As you’ve probably noticed lately, our mindset about clearing the stuff and junk out of our house that we haven’t been using at all in the last 6-10 years has really clarified. If you’d talked to us a few months ago, you would have found out that we had dreams of getting rid of our clutter — but now we’ve actually begun to enjoy it. And sometimes even feel passionate about it.

Last week, we decided to call an antiques dealer to come check out the stuff we have in our barn to see if it is worth anything. Now I don’t often show a lot of photos of what is inside our barn or big attic; but let’s just say that we’ve not touched it much in the last 6 years (except to add stuff to the chaos). And when we moved in, it was already quite full of stuff.

Unfortunately, the dealer was not interested in any of our stuff — because it’s only from the 1870-1920 date range. Apparently not only enough to be cool, interesting or worth anything. Of course I have no idea if he only starts getting interested when pieces are worth at least €2,000 or what — but he was apparently more after Baroque-style pieces — and hey, aren’t we all?

At any rate, the deal was a bust and no help what-so-ever. So we determined it was time to start taking things into our own hands.

We’re learning more every day that people in Germany only want to buy used things that are like new — or they want to have them given to them. As much as that pains me to know, at some point you just have to let go and know that you’ve gotten all the use from it that you can. It’s only bringing me problems by sitting around and collecting dust. The costs are already sunk into it. So if I can’t get money for it, at least I can be happy knowing that someone else will take it home and love it for a while. And I’m not tossing it into a land fill which makes me very happy too.

The Metal Gypsies

In our area, there are one or two companies (at least I assume they’ve formed some sort of company) which drive from town to town, about once every two weeks, and ring a really loud bell. Sometimes they will also shout out, “ALT EISEN!” That means “old steel.” This guys are metal collectors and they collect all sorts of scrap metal which they then drive to a junkyard and sell. They perform this service for free, which I think is a pretty good gig for them. They get all the profit and you get your junk tossed out without paying to have it hauled off — or hauling it yourself. With the current state of metal prices, it’s often not worth doing it yourself. And we wouldn’t even know who to look to if we wanted to sell it.

At any rate, we heard “the screamer” coming down the street and flagged him down. Our thought process was simply to get rid of a single enormous metal grate which used to be inside the horse stables (which we turned into a guest house.) The thing is beyond heavy, and we thought the guys would be pretty stoked about getting such a huge chunk of metal. Unfortunately, they were overweight, over 50 and generally lazy — so we had to do most of the heavy lifting.

What began as “just give them the grate” turned into “find any metal we don’t want and chuck it”. So about 1 1/2 hours later, we’d found all sorts of metal we didn’t even realize we had, a bunch of junk we were already wondering what we would do with was loaded on the truck and they were on there way. Stefan almost lost a toe in the process; but thankfully everyone survived. And we were definitely starting to feel like the clean out efforts were not in vain.

Things they took:

• • Old stove & dishwasher
  • The metal grate
  • About 10 five-meter long metal pipes that were in our wine cellar — and so long that we could barely even get them out
  • A ancient old drill press and table saw
  • A basket of old rusted files
  • Random metal junk from the shelves in our barn
  • A box of horseshoes
  • Piles of other randomness

When these guys got to us, the truck was nearly empty. And when they left, it was full. So I’d say it was a good day for them. Although I have no doubt that they complained and moaned about how they were going to get it all off of there, despite the fact that they were going to make some money from it.

Sadly, I didn’t get any photos of this process and most people probably wouldn’t see much difference because there is still so much here — but we see it and it ROCKS!

Freecycle.org

Now while we’re on the subject of giving things away, we also put a few items on Freecycle this week. I have to say that here in Germany, Freecycle works just as well as in the US. People apparently sit on top of the message boards, waiting for things to pop up. And within 30 minutes of making the posts, we’d promised almost everything to people.

Our first round of junk including thing like an old kegerator, an IKEA shelf, our cat tree (which the cats have used maybe 5 times in the last 3 years), a mirror we inherited with the house and a TON of wood from the barn.

Now, regarding the wood. We knew this was going to be a tough call because it’s literally just random pieces of wood, spindles, table legs, a few decoration pieces and so on. The guy who used to live in our house was a carpenter, and he made and rebuilt furniture. So he collected all of this stuff for one day when he might need it. I’m convinced that the amount of junk this guy had around him caused his death, because he simply couldn’t function anymore with so much clutter.

At any rate, we have been dreading taking this stuff down because it’s on the second floor, above all of our workshop space (so you need a ladder) — and we have no use for any of it. When we put the ad up for it, I wasn’t really sure we would even get a nibble. The first person offered to come get it to turn it into fire wood — and to be honest, we’ll probably let him take whatever ends up being left over instead of paying to haul it off. But there are two other people coming by on Saturday who are going to look through a bunch of it and see if they find anything useful. One is renovating a house, so we understand their plight and hope this works out well for them!

Next Steps

Our next plans including listing a bunch of specialty stuff on eBay and then we’re going to have a big garage sale in a few weeks. So if you’re around the Frankfurt area May 26-27, drop by and see what you can use! There’s a lot of work to be done, but we hope that via these two methods, we can get rid of a lot of stuff (without having too much hassle of packaging and mailing things) — and then we can see what the next round of things will be that ends up on FreeCycle. Strangely enough, private garage sales are not at all popular here in Germany…so it will be interesting to see how that turns out. I’ve always had great luck with them in the US, and we live on a really busy street — so hopefully it will all work out beautifully!

Don’t forget to stop by Pancakes & French Fries for more projects of beauty and usefulness!