Originally posted by monochrome How? Just a few alarming observations from yesterday
Family of 5 - one college graduate, but many of her things are still here.
- 163 Coats (all types), not counting youth sizes saved for future grandchildren
- a bit more than 1 per year per family member for an average of 23 years
- 3700 books (estimate by measuring feet of shelf space * avg. books/ft.)
- 1. Inherit 3000 books
- 2. Buy each other 5 books a year for 23 years
- 367 CD's by actual count, not including burned mixes
- I can't even begin to guess - I've never bought one
- 127 DVD's
- Christmas, Easter, Birthday * 5 people * 8 years
- 263 VHS tapes, including self-recorded
- We actually watch the DVD's every year or two. They're all re-releases of classic old movies. VHS don't get used any more because the VCR broke and I refused to replace it, meaning my wife is replacing the old VHS movies with DVD's - You can't win.
I was afraid to start on shoes - but I did count 31 pairs of used athletic shoes neatly stacked on a shelf in the garage. When 3 children who play 2 sports each year for 10 years and their feet grow - - - At least my son's college gear is provided by the University Athletic Department.
OK, you're making me feel better. What we did about CDs and DVDs was get some of the cases from Office Depot that hold like 150 without their cases and jus stuck them in there. Now we just have two big "binders" full instead of entire shelves.
Books, those are the hardest to get rid of. We did a sort of three step approach. First, we pulled all the "classics" (e.g. Voltaire, Swift, Dostoyevsky, Shelley, Pynchon, Eco yada yada). Then wife went through and pulled all the ones she'd either re-read or hadn't read and intended to. Then I did the same. We probably ended up with half our collection left. We'll go through those and see if any are worth $5+ used in which case we'll list them on amazon. The rest get donated or given away.
Clothes we're pretty ok on -- every fall we donate whatever we don't use.