing.
This is the point at which “just buy another one” comes back to bite me, as I discover duplicates, triplicates, and more, of pretty much any type of home hardware you can imagine. Some of it seeing the light of day for the first time in decades.
It is appalling, but not unexpected. Like cirrhosis for the alcoholic, or a heart attack for the obese, a lifetime of bad hardware habits is catching up with me.
But how?
I now need some strategy for disposing of this ridiculous lifelong accumulation of tools and hardware. Everything from perfectly usable power tools down to the inevitable coffee can(s) of mixed fasteners.
Obviously, I could dumpster the lot and be done with it. Keep back the minimal set of items I think I might need over the next few years. Toss the rest in the garbage. Dust my hands, and I’m done.
That’s wasteful. Not merely from an environmental standpoint, but even more from a value standpoint. At least some of my hardware hoard could be of utility to someone, if I could only get it into the right hands.
The goal, then is to generate as much value out of this hardware excess as I can. Find the people who could use it, and get it into their hands.
And conversely, I need to acknowledge that large parts of it are virtually worthless, or not worth the cost of processing it. In particular, if you look on Ebay, you do in fact see people selling what amounts to the contents of their coffee cans. Everything from dealers in new fasteners combining odds lots from open boxes, to what appears to be literally a coffee can full of mixed steel fasteners. And people will buy that, in large lots, for about $1 a pound. So I guess there’s that, as a last resort. I don’t think that’s worth the cost of shipping, really.
I’ve already had my son sell some high-quality but no-longer-needed tools on Ebay. I don’t think I have much of anything left that is of enough value that it would pay the shipping costs to try to sell it. Although, per the above, it’s surprising what some will pay good money for on Ebay.
As a result, I’m now in the business of trying to find ways to give this away locally, to produce the highest value for the ultimate end users. Without paying shipping costs. And that means I’ll be giving it away through my local Buy Nothing and Freecycle groups, and similar.
I haven’t evolved a complete strategy yet, but it’s clear that there is some low-hanging fruit. For example, I have an open box of deck screws. It doesn’t look like much, but at today’s prices this scruffy box with four pounds of screws is about $40 worth of fasteners. Surely I can find a taker for that. The same for (e.g.) functioning power tools that I no longer need.
The real trick is going to be getting any value at all out of the lower-end merchandise. With the coffee can of mixed fasteners being the apex of that problem. The question being whether there is some way I can easily repackage that so that someone in my immediate area would be pleased to take that off my hands.
One can find examples of D-I-Y devices to sort out the contents of the typical suburban coffee can of mixed fasteners. Upon investigation, these seem to be either aids to manual sorting or Rube Goldberg contraptions that are unlikely to work well. The upshot is that technology is unlikely to come to my rescue. And in any case, do I really want to buy or make yet one more hardware-related device?
So, the question is, how can I pack up this excess in way that provides some value. Otherwise, there’s always the option of turning it in as scrap metal. But only as a last resort.
I’ll let you know how it goes. But I’m keeping the stuff from Hechinger’s.
