Well, the phenomenon that may have originated in SF has made it’s way to the Midwest. I can’t BELIEVE what people are willing to take from the side of the road. And considering that I can think of a delapidated reading lamp and discarded door, we usurped and put to decorative use, not only are we in (as Merlin says) a “transitory” existence, but a a species content, nay, empowered by exchanging our junk contagion.

Considering the other option is the grand undertaking of the “Garage Sale” which gives you the phantom feelings of turning a profit, all the while never earning you more than $1.25 an hour for your efforts, I see the practice of frequent shipments to “CurbWill” to be the most efficient AND generous exercise of stewardship.

I find garage sales soul-crushing. I just don’t have the make-up for it.

In the (three maybe?) that we’ve done at our current house, we were visited almost exclusively by people who were more interested in arguing over a nickel (literally) than actually buying anything. It seems like a popular hobby, this Saturday morning dickering. Weird.

Oh, my family has MASTERED the (f)art of Garage Sales. They can turn an utterly devoid and blind set of eyeballs away from the stress, time, and sweat invested to earn a few hundred bucks. They’ve been known to TAKE OFF WORK on Thursday and Friday to prep and run their GS all day Friday/Saturday. Nuts. I tell you, NUTS.

We just pared down, giving away what to them would be UNTOLD fortunes. And considering that Goodwill gives you a receipt that YOU determine the value for the donation, truly, their is no greater feeling than being reminded in April how you did NOT waste time with peddling your crap in your drive way.

In fact…and tangentially….it’s like a Breath Right Nasal Strip for my psychological well-being. Merlin—care to spin-off of that analogy—what other tricks seem to give you free and easy breathing?

Hey, we have this urban recycling here in manhattan too… me and my friends call it the garbage faerie, and almost all my furniture is made from junk.

in fact, i found a cool poster yesterday which I posted on my blog: http://blog.nonlinearmatters.com/art/what-not-to-love-in-this-city/

I guess the economics of it are: the less space you have, with high rent, the less people can afford to KEEP their junk around… so high rent can have some benefits too…

I have an URL for you: http://www.freecycle.org/ - vibrant, local reuse communities, all Internet-mediated. I’ve given away litterboxes and yoga mats and old computers, and picked up linguistics texts and other goodies.

The Boston area has the street-recycling phenomenon as well. A particularly fine version of it works at MIT, where there is a mailing list (reuse) whose sole purpose is to inform the community that you’ve just put something out in the hallway/loading dock/curb and that it’s free for the taking. Things have been known to disappear in a matter of minutes.

Relatedly, I knew it was time to upgrade my grandmother’s computer when better computers were appearing on the street and not immediately whisked away.

My wife and I began “throwing stuff out” when the community group she helps organize held a fundraising yard sale (many of the community groups in Somerville, MA hold yard sale fundraisers and are willing to take just about any junk you want to dump on them; you personally don’t make any money, but you get some of the crap out of your basement). That got rid of the excess furniture and the truly bizarre Christmas gifts people who don’t seem to know us very well (mostly family) had given us over the years. Then we got serious: closets were emptied, drawers were dumped, every single piece of paper collected over the course of two bookish lives was scrutinized, the refrigerator was cleaned …

One day, waist deep in her correspondence, having just finished culling birthday-valentine-get well cards and getting started on letters of teenage angst, my wife looked up and said, “Hey! I’m quitting grad school.”

Once you start throwing away shit, it’s really hard to stop.

On top of my deep loathing of having strangers knock on the door at ungodly o’clock in the morning, I don’t like yard sales because I’ve seen too many people use them as an excuse to never get rid of the stuff they claim (and probably really think) they’re getting rid of. “Oh, I don’t use that anymore; I’ll sell it at the next yard sale…” Once the whatsis has been so designated, it can sit around for months with no inconvenient guilt attached. For that matter, haul it out into the driveway, and if it doesn’t sell, you can bring it back inside and wait another year to sell it at the next, next yard sale.

A good purge, on the other hand, actually makes things go away. My area is too suburban for urban recycling to work, but I’ve never listed anything on freecycle and not had offers within the hour.

[…] Here’s a shoutout to what KC and I used to call the “ghetto mall” when I lived in the Mission District in SF. As you walked down the streets there, people line the streets with blankets covered with assortments of old stuff. I got half my books that way. I’ve always had a theory that many homeless are more literate than the average person because books are some of the only entertainment they can afford. With no electricity, very little money, and lots of time, books are probably the best way to entertain yourself, I imagine. […]

I thought Park Slope, Brooklyn was the official capital of that. I once put a totallly gross smelly stained couch on the curb just until I could go get my car to start stuffing parts in. It was gone before I could drive around the corner.

I live in the mountains now and if you put crap on your curb here someone will hit it with their truck while muttering under their breath about how Godless you are.

It’s already been mentioned above, but it’s worth reiterating the refrain my friends and I have been reciting recently: Freecycle Rocks! http://www.freecycle.org/

I live in the ‘burbs, and the neighbors wouldn’t put up with junk on the curb for long. However, I’ve used Freecycle to get rid of stuff that’s (a) of no value to me and (b) to much hassle to sell (face it, some stuff just isn’t ebay’able).

My current algorithm is this: 1 If not shippable or selling it isn’t worth the effort, goto 2 otherwise proceed 1a try to sell on ebay 1b if it doesn’t sell, relist once 1c still no sale, go to 2 2 Post to freecycle 2a wait for replies 2b if no replies, toss it

I’ve been surprised at what will sell on ebay. I’ve also been surprised at what people want on Freecycle. I have yet to actually get to 2b in about 30 or 40 iterations with everything from old toys to dollar-store crap to archaic computer hardware to an old bed frame.

In the end, I don’t feel bad about giving away valuable stuff (since the ebay branch of my algorithm ferrets out the stuff that actually is valuable), and I feel good about decluttering the house.

I grew up in Alexandria, VA, which had a great of dealing with “large trash.” They only picked it up twice a year, on a Saturday. Well, people started cruising the stuff left out. I even knew of potluck dinner parties held on the Friday night, with folks splitting up where they were going to look, and getting a hold of other people’s want lists. Finds were brought back to the house, and if not wanted, left there for the trashmen to take.

I swear it cut way down on how much trash the city had to haul away, because so much of it was taken in by other people.

As for yard sales - the only successful ones I’ve been involved in are when you get together with several neighbors and all have a sale on a given Saturday. The freaks are easier to deal with when you know you’ll be have a beer with friends and gossiping about them later. Also the putting up signs, ads, getting change, etc. can be split up between the households. And if you want to shut down early, the people who show up will have somewhere to go.

We had great success paring down before a move from Lexington, MA: all the stuff which was too nice to throw away but too [fill-in-the-blank] to be moved went on the curb. Within an hour, most of it was gone. One woman kicked her husband and son out of the car so she could fill it up with our (old) stuff.

The town next to mine just made this illegal. Anything left out could be considered garbage, and due to “security concerns” (identity theft) it is now against the law to go through another person’s trash. In this college town, the last day of finals was shopping day — cruise past the rich girls’ apartments and look for old TVs, VCRs, and household goods. I didn’t purchase a Christmas tree for years because I used co-ed throwouts. Ah, the good old days of dumpster diving.

Got to corroborate the original blogger’s experiences here. Just got rid of a lot of stuff in preparation for a move to a smaller apartment with less built-in shelf space. Got rid of books I hadn’t read in a while, got rid of a carton of textbooks that had stayed in my closet for eight to 10 years, unread, and so on.

Nice part is that I didn’t need to move the material, and in most cases, I got rid of it by offering it free on Craig’s List. :-)

Actually getting rid of excess stuff is really easy:

Move at least once every 5 years Move yourself. Don’t pay anyone. You’ll be amazed at how much stuff you don’t take with you, simply because you DON’T WANT TO MOVE IT.

Rinse, repeat.

This article is very reaffirming, because it’s something I do all the time since the I started using eBay. Here’s what I do.

First, go through the stuff I own. More on a casual basis but I do it. And weed out the stuff I will never use.

Second, filter out what I can sell on eBay versus what can be donated to a thrift versus what is plain junk and should be thrown out.

eBay really spurred me to do this because I think that we all hold onto too many things simply because ‘one day’ we’ll use it. But now thanks to eBay, I’m more of the mind that I should just sell old stuff so someone else can use it and then I can use the money collected to buy things I definitely need now. In a way, it makes me feel like everything I own is being ‘rented’. And it works well.

“I suspect there’s a reason Craig’s List started in San Francisco; it’s a social city that’s just not afraid to deal with other people’s junk.”

Are you serious? I grew up in the 70s and early 80s in the deep south, a poor neighborhood, bars on the windows, etc. The entire community would put unwanted ‘anything’ (clothes, furniture, toys, etc) on the curb. The next day it would be gone, taken either by families who needed an extra bed, or bookcase, or the junkman who fixed that old tv up and sold it or gave it to a friend.

Of course, we never had a fancy name for it. But you might want to be a little more ‘aware’ of whats around you instead of being so eager to pat your particular community on the back.

Great ideas … too bad the original author’s editor allowed three left-wing political slams at Republicans and Bush — like it had anything to do with the subject. But I guess that’s SF for ya.

That’s no editorial oversight, Mark₁; that’s just Mark₂. He’s an outspoken political and cultural columnist who’s been a (IMHO, hilariously articulate) voice against any number of targets for years.

For what it’s worth, a) heck yeah that’s San Francisco for you, and b) this column is way way toned down compared to many of ‘em. :)

Seriously, though, let’s leave our politics at the door if we can, Mark₁; I bite my tongue a lot to try and keep the joint a political DMZ, and I’m grateful when other folks are willing to do the same. TIA.

/political stuff

I sold 80% of my household furnishings before I went to China, and have had to replace that stuff since returning last year.

I like older stuff coz it means I’m not worried about scratching it or whatever, so most of my furniture is 2nd hand.

My printer stand that sits under my computer desk is a 70s TV stand with castors- which works great. It cost me $6AUD at a 2nd hand furniture shop.

Isn’t reusing stuff kinda like bricolage?

GoogleSearch “define: bricolage” gives: to use something that is easy at hand for a tool it was not designed for. A brick used for a hammer, for exaple, is bricolage. Postmodern authors talk about the way language grows by the means of established terms being used as a kind of bricolage, as a brick might be used for a hammer. return

www.california.com/~rathbone/local2.htm

French term for ‘putting together different articles’, as in punk fashion eg a safety pin is taken out of its practical context and turned into a fashion accessory.

freespace.virgin.net/brendan.richards/glossary/glossary.htm

Bricolage – from the French-language verb bricoler, meaning “to tinker” or “to fiddle” – is that language’s equivalent of the English phrase “do-it-yourself”.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage

How many times have you gone out and bought something you already have because you a) couldn’t find it or b) didn’t know you already had one?

I finally realized that not knowing you have something (or not being able to find it) is the same as not having it. So, if you didn’t know it was there, you might as well get rid of it.

Here’s what Marilyn Paul says about keeping stuff in her book It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t Find Your Keys: Keep the things that:

• you use regularly
• you require for bookkeeping
• you love or think are beautiful
• have deep meaning for you

I think it’s relatively easy to do a one-time cleanup (e.g., getting your desk free of clutter), but the real improvement comes from changing habits so that the problem is solved in the long run.

The key to a successful garage sale is…. advertising. If you spend the time, you should blanket your neighborhood with signs, along with some small p/r through craig’s list and the newspaper. Here in LA, you can do sales all day Saturday and Sunday. But when you look at your hourly fee (when all his is done) sadly, it’s like what someone said above, $1.50 or something like that.

With nicer items, with the right positioning, you can do a weekday sale, and call it an estate sale.

I tell friends that if they need the cash, do the sale. If they can use the write-off, do the donations. Turbo tax has a great program called “it’s deductible” and you can download it for $20. It lists all the IRS -approved numbers for items.

The best advice I’ve heard about really getting rid of the useless stuff that presses down on us most of our lives is to literally move everything in your house or apartment out of the house into the yard or out of the apartment into the hallway. Then piece by piece move what you really use back, and what is left over is uaually an astounding mess. That’s what gets thrown out.

To add to the list of places that have informal streetside recycling pickups, Baltimore has a fine tradition of it. I lived there for several years, and by the end we had furnished a four bedroom house almost entirely from stuff we had picked up off the street.

I’ve always had great experiences in San Francisco with the junk fairy (from both sides of the cycle), but once my boyfriend put an old (originally junk fairied) couch out on the street, only to find the next morning it had been claimed, deconstructed, deficated on and overrun with neighborhood homless. An actual encampment of about 5 people had been formed right there on the sidewalk next to my front door. Didn’t stop me from future recycling, but the experience did teach me to keep an eye on my junk until it had found a new home.

Here is the UK we don’t go in for Garage or Yard sales very much but what we do have is the Car Boot Sale. (Boot = Trunk to you guys). Some entrepreneur will hire a field, do the publicity and charge sellers about £6. You pile your unwanted stuff into the boot of your car and park up in rows with the other sellers. Using a wallpaper paste board to display your stuff - the public is let in about two hours later to trawl the rows of junk. Haggling is the norm and there are usually two or three ‘boots’ to go to on any given Sunday morning. My father has a regular contest with my sister as they go round in different directions to see who can find a copy of Jaws in paperback first.

Craigslist is my sales site of choice here in Philadelphia; it saves you shipping and you can make interesting trades and deals for local goods and services. Once I even sold a bike to someone I knew; which I only found out when she showed up on my doorstep to pick it up!

I love paring down my possessions. My ultimate goal is to get rid of everything I don’t use. To do this I have been mentally employing tactic suggested by Eric Hoffer (the longshoreman philosopher of San Francisco) He’s an awesome writer by the way. Do a web search for his name and you will come across endless wonderful quotes by him. That being said, he suggested that you figuratively take all your possessions and put them into one box (in his case he actually could do it). What you use during the course of a year you take out and put into a smaller box. Whatever is left over in the big box at the end of the year gets thrown out. Its really simple and easy. At the end of his life, a life distinguished by books, letters, a reasonable amount of intellectual fame…it took only two hours to file his life’s work and clean out his entire apartment. Also, if you happen to have relatives who give you lots of useless guilt inducing crap, like my mother, it’s worthwhile to have an honest chat with them about what you need and don’t need.