Never Throw Anything Away

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Posted by Ron Laden on 06/09/2018 08:40:25:

I think in the future the rule is it only gets chucked if it would cost £1.00 or less to replace.

Even stuff in a pound shop costs more than that when you take into account the shoe leather. Have you seen the price of timber! It's about a quid a foot now.
Those short ends in every builders skip amount to about £20. Ok not much use for most building but when I retire my exercise is going to be cycling around picking up those little bits and I'll put a wood burner in the shed (if the greenies haven't banned them)

[Brian OldfordParticipant @brianoldford70365]

Posted by Bazyle on 06/09/2018 18:26:26:

. . . . . . when I retire my exercise is going to be cycling around picking up those little bits and I'll put a wood burner in the shed (if the greenies haven't banned them)

But surely if the greenies want us to grow even more trees we'll need more CO2 in the atmosphere.

[Clive FosterParticipant @clivefoster55965]

Far as I can see the never throw anything away syndrome is justified by the inversion of the 80 % : 20 % rule. That is only 20 % of the stuff you keep could ever be used, even under the most optimistic assessment. Question as to which 20% will get used is unanswerable in advance so hafta keep the lot. For creatively serious hoarders, like moi, the rule is probably more like 95 % : 5 % .

Closely related is the effort that we feel might "reasonably" be expended to make use of hoarded treasure. IFor example I need some serious shelving for the loft and have a decent collection of 1" square speed frame off cuts, a box of joints and a new pack of 12 ft lengths. A quick eyeball estimate says that the off cuts should be more than enough for the 125 ft (ish) total length but a fair number of actual lengths available make a poor match to whats needed. So I set up a jig and welded the short ones into longer lengths. Maybe splicing 1" and 2 1/2" long pieces into the middle of one four section piece was going a bit far but the 1/16" excess came off pretty darn fast on the vertical linisher so it worked out fine in the end. Off cut collection down to one 3 ft length and six 2 ft 6 ones with integrated welded on shelf brackets. Result.

Naturally we won't mention the saga of the "too good to use" assessment on block of alloy which caused me to buy an almost identical lump for a job. Which never got done! So now I have two too good to use pieces.

When it comes to values I suspect most of us had our mental assessments pretty much frozen around about the time we got our first proper wage packet. £50 per calendar month for me. Inflation and technological change leading to vastly reduced real world prices make that assessment a poor guide in the modern world.

Clive.

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