Useful Junk

Occasionally people will get excited about a minimalism fad, where you figure out which of your possessions you need and keep only those. As someone who generally doesn't like getting rid of things, I've been thinking some about why, and the main thing I keep coming back to is that random objects can be helpful in unpredictable ways. Here are some things that I kept without a specific use in mind, but that ended up being useful. You could say they saved time or money, but often the biggest gain was from being able to do a project in one go with what I already had on hand:

• Ethernet cable. Back in 2019 if you'd asked me whether I would ever use ethernet again, I would have said probably not. WiFi was good enough for everything I was doing. But then I (like a lot of us) suddenly started working from home and got frustrated about how poorly my internet was working for video calls and ran ethernet to my desk. Having cable on hand already meant I could just set it up.
• Plexiglass. When I built my accidental electronic instrument I wanted to protect it, and had plexiglass left over from when I added an insulating layer to a single-pane window.
• Scrap wood. So many things. To give one example, when one of the stairs in our basement fell apart, I was able to replace it with extras from past projects that I'd kept around. Similarly, when Lily came back from visiting a friend enamored of their prop axe, she had everything she needed to make one already in the basement:
• Computer mouse. One of my housemates was having wrist issues, and wanted to try out using a mouse on the floor. They ended up hating it after a day or so, but being able to pull one out of the junk electronics pile and try it made for quick experimentation.
• Plastic sheeting. When we wanted to divide our apartment in two so we could isolate a new housemate I had sheeting left over from an earlier project.
• Screen. When I wanted to make a screen door for our kid door I already had window screen lying around.
• Hinge. Lily wanted to make a "laptop" for Anna as a present, and I had an old hinge lying around from who-knows-what that was just right for having it stay open at the right angle. Here's the laptop after Anna decorated it: And with the hinge it closes just right:
• Volleyball net. When we went back to the vacation house where Nora had a close call with a fountain, we wanted to put up a barrier. The kids would probably have been fine without, but we wanted something that would clearly mark it as out of bounds. We got some chicken wire, but realized when we were packing that it was only about half as long as we needed. An old volleyball net made up the difference:
• Hand saw. I would have said there's no situation in which a traditional manual crosscut saw is the best tool for the job, but when the city cut down the tree in front of our house for being diseased, Lily wanted a piece of the stump to remember it by. She really wanted to cut it off herself, without assistance from electricity or other humans. Luckily, I still had the tool for that: She did change her mind on help after realizing how hard it was, though I don't think Nora was very helpful:

Having a wide range of objects in the basement is something I find useful on a regular basis. One thing I like about projects is that they often leave me with interesting scraps I can use for other things. I especially like that they're not very valuable, because that means I feel much more free to play with them.

If we were moving often, or didn't have a large unfinished space, of course, the tradeoff would be different. And many things go into the basement never to be used again (so far!) Since we do have the space, though, keeping things without knowing what we might need them for seems well worth it.

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