Pieces of Furniture

Old furniture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

      Furniture is typically among the items we most take for granted in our homes.  The furnishings that we fill our rooms with are some of the most enduring possessions many of us will ever own.  On first acquiring furniture we may admire it and administer great care, then as the years pass we tend to just accept that it is there as it gathers dust and typically a few nicks and scratches as it staidly remains in repose in whichever room it has been placed.

       If we happen to relocate to another house, often the furniture will be moved with us.  A move might require a large truck accompanied by professional movers or we might go the do-it-yourself route with a rental truck or even our own or a friend's vehicles.   Furniture is among our biggest household investments.  The practicality of periodically replacing old furniture with new is out of many of our budgets so whether we like it or not we are often stuck with many of the furniture purchases we make in our lives.

       My parents bought their first furniture in 1958 when they bought their first house.  Until that time we had always lived in furnished houses or apartments, but home ownership required the sizable investment of furniture for our then young family.  They had to purchase furniture for a living room, a dining room, and three bedrooms.  I'm not sure how much they paid for it all or where they bought it, but I do know that it was all brand new.  Most of that furniture stayed with our family through three subsequent moves and the raising of five children.

       We went through a number of upholstered pieces and a few dining tables during that period, but most of that early furniture purchase remained with us and it took a beating.  Gradually, piece by piece, furniture was replaced, moved around the house to be used for other purposes, or discarded in one way or another.  A couple of the pieces went with me when I moved away from home into my own place to live.

       Over the years, the furniture that I took sometimes made its way back to my parents' house for storage until I was ready to use it again.  Once the furniture was relegated to a paid storage facility in Richmond, Virginia--that was a huge waste of money.  Eventually most of the possessions that were stored in that locker was sold, given away, or trashed.  Two pieces of furniture I did keep.   Both of these were part of that initial purchase my parents had made twenty years earlier.

       Now, about thirty years later, I still have those two pieces of furniture.  A large dresser that had originally been in my bedroom and a china hutch were pieces that I recovered from my parents' house in 1988 after my wife and I left the road life to settle down in an apartment in Tennessee not far from where my parents lived at that time.  In 1991 we loaded up those two pieces of furniture into a rental truck along with all of  our other possessions and made a drastic move to the Los Angeles area.

        Once again we fast forward to the present.  Since that move to California I've gone through a divorce and then got married to another woman.  Together we bought a new house and consolidated our furniture assets, getting rid of what we didn't need.  The well worn dresser and hutch that had been in my life for so many years ended up in our garage where they remain to this day.  I use them for storage.  My wife would prefer to get rid of them and probably that will one day happen.  I'll have to find a place for the stuff stored in those pieces--possibly a lot of it will end up in the trash.

        Those pieces of furniture, now out of sight and out of mind most of the time, still hold so many memories in the history of my family.  They are not particularly special other than that.   Maybe they do have value of which I am unaware, but I doubt it.   I'll check before ever actually getting rid of them.  If I ever do get rid of them.  Those pieces of furniture have been in my life for so long that they seem like a part of me.  In a way I guess they are.

        Do you have any pieces of furniture that have been in your life for almost as long as you can remember?   Has any furniture that you own been appraised at any significant value?    Is there any particular furniture that you own that is stored away and not used in your home?

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There's No Stuff Like Home Stuff

Austell, GA, September 30, 2009 -- Household possessions and debris are placed at the curb of this flood affected home following the September severe storms and flooding. George Armstrong/FEMA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.
~~George Carlin

       My posts over the past month have taken a look at material possessions and those collections we amass over the years. George Carlin humorously calls these things "stuff" and I think this how most of us often think of the possessions we accumulate. It's a bunch of things to which we have attached some sort of significance. Sometimes we remember why we kept things and at other times we may look at something only to think to ourselves, "Why did I keep this?".

       A house is a cozy place that provides us shelter for our families and a place to keep our possessions until we figure out exactly what we are going to do with them. And more often than not those things stay where we tucked them away until they get shuffled around to another part of our house. Or perhaps to another house that we move to. Downsizing can be a lot of work that can tax us mentally and emotionally.

      However, that being said, the stuff in our houses can provide as much comfort as meatloaf and mashed potatoes or whatever food it is that makes you feel safe and warm inside. The words "mine" and "ours" give us a sense of identity and security. Even homeless people are often seen pushing carts of stuff or toting burdens of material goods on their backs. They too want the security of ownership, but they lack a house in which to put their property. Those of us with houses can have more stuff. The bigger the house the more potential stuff we can own.

     The beauty of habitating in some sort of dwelling is that we can find many places to put our aggregations of life. Or is that the ugly side that shows a certain sense of greed and love of materialism. Whatever the case may be, at least we have options of putting our things into rooms, closets, cubby spaces, or stuff-holding components disguised as furniture. These things may be neatly placed with organized intent, tossed in randomly, or a combination of the two storage styles.

     The place we call home is the place where our stuff is. To lose one's home through fire or natural disaster must be devastating for most people to whom this happens. On the other hand maybe it's a feeling of release--liberation from the possessions that hold us hostage, keep us prisoner. I don't want to ever know the feeling of having my material life wrested from me. I want to keep the stuff that helps make my house my home.  Or at least keep it until I decide what I'm going to do with all of it.

     Do you ever feel like a captive of the things you own? Does ownership of material goods help you to feel better about yourself and provide you a sense of comfort? Do you tend to have more things if you have more places to put them? Have you ever experienced a tragic loss of possessions? What happened and how did you feel in the aftermath?

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Now Where Did I Put That?

That's all your house is:  a place to keep your stuff.   If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house.  You could just walk around all the time.
~~George Carlin

Julius Brooks, miner, in his four room house for which he pays $10 monthly, no closets or storage space is provided.... - NARA - 540740 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

         Have you ever found yourself looking for something that you're sure you once had, but just can't remember where it is when you want to find it?   When you have too much stuff, you end up filling closets, garages, drawers, cupboards, attics, and every other available nook and cranny.  How often do we actually organize stuff?

         Oh sure, there are some neat freaks out there who have things carefully categorized into specific places.  Going to a house like that is like visiting a library or a museum or something.  Or at least it seems neat and organized.    A place for everything and everything in its place.  But I'm not talking about you neatniks out there.  I'm referring to the folks like me in our houses surrounded by piles of stuff.

         Don't get me wrong here.  I haven't reached the bizarro amassing of material goods like you might see in an episode of one of those television shows about serious hoarders.  I can still move easily around my house without threat of being crushed by some toppling pile of who knows what.  Things are still in check with me in that respect.  Still I have more than I need and more than I ever look at or hold in my hands on a regular basis.  Some of my possessions haven't seen light in years.  They remain stored away in the places I put them way back in some time when I thought those things were worth saving.

        If my stuff is stored in my house that's not too bad.  When my stuff starts getting stored at other people's houses then that's when I need to start figuring out a plan of future action.  I suppose if I don't have something under my own roof then I apparently haven't put too much value on it.   Certain things that are mine are still stored at my mother's house--they've been there for 30 or 40 years or more.  I feel a certain sense of security in those things being there.  My mother hasn't complained about this, but still I know that someday I need to retrieve these things or accept the fact that I've given them up.

       Aside from other things that I've loaned to people and never gotten back (and that's another story in which the assumed outcome is that I'll never see these things again), the only place I can think of where a few of my ex-possessions might be are at my ex-inlaws house.   Those too are things I can write off as relinquished out of my control.   There are times when we must accept that some things we once owned are things we will no longer see.

        My biggest mistake in trying to hang on to things was renting a storage facility because I had nowhere else to put those things.  What a waste of money that was.  When my second wife and I decided to go on the road full time, we decided to put our furniture and everything else we couldn't tote on the road with us into storage.  Keep in mind we didn't have furniture or household items that were especially worth keeping, but we kept them nonetheless.   We paid ninety dollars a month to do this.  After two years we no longer cared about this stuff and went back during one of our breaks to get the stuff we wanted and then we got rid of the rest.

       Two thousand dollars was spent for a lesson in stuff.  If you've got the stuff and have no place to keep it then maybe you've got too much.  If you have stuff stored in different places around the country you probably have too much stuff.  And if you start having a hard time finding things you do have or remembering whether or not you actually still have those things, this may be a good indicator that you have too much stuff.

       I like having things, but it's scary if the things start to own me.  If it costs me more than something is worth to keep it, then it's rarely worth keeping.  Most things are easily replaceable if you really need them again later.  Less clutter means being able to find things more easily and being able to move more easily if that time ever comes.

         And if it comes to a point where you are trying to figure out if that thing you are looking for is in your house, a rented storage facility, or, God forbid, someone elses house, then you should reassess whose stuff is really whose.

        Have you ever wasted money to rent a storage locker to keep something that you eventually got rid of?  Do you have any possessions stored at someone elses house?  How do you keep your material possessions in check so they are easy to locate when you need them?

     

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