Junk
I have been a lifelong and compulsive buyer of books and music, and I additionally have the common male failing of 'collecting'. With some people this often takes the form of an obsession with one subject or endeavour, be it football (or other sport), a particular historical period, car maintenance, or whatever. My own obsessions are not so single-minded. The consequence is a hoard of not-necessarily-connected paraphernalia indistinguishable from a pile of junk. This is not limited to a single location, with much of my surplus still at my parents' house 150 miles away (a ludicrous inconvenience—especially given my age and the decades I've had my own home).
Just in the case of music, in an age of streaming and downloads, YouTube and decent radio stations, is it necessary to keep a large volume of physical media? Yet an extensive collection of vinyl sits unplayed in Yorkshire, I could listen to a CD every day and not come close to exhausting my home collection in a year, and still five more recordings were delivered to the house today. Am I crazy? Added to this, our home is a small one—barely large enough for the three of us—and my wife and son are also both hoarders!
My father died in 2011. Under the circumstances prevailing at my parents' home, only slight inroads into getting rid of now useless junk have been made.
Dad was a busy chap and, as well as gardening, he had an interest in building and tinkering within an extensive shed-realm which, over the years, became full of 'useful' material. For dad, everything could be re-purposed or put to good use (although most of it wasn't). I doubt anything was ever thrown out. In-shed he would store his tools and gardening equipment, maintain the mowers, and carry out other light engineering and construction tasks.
My parents' (now my mother's) house is an old property which had, at the time we moved in (about 1968), getting on for an acre of land attached. About one-third-to-a-half of that was set out as garden. Along two sides of a paved courtyard next to the house were outbuildings that included a wash house, a two-storey stable (with hay loft) and a short range of adjoining sheds. Behind the stable and sheds were two wooden stables and, beyond those, in a sea of long grass and brambles, a collapsing wooden summer house with an alarmingly bowed glazed front that gave the impression of having been dropped from a great height. In front of the house was a short drive separating it from the maintained garden. At the end of the drive, next to the sheds, dad put up a garage. In succeeding years, the land not set out as garden (though used by dad for produce) and farthest from the road was acquired for development by the local authorities.
To come to the point, the result is that the accumulated junk of decades filled the aforementioned garage, wash house, stable/hay loft, adjoining sheds and the one remaining wooden stable. And it is that lumber which now must be shifted. Recently filling the largest available builders' skip effectively only cleared one shed (alarmingly, there was quite a bit of asbestos sheet in there, so that was bagged in polythene and taped up for proper disposal by approved means. Dad was a fiend for asbestos. I can remember, as a child—as my father cut insulation for a fireplace from the stuff—playing in a heap of the residual swarf. I feel short of breath just thinking about it).