Guest Post: The Cupboard of Crap

We all know Nickie from Typecast makes amazing tutorials but apparently she is also a hoarder. I feel Nickie's pain on this one as I have myself a garage and office full of crap as well as several crap drawers around the house. If Nickie is greedy, I must be a glutton.

I am greedy.  I have two Cupboards of Crap but they both are independent of personality as one resides at work and the other at home.  They reflect my very secret unorganised side – something that not a lot of people see.

The Cupboard of Crap at work is where all the shredding goes to be done “one day”.  It is where I store two old computers, some bits of wire and a broken printer that may “come in useful” at some point even though the printer is beyond repair, the computers are useless and I have nothing to do with wire in my job at all.  I also have old filing trays, letterheads from three old premises and a load of accounts files that are probably more than ten years old.

The Cupboard of Crap at home is in the kitchen, behind the door.  It houses a number of my husband’s tools, tins with old paintbrushes standing in a couple of inches of water, coats that no-one will ever wear any more, spare light bulbs, the barbeque and my father-in-law’s ashes and memorial stone.

I should really clear them out but I am such a hoarder that I panic over the notion that I may need one of those items a couple of days after I throw it out.  I am the same with book although I was recently forced to be very ruthless and had to “re-distribute” about 400 of them due to a serious lack of storage space.  I kept my most favourite 101 but the pile of books next to my chair in the lounge is growing again.  We have eight shelves full of videos that have never moved but they are all ‘classics’ in our eyes.  I also have a box full of cassette tapes from my teenage years and, even though we don’t have a cassette player any more, I am loathe to throw them out as they are part of my history.

So when I read somewhere that Mahatma Ghandhi could count on two hands all the possessions that he owned (i.e. ten in total) I start to think that we live in a possession-laden world and question whether we need all of this “crap”.  I start to make lists (oh yes, I’m the Queen of Lists) of items that we can easily do without but then I am overcome with sentimentality.   I can’t get rid of photograph albums even though I could scan the pictures into my computer and store them digitally.  I can’t dispose of my CDs or DVDs even they could be stored on a hard-drive somewhere.  And, if the inevitable happened, how would my nearest and dearest ever my “personal collection” as we are constantly reminded not to share digital passwords with anyone?

We have moved towards a disposable era, to be backed up by recycling – so that is exactly what I am doing.  I am storing all my disposables in my Cupboards of Crap in readiness for recycling when the time is right.