COLIN HOGG

COLIN FINDS MEANING IN GIVING IT ALL AWAY

On average, every one of us across the country is hoarding $1200 worth of unused bits and pieces about the house, according to a recent survey by the popular invisible shop Trade Me. I’m not sure if that means even the little children of New Zealand have a great big stash of stuff, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.

I do, though, have issues with the use of the word “hoarding” and also with the word “unused”. I have a lot of stuff that might seem unused, but I’d argue it’s simply waiting to be used. And there is no hoarding round our way. Well, I wouldn’t call it that. Collecting is a much more polite way to describe it.

Anyway, Trade Me reckons there are 73 million second-hand items lying unused and unloved in garages, attics and cupboards across the nation. The 4000 people they surveyed about their unused stuff each admitted to having an average of 15 things they never touched any more.

Whether this constitutes a national scandal or just a cunning attempt by Trade Me to shake up more business I’m not sure, but it did get me thinking about what was lurking in our cupboards and gathering dust in the garage.

Well, there’s an unused fridge for a start – the one it’s hard to avoid hitting when I park the car. It was additional to requirements when we moved into our house nearly six years ago after the previous owner left their old fridge behind. So it stayed in the garage, unused and unattached. At various times, I’ve tried to sell it but the darling wife is reluctant to let it go.

“We might need it one day,” she says mysteriously.

I think she feels the same way about the sewing machine, the ice-cream maker, the spa footbath and the juicer. It’s just the way I feel about my soldering kit, my stuffed partridge and my collection of broken turntables and CD players.

I doubt my disused stuff would add up to $1200, though I’d happily take that sort of money for it. Maybe the solution to all this stuff we’re hanging onto lies in the old line about one person’s trash being another’s treasure. Any chance you get you should give the stuff away.

I’m forever giving away things that I don’t want. The other day I gave a bloke I’d only just met a broken coffee machine that had been sitting in a cupboard for a year or so. He was a building inspector, looking over our place for a prospective buyer.

“What’s wrong with that?” he asked, eyeing the old machine. “It’s broken,” I told him.

“How much you want for it?” “Nothing. It’s yours.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

And he took it and I’m glad to see it go. It had blown up one time too many for my comfort. The last time involved smoke. I told him, but he didn’t care. It was a good deal all round. He had a broken coffee machine and I had space for more stuff in the cupboard.

Which is just what we all need, apparently.