Melissa Madsen’s Posthaven

After 20+ years in our current house, we have accrued a huge amount of stuff, and have been decluttering and downsizing progressively over a couple of years. Added to 20 years accumulation of stuff, two parental bereavements that came with an inheritance of stuff, and another parent who downsized in part by moving stuff from his house to ours, and you have a recipe for an episode of Hoarders.

We have learnt a few things along the way. Here's a few of the things we have leant.

There are three main options for downsizing: dumping, donating and divesting.

Dumping

This is easy, but not very environmentally friendly. Plus it feels really bad to see good stuff go to hard waste. Inevitably though, some stuff will need to be dumped. 

Our council, City of Charles Sturt, offers two free hard waste collections each year. These need to be booked in advance, and there are rules about how much in advance you can put your gear on the nature strip. These rules do not appear to be strictly enforced though, and most of our last hard waste collection was pillaged by neighbours before the council came. One neighbour was so happy with the gear that they scavenged from our stack that they brought us some homemade cake as a thank you. I understand (I think) why councils no longer have common hard waste collection weekends, but gee I miss the camaraderie these brought.

The City of Charles Sturt also runs the Beverley Recycling and Waste Centre. They take e-waste in smallish quantities for no charge. Got old phones, answering machines, modems, boom boxes and radio controlled Daleks that no longer work? Anything that plugs in or has a battery counts as e-waste and can be recycled.

Over 20+ years, we accumulated a lot of paperwork with personal details than cannot be dumped through normal means. I had tax records going back to last century - well beyond the seven years that you are required to keep. For this, we got a big bin from Shred-X. For a fixed fee, you keep the bin for four weeks, fill it up, then they collect the bin and dispose of the contents securely. I had an old computer that had a hard disk fail, in such a way that I could not get rid of any personal information. I had that computer sitting in a box under my desk for a few years, until eventually asking Shred-X to dispose of it securely.

Finally, small amounts of stuff can be disposed of weekly / fortnightly in the regular garbage collection.

Donating

We have weeded out a significant volume of kitchen goods, bed linens and towels. Somewhere along the way, we collected dozens of ceramic mugs, none of which we use. Donating is the 'feel-good' option, but takes quite a bit of work to do in a responsible way. Charities are understandably reasonably picky about the donations they will accept, and the volumes of donations they will accept. We have spread donations to charities across three organisations: 

• Vinnies on Semaphore Road for bed linen as they have large bins outside when their shop is open.
• The Animal Welfare League SA operates op-shops in Adelaide and has a sorting centre at Gillman. They accept a wide variety of goods.
• Second Chances SA is a charity that supports people in prison, their children and families. They operate an op-shop at Sturt that seems to always be busy when we have dropped off donations, and a second-hand furniture shop at Richmond that both sells furniture and provides furniture assistance packages to folks in need. They will collect furniture donations.

Charities are not the only people who accept donatable goods through. We started downsizing with books by sorting through our book collection to find books to donate to the Adelaide Pop-Up Bookshop in the Adelaide Central Market. We took a box of books to them every fortnight or so for several months. They sell the books, but the books get another life. 

Divesting

Summary

Postscript