What to Do With Your Stuff

The following was written by a friend, Allen Appel, and posted in his community publication. I found this very interesting and realistically true and it is posted here with his permission. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. This is the fourth blog with Allen’s satires that are barely exaggerated.

By Allen Appel

Early man didn’t have a lot of stuff lying around his cave – maybe a spear, a flint knife to cut his meat, and possibly an extra loincloth in case his everyday one needed laundering. As civilization slowly advanced the amount of stuff man accumulated ballooned. Today everybody has a massive amount of stuff, a good part of which they have no current use for but don’t want to get rid of because it might come in handy someday to meet some, as yet, unknown need. Like classified telephone directories. In my house we have four of them, each covering a different local area. We never use them. When we want the number of some business we Google it. Who looks at directories anymore? But we keep them, just in case the internet is down when we have an emergency and need a plumber’s phone number in a hurry. And road maps. We have GPS systems in our cars and Waze on our cell phones but someday we might take a trip and lose the satellite just as we come to a fork in the road, so having maps in our glove compartment could save the day.

Twenty years ago my wife and I could keep track of all our stuff. We had moved into this new house here in Encore that had four closets, two of them walk-in, and even though we had two cars there was still plenty of room in the garage to store stuff. We knew what we had and we knew where it all was. Occasionally we’d inventory our stuff and get rid of some of it, but in the blink of an eye we’d replaced what we got rid of with twice as much new stuff.

Storage space, which had once been so ample, was shrinking rapidly. Costco is partly to blame. They showed us that we could save money by buying paper towels, toilet paper and napkins in massive quantities, which is the only way they sell them, instead of buying just a week’s worth at a time, which was what we used to do. The only way we could have made room inside the house to store all that stuff would have been for one of us to move out. That was not a viable option, so we bought a tall, standing shelf unit, stood it up in a corner of the garage, and that’s where we keep our paper goods. On the shelves not occupied by paper towels, toilet paper and napkins we keep the nearly empty cans we saved from the last time we had the interior painted. You never know when a wall is going to need a little touching up.

I have sports equipment I haven’t used in close to fifty years, but it would be a shame to get rid of it, so I just keep my basketball in a box on top of that standing shelf unit along with my tennis racket, fielder’s mitt, ball and bat. Maybe someday, if my arthritis isn’t acting up and I’m not ready yet for a walker, I might find some other geezers who don’t know their limits and feel up to playing. So I certainly don’t want to get rid of any of that stuff.

Copies of my tax returns eat up more and more of my available storage space each year. In addition to copies of the returns I have to keep all the supporting documents I used in preparing them. So, to keep each year separate, I place them in manila folders. I read somewhere that it’s only necessary to keep copies of your financial records for seven years but I don’t trust the IRS not to change their rules and make the changes retroactive, so I keep them a lot longer. Where was I supposed to keep twenty years’ of tax return folders? There wasn’t any place suitable. I had no choice. I had to buy a file cabinet. The only place I had where a file cabinet would fit without messing up the décor of our home was my walk-in closet but I didn’t have enough open floor space to put a cabinet. I had to get all my footwear off the floor and line them up on top of the file cabinet.

I also found I needed a couple of accordion files to keep my medical receipts, financial statements, insurance policies, service records for our cars to prove to any potential future buyer that they were properly maintained, receipts from donations, and similar backup. These had to be kept inside the house because I was continually adding to their contents. I found room for them in my closet on top of some other stuff that I’d probably also never need.

In recent years I’ve lost a few pounds so I’ve had to get new clothes to fit my trimmer figure but I might put weight back on, so I don’t want to get rid of the old clothes that are still in good shape. Having run out of space for hangers on the rods in my closet I’ve had to put hooks on the inside of our closet doors to handle the overflow.

Years ago we had a small platform built in our attic which we accessed via the pull-down ladder in our garage. This is where we kept our luggage until we needed it. We can’t keep it there anymore because the cabinets and table in the garage where we keep stuff that we don’t want to keep in the house block access to the ladder. So now we keep the luggage wherever they fit in our walk-in closets, which have become increasingly difficult to walk into.

We have a lot of family pictures and, since there has been no moratorium on taking of family pictures, the number just keeps growing and growing. We now have several boxes of photographs along with memorabilia from high school and college. Stacks of these boxes filled whatever shelf space there was left in our closets.

When our son moved from his roomy apartment he had no place to store his LP’s, CD’s and audiotapes so he asked us to hold them for him. He no longer has a phonograph or an audiotape player but he values his collections. We had no place to put them. We needed to be able to add storage in a way that didn’t require taking up any floor space inside the house. The solution was to install shelves on the garage walls, high enough so that our cars wouldn’t hit them when we pulled in.

So that’s what we did. We had two long shelves put up on the garage wall next to where my wife’s car is parked and two short shelves on the wall between the garage and the house. Each of the shelves could accommodate the 18” high boxes I bought from the UPS store. This solved our problem of where to put the stuff we had no room for, at least for the time being. But it created a different problem.

When my wife and I go somewhere together she usually drives. It’s not because she’s a better driver than I am, although she probably is, but because I have trouble parking. As I pull into a defined parking space I can’t see the lines on the ground that define it so I wind up straddling two spaces. I can’t leave the car that way so I have to get back in, restart the engine, and do some maneuvering until I’m completely between the lines. My wife doesn’t have this problem.

With my wife driving I, naturally, will be sitting in the front passenger seat. That means that I’ll have to get in on the passenger side. This has become dangerous. The lower shelf on the wall next to her car is high enough so that her car won’t hit it but not so high that my head can’t. If I don’t duck while I’m getting into her car I could wind up scalping myself.

I can just imagine myself telling a triage nurse in the emergency room that I’m there because we have too much stuff.

Enjoy!

Links to his previous columns that I reposted are:

Canceled Travel Plans

May I Ask Who’s Calling?

Numbers Don’t Lie, but Some May Fib a Little