Loads of people have cupboards, attics, garages and spare rooms filled to bursting with old possessions they no longer need or want. When you get around to having a clearout, there are a few obvious possibilities: you can give things away to a charity shop, you can flog them on Ebay, or you can throw them away like a piece of rubbish. The latter option seems rather pointless - and you never know, you might need that reversible Jason and Kylie duvet cover again some day - so if an item is too big or too pointless to lug down to the post office or the charity shop, it’s tempting just to keep it lying around. That way lies madness, and a garage full of junk.
Luckily, as ever, there is an alternative! Sign up to Freecycle, where you can offer your unwanted clutter free to others in your local area. If someone is willing to take that oversized inflatable snowman off your hands, they’ll come round to pick it up - so aside from the remote possibility of telling an axe murderer the way to your home, it’s a hassle-free way of clearing some space and getting your old stuff into the hands of people who might actually appreciate it.
You can bag some decent stuff on there too. Free, unwanted hi-fis are a relatively common sight. I landed one a couple of months ago - hey, the CD player doesn’t work, but nothing’s perfect.
Now if someone - anyone - would take my old 17″ CRT monitor off my hands, which I freely admit in the ad is “quite blurred” and worst of all, “beige”, I’d be able to recommend Freecycle unreservedly. As it is, give it a go if you’re remotely interested in tree-hugging, saving the planet, and all that. What’s the worst that can happen? You feel a crushing sense of rejection because nobody wants your stuff, even for free. And that’s not all that bad at all.
