300,000 Items in our Homes!

There’s a retired couple in our neighborhood who bought the house across from them just so they had more space for their stuff. Each of them now has their own house.

You don’t know what you have until you try to move to a new home!

I thought we had almost nothing because we are minimalists but when we moved I was shocked to find what we had. Most of the stuff sat and some still sitting in the garage after several years of being in our new home. I don’t miss it!

CBS Sunday Morning just this past Sunday had a story about storage units and the amount of “junk” Americans are collecting for no reason.

They had the stat that there are more storage unit locations in the U.S. than McDonalds, Subway, and Dunkin Donuts combined.

Oh well, I’m sure some storage unit owners are my best customers!

Years back, I read “Your Money or Your Life” and counted every item I owned, as part of a “100 things challenge” type of exercise. I don’t remember if that was part of “YMOYL” or from a different book I read. I also don’t remember exactly how many items I owned. Definitely more than 100, but way WAY less than 300,000. It was an interesting experiment at the time, and absolutely made me think about my relationship with “stuff”.

Let’s say you have a nice big 2000 sq ft house. That gives you 2000 sq ft x 8′ = 16,000 cubic feet of space. Divide that by 300,000 and you get 0.05 cubic feet per item, which corresponds to an item about 4″ on a side.

IOW if you had 300,000 things the size of a grapefruit, it would literally fill that size house up from wall to wall to ceiling with no room for oxygen.

I don’t know how they came up with 300,000 things as an average, but assuming it isn’t a bullshit number, it’s certainly not the *median*. And although I’m sure rich people have somewhat more things than poor people, I don’t think the Jeff Bezoses of the world are generally known for hoarding hundreds of thousands of… what, snowglobes? in their penthouse apartments.

My feeling is that the number is exaggerated – for example, I have dozens of boxes of screws and nails in my garage (lets say 20).

If each box has 500 screws/nails in it, do I have 20 items, or 10,000?

Other items can be crazier – do I have a box of rice, or 10,000 grains of rice in my cupboard?

I assume they extrapolated the number as far as they could to get the 300,000 number.

It would be more beneficial if the number was based on real items – for example, how many shirts does someone in the U.S. have compared to other countries, or other hard numbers that give a better scope.

It’s an older book but Material World – A global family portrait is really interesting.
They asked people to empty out their houses and put all of their belongings in the front yard for photographs.

Discussions on minimalism and voluntary simplicity is actually what got me started selling on Ebay in the first place. I was trying to pare down my belongings and pay off my mortgage and Ebay seemed like the perfect fit. Little did I realize that a few years later I would be bringing carloads of stuff into my house…

Seriously…

I’m working on getting the house back in order by listing the big death pile and tucking it away into inventory in the back bedrooms. Then I can just close the doors and have my neat, tidy home back. Until the next carload of stuff arrives.

@anterestar – Me too! I think my soul shudders a little every time I empty my car into the house after sourcing…. My top goal right now is getting the random eBay inventory that’s not in my office out of the rest of the house and into the office, no matter what it takes to fit it. then, install a door so I can close that clutter away, and I can have my minimalist house back (just squinting when I look at my partner’s side of the room, ugh). 🙂

I enjoy the overall work of ebaying, but when I look around my office at all the stuff, I just want to shake my head.

every time i start to list stuff i no longer want, i look at the piles of unlisted stock i already have to list and go “ughhh…” now, i have bags of unwanted clothes and other random items mixed in with stock, and i just never get around to the clothes because it’s no fun for me. that’s after weeding out stuff that’s not good for online. if i have to list stuff that’s not enjoyable to list, it has to have a higher asp, at the very least.