Good Junk

I admit I am a pack rat. I don’t easily throw things away because I always consider a future use, perhaps ten years down the line.
I love to thinker and I fix pretty much everything around the house and more often than not, I have what I need “in stock”. My wife just laughs at the stuff I store in the garage, but I always look at the weird things as “inventory”, and in my mind almost everything has a potential use.
Some of my favorites include the usual pieces of 2x4’s, washers, brackets, boxes, tubing, etc.
Another goody is the 5-6 inch tall wooden wine case from a wine shop or Costco, which I mount on the wall in the garage to store spray cans and cleaning supplies. I also have one of these in my trunk, so when I put grocery bags or other small items in there they don’t go everywhere.
The ones I use more often are cleaner’s wire hangers and I love the fake plastic credit cards or expired hotel room card keys.
With the wire hangers I have secured garage door springs, trundle beds for moving, hang flower pots, pictures, poked stuff from under just about anything, and sometimes with a magnet taped to the end.
I unclogged drains and calking tubes, made whisks from them for mixing paint, made hooks to hang stuff on the wall. Tidied up and organized a bunch cables behind my stereos and computers.
The plastic cards are always handy for scraping food off the counter or out of pots and pans. I pick up my pets’ little “mistakes” (I throw those cards away). They are great for caulking, mixing, leveling, scraping bugs off your windshield. I cut them into “L” shape to clean the sliding windows tracks. Have you checked those lately?
The most important part of all this is the fun and convenience of finding instant solutions to problems around the house.
So before you throw things away let your creativity take over and start building your own “inventory”.