This is my problem: I would like 90% of my belongings to immediately leave my life, but I want them to go somewhere where they'll be useful. Tons of cleanup services exist, but they're gleeful about tons of junk going into dumps. The "decluttering" services are more coy about what happens to the once-clutter they "get rid" of, but it's not hard to guess. That stuff kills me. I can't do it.
But then the ethical options are so manual and painful and slow. Like, charity shops accept donations, but they each accept different categories of things, and moving stuff to them in bulk is awful without a car. I like the idea of Freecycle, but in practice it's slow and unreliable, and it means itemising millions of tiny unrelated things: one remote control for a mac, one combination lock, one metronome, four cork tiles, a case for a macbook air, a mosquito repellent kit, several notebooks, a cubic foot of comics (I usually put these outside, but if I give Warren Ellis to the neighbourhood kids, their parents will burn down my house), a first generation OLPC, a 4x4 ikea expedit, a saxophone stand, a mask from Sleep No More, a keyboard, cables, cables, more cables... and that's a subset of the stuff I can see from where I'm sitting in my little study. With Freecycle, this will take the rest of my life. I will have burned down the house myself by then. Some charity shops come collect, but... itemising. Pain. A staging area that takes up half the apartment. Probably divorce. It's risky.
There's the option of hiring a storage service that will come get stuff and paying to have it hidden like toxic waste forever, but, that's more mental than I am (yet). Though someone floated the idea of doing that and then not paying the storage company, so they'll try to sell things to recoup the cost. (Still no.)
What I really want is to hire a skip/dumpster, spend a week putting things into it, and leave it sitting outside for the good people of Brooklyn to scavenge from, then have someone else aggregate stuff into piles and deliver the clothes to Goodwill, the furniture to Housing Works, random bits of metal shelving to a recycle depot, blankets to dog shelters, etc, etc. I'd be willing... no, I'd be _overjoyed_ to pay for that service. This is New York City, you know? Every crazy service you can imagine exists. Why doesn't this one?
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cartographer- Tanya
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There's a really good window of opportunity right now for various charities to do bulk collections of stuff. Some actually do entire house clearances here in Switzerland, so helping people who just want Less Stuff should pay off. Especially as decluttering is particularly popular among we hand-wringing Internet liberals who *really* just want to go down from *four* Macbooks to *one*, darling, and two of them are over a year old so they're just *worthless*...
Obvious answer: organise it yourself? Or if you're not in a position to do that, suggest it to somebody who is? You're probably not the only person having these thoughts. There could be a monthly/quarterly/whatever-period-is-con
Now that I've spelled all that out, I'm kind of thinking we should do something like that here. Hmm.
Though someone floated the idea of doing that and then not paying the storage company, so they'll try to sell things to recoup the cost.
Ha, someone's been watching Storage Wars. As have I! It is strangely addictive. The fact that there are people who make a living by buying abandoned storage lockers at auction and then selling off the contents is the source of more amusement than seems entirely reasonable.
Recently, because our house got flooded and we were ripping up the flooring downstairs and needed a skip, we took the opportunity to get rid of a bunch of stuff. I had piles upon piles of old comics, old annuals, college notes and newspaper articles and jewellery I never wore and incense that no longer smelled of anything and cables for electronic items I no longer owned, and God only knows what, and they all went into the skip. There comes a time when your need to be free of the stuff outweighs whatever guilt you may feel about dumping something that somebody, somewhere, might be able to make use of. Exactly when that time comes is hard to say, except it has to come before your house is so full of junk that you can't get to the bed. (Another reality show that may be relevant: Hoarders. There but for the grace of God go I...)
(Though, to be fair, the exercise bike was the biggest single item to go in the skip, and that did get claimed, by a very polite woman who wanted to be sure that we definitely wanted to dump it.)