ARE you a dad? Is all that stuff important, easily fixed, or you’ll need it the week after you throw it away? Follow these hoarding tips:
Screws and nails are more precious than jewels and gold
Keeping a vast stockpile of screws and nails, displayed to their best advantage in dusty jam jars, is vital. Some of them date back 50 years. Not just aesthetically pleasing but useful if you need to build a bookcase, another shed, or a life-size wooden model of the entire world.
Guard your treasures jealously
Don’t take any crap from your wife about it being ‘pointless’ hanging on to a Fisher Price treehouse playset with half the bits missing when all your kids are grown adults living abroad. If she has an unplanned pregnancy that’s 35 quid saved.
Old magazines constitute an archive
The burning of the Library of Alexandria set the world back centuries, and throwing away your stack of Sunday Times magazines would be even worse. Who knows when the world will call on you demanding to read that cover interview with Jarvis Cocker from 1996?
Remember your magical dad repair skills
Nothing is too knackered to be discarded. And despite having no training as an engineer, you are able to repair anything from hair tongs to a DVD player, or at least strip it for parts. The only reason you haven’t is that you’ve been busy thinking about fixing that broken strimmer for five years.
Render parts of your home inaccessible
If you can freely move around your loft or spare room and there’s space for something useful like a home gym, you’re doing it wrong. It should be impossible to get in without first removing boxloads of total crap such as a single bike stabiliser, a beige computer monitor or a set of dowelling rods you have no memory of ever needing.
Misunderstand sentimental value
Might your grown-up daughter like to be reunited with her favourite childhood teddy? Unlikely, so he can go on the bonfire. However doggedly keep old taps, as if having your sink fixed in 2005 is a joyful memory.
