I got some de-hoarding done in the workshop. (Is there such a word?) I am motivated by the disturbing thought of compulsive hoarding illness (I hoard, but not compulsive). I don’t want to keep too much “this might be useful someday” stuff packed into my workshop. Ha! I just re-read the last line. The stock excuse is in the parenthesis.
I am not going to explore the separate (illness) condition of compulsive hoarding as it is off topic and already too well covered on several cable TV channels. But I think hoarding or caching is a natural human (maybe survival) instinct to some extent and especially easy to nurture if we have a real workshop where we make things. It’s hard to toss that little widget away or that cut-off for which we might have a use. “I can make a “dufus” from those angle brackets someday…” It’s because craftspeople have the ability to see function in obvious pieces of scrap. (Am I still making excuses?)
One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.
Collecting construction material is of course a bit different. My spouse is a quilter and she calls it her “stash”, rymes with cache. Ha! In the workshop we just call it our raw material supply. The “scrap box” is a bit different though. It’s the stuff that is too small to be called construction material but too big to throw away as scrap. Or it is parts of other things that can be “re-purposed”. Like, I’ll save those old wheels as I can make a cart some day.
The sanity check is called house (shop) cleaning and finally discarding some of what has become a hoard. It doesn’t pay to go through it with too much detail. The “keep it” monster lives in the dust. My rule of thumb, if it is not made from pure “unobtainium” and I am not restoring antiques, then it can go. It can be a very tough decision.
A curious social event called a swap meet or flea market has been invented to help some people let go of some of their “useful” hoard. Unfortunately it can work two ways and it sometimes just makes the condition worse. I figure it is the safety vent, that if I really need something old, those social events would be the place to look, rather than on my own shelves.
Enough said, the shop has a bit more space and I like clean space to make new things. I also enjoy a little restoration work and that needs the clean space too. A tidy shop gives me a good feeling. Some readers of my THMS Blog think my shop is too clean, but that is not always the case. It can get totally trashed by debris from cutting/shaping wood, composites or metal. Not the same as hoarding the treasure of someone else’s trash.