A really good box ☺

I hope my wife never sees this.....

Not so easy with the old, REALLY GOOD, boxes where the joints were glued and stapled with those huge copper staples and the corrugations were three or four layers deep; but, with the newer, thinner, taped together boxes, you can greatly decrease storage room by cutting the tape and collapsing the box.

As for some ridiculous carbon tax, we need to send all of those greenie-weenies to Siberia and let them spend several winters with no power other than solar and wind; before the third night, they would be begging for some black coal smoke to thaw them out; let the environment they are so in love with show them what the environment really is.

I am guilty of all of the above, alternating between purging and collecting stuff. Sometimes I pretend that we are moving house, this forces me to make decisions about what to keep and what to take.
I have tables full of stuff to donate, my kitchen drawer alone produced bagfuls of unused utensils, my husband refers to me as the ‘gadget Queen’, seems I can’t resist anything that I think will make life easier when it comes to food preparation.

I will admit I am a hoarder and being a hoarder is not a bad thing.

When something flies apart, be it vehicle, appliance, well-pump, plumbing, electrical, fence, barn, or riding mower, I can almost always get it back in action without having to go to town.

I am also a huge recycler, but not in the greenie-weenie sense of the word; I find practical uses for many things that most people will throw out.

However, if I do throw something away, I throw it into the plain old garbage and it doesn't bother my conscience one bit.

We have had several so-called recycling companies get huge government grants to go into the recycling business and they always end up getting caught taking all of that "recyclable" stuff to a common landfill; I just bypass all that foolishness.

If you live anywhere remotely rural, another good reason to not be too quick to throw something away is genuine actually be there with cash in hand public auctions.

People you would think had a little sense show beyond a doubt that they have no sense at all at a public auction.

The auctioneer can be selling a rusty filthy Black & Decker circular saw, missing the blade, blade collar, blade bolt, and blade wrench, and the cord cut off up close to the handle; $29.99 brand-new in the box at K-Mart with a blade and a warranty (for whatever that's worth); at auction, this rough-looking used saw, missing several vital parts, and with the cord cut off and no way to tell even if it will run, will bring $65 or $70

Five-gallon buckets of barn paint, the top pried open and probably two gallons gone, sat in a barn and froze and thawed countless times for the last fifteen years, untelling how much of the remaining volume is condensation; $34.99 brand-new at Lowes; it will bring $65 at auction.

You might think it is junk; but, collect enough of it and you can have an auction.

For old household and farm paraphernalia, most auction companies will sell it for 25% ; your 75% will be more than you paid for the stuff new; everybody comes out a winner.

I have seen people buy filthy old used mops, used rusty-yellow bedsheets, mattresses that look like they came out of the drunk tank at the county jail, even buckets of ashes out of a stove.

The moral of all this is DO NOT throw anything away.

There’s a matching box of cables at our house, I think they are breeding in there...

pontiac1940, when you do kick the bucket and fall face down in the mashed taters, your kids had best hope you haven't thrown away a thing; the more junk the better.

What you do is have an Estate Sale; with the proceeds from that, you can have a big thirty-eight-hundred-dollar rock instead of the six-hundred-dollar one the kids had in mind.

You can be put away in one of those satin-lined Walnut and Brass caskets with a mural of flying geese on the inside of the cover instead of the plastic and aluminum economy version they had picked out.

For this to really be successful, you need enough junk to fill a four-page flyer and keep two auctioneers busy from 10:AM 'til 4:PM

Some idiot will fight another idiot to buy those floppy disks for a ridiculous price.

That old Shop Vac with the motor-brushes burnt out will fetch more than you paid for it new.

And, what if you don't croak out when you meant to; you might actually need some of that stuff you were going to throw away.

The less valuable something is, the more it will bring accordingly; reason being, ignorant people who are going to throw their money away don't have a lot of money to throw away; but, you put something in front of them at an auction that they can afford and they throw their brains out the window --- until it gets out of their reach; then, that is when the wealthier idiots step in and take over; these people are usually doctors or wives of affluent people; their money comes too easy so they throw it away easily.

Mark my words; kick the bucket and have a big estate sale and then come back and tell me whether I am right or not.

I want to be

I look at things and wonder why they are there when they are never used - Christmas decorations are my next project. I started -- I got the boxes down onto the floor of the garage - where they sat for 3 months. When my son was here, I again looked into the boxes - saw stuff I love - AND HAD HIM PUT THE BOXES BACK UP ON THE SHELF.

In the house, there are a dozen boxes of Christmas things -- but they aren't in the way - they are on the top shelf of the closet - not even spread out into other closets - but really -- never used, so why are they there???

I can be brutal when purging - but decorating for Christmas was a big part of the past - and it seems, if I purge that stuff - the old life is truly over.

As for 'good boxes' - I, too, suffer from that syndrome. However, I cannot store them in the garage because of 9 months of humidity, so I am limited to a few in the office closet.

Each year, I get a Sharovski ornament as a gift...

This year, I decorated for Christmas...
(in honor of my son's visit)

Now I am curious; what is the big deal about paint cans ?

Paint cans are metal and have really neat mouse-proof lids.

When one is empty, I turn it upside-down on a fence-post and let the insides dry; then, I use it to store nails or the like.

Nails won't poke holes and fall through paint cans.