Don't feel bad, being a packrat is not really a disease,,,it's a way of life!!!! (and I'm eaten up with it)

I like the big rubbermaid type tubs, labeled, and stored on metal shelving. One advantage is that they are faily drip/dustproof.

Teacher

PS I've learned to label both ends and the top.

That's a good tip about labeling both ends and the top. I'll have to get my pen and labels out...

My wife went crazy a while back when she found Rubbermaid and Sterlite shoeboxes on sale. She got a lot of them, and I've been filling them up with different kit and EDC items. I've got some shelves that are dedicated to this. The only problem is that occasionally one of the cats will knock some of the boxes off and the lids aren't all that secure, so sometimes I have a box or two of stuff to pick up. I don't have my items inventoried in a spread sheet, but that's a good next step for me.

When we moved last time, we moved our books in Rubbermaid totes. It was readily apparent that we would not have room to set up bookshelves in our current house. When we packed the books, we gave letter names to the totes, and itemized each book that went into each tote. When I need something, it's quite easy to check the list to see where the book I want is...although the books did get packed in somewhat a random fashion, so searching for the title does take time. Come to think of it, I haven't seen the Word doc for the file lately...wonder if I've got that somewhere.

We're moving in a few months anyway...good time to itemize again I guess.

A while back I just happened to be driving down a street in town. Someone had their garage door open and I happened to glance over when I went by. Inside was the nicest storage setup I have ever seen. Shelves lined one wall and on each shelf, arranged in an OCD manner, was a banker's box filled with who knows what. There must have been 40+ boxes, at least.

Then I pull into my garage and see various bins and boxes scattered around. Nuts.

I feel your pain cedfire,

Tonight I started packing for another deer hunting trip next week and had 9 Rubbermaid Totes of clothing/gear scattered about the basement family room, when DW saw it she was not happy (really, really not happy).

I am in the doghouse again, good thing I am going away for a week; hope my cool stuff is not all on the front lawn when I get back!

Mike

Each day, I face a new wave of crap that people bring to my home for me to manage. We now have baby version 3.0 on the way, with an early March release date, and there's a bit of "getting ready" that needs to happen.

For a few years we were good with the stuff management, 2003-2007 have been, um....less good. But we're ending 2007 with clear direction and a Plan Of Action that seems to be working, if not as fast as I'd like.

Like you, we have scores of those Rubbermaid totes, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. For reasons that my "Y" chomosone prevents me from understanding fully, my wife has what amounts to basically continuous, daily chore that involves washing, sorting, folding, storing and unstoring articles of clothing that are forever arriving as gifts and hand-me-overs from others as well as departing for thrift shops and to the homes of other kids. As far as I can tell, at any given moment, 80% of the clothing in our home is either recently arrived, is about to depart or was left here by someone, we just don't know who. Add to this a need to manage a seemingly endless progression of kids clothes that are too small, too big, the wrong season or the wrong style. The launder-management, which differs in complexity from the launch of a telecommunications sattelite only in that the clothing does not end up in space, is the main use of most of our Rubbermaid totes and is my wife's contribution to the sotrage dillema we face.

Not wanting to be an unequal partner in the arrangement, I contribute to the storage dillema in my own way. First of all, there's always 3 to 5 computers in the basement in some state of dissassembly and re-assembly as I have this almost obsessive tendancy to rescue, rebuild, and give away computers. In any given month, I'll get 8 or 9 systems, from which I can usually build 4 or 5 fairly nice systems which I then give away. Well you can imagine what this means I have a lot of drawers full of hard drives, NIC cards, memory sticks, and the like. Now add to this the fact that I've never met a tool I didn't like, but my basement shop is only 14'x18'. And then add to this that I just KNOW that that coil of 650' of quad-sheild RG59 that I found will be handy one day, if I ever need it. Oh, and that milk crate full of all those NEMA L-15 Twist Lock connectors, that cold be useful for something. And that big trash bag of packing peanuts. I mean, it's a shame to throw them out right? They won't go bad, after all. Oh, and look at this folding table - it's perfectly good, they were throwing it in the trash!

Now, put this together, and you have a Storage Dillemma of Epic Proportions.

I know that the answer is a mass reduction of stuff, and at this moment, I think that's our single biggest challenge - simply getting the stuff OUT to the people and places that will take it. I did recently give away my old pickup truck, just because it was another thing to be managed, and I know that this weekend, I'm going to be hauling just huge quantities of old technology out of the house, for good. I know that 10GB hard drives were a big deal once, now they are space-wasters, and it's time to let go. I'm also going to apply the "I haven't touched this in a year" rule to a bunch of stuff, no matter how "useful" it might be. Or local Freecycle group is going to have a good week as I clear out the basement.

We have two kids now so I took some of my tools and bought some lumber and built a nice big dresser/changing table. I made the drawers as big as possible to get the most space.
I used to fix up old computers and give them away then so many people expected me to drive out to their homes and fix them or call you and have you walk them through how to do something. I finally took all the old stuff and ebay'ed like items together and gave away the rest. Now we have our laptops and another old one I picked up for my son and am looking for another one or two to start fixing up for my daughter and maybe a spare.
I bought one of those soft sided tool bags and put one or two of just about every part I had in it for a repair kit.
Any old Dell Latitude parts you have laying around I'll take to help you clear up space Doesn't matter how old since we run Linux wedon't need the multi G of ram needed to make windows run.

Ohh, saw mention of freecycle. Its run on Yahoo servers so don't put any more information than necessary, yahoo is very bad when it comes to selling information and privacy invasion, very very bad.

That's how I got the chair I'm using now. When I was moving into the apartment I use during the semester, someone had moved out of one of the others & maintenance cleaned out whatever they left behind. Right on top was a perfectly serviceable desk chair.

Freecycle has nothing to do with Yahoo any more than the Cubscouts have anything to do with Yahoo. Yahoo! has group communications tools, and a lot of people who create Freecycle groups like to use Yahoo to manage them, but it's not a Yahoo product, service or feature.

I know, because my wife and I are founders of TWO Freecycle groups!

Martin, you wanna feel better sometime, just come over and take a look at my garage.

There is a fixed ammount of stuff in my family, it just gets passed from father to son a little bit at a time every time they visit.

My grandfather lived through the great depression and never threw anything away since. He taught me how to pull nails from scrap wood, straighten, and re-use them.

There is also a fixed ammount of stuff in our town. Four times a year we put our unwanted "bulky items of refuse" on the curb and then drive around picking up stuff we do want from everybody else. The town claims that they pay to have this stuff collected and taken to the landfill but I think someone just pockets the money.