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“Better hang on to it just in case” ~boomers
My parents rented a storage unit when my grandma passed because no one had room for her nice furniture. And it is nice furniture, very well built - but no one is ever going to have the space for a 12ft tall curio cabinet. Let it goo.
I like those big cabinets in place of kitchen cabinets. Glass front makes everything look better, I don’t put curios in them. Plates, glasses, bottles, booze, whatever goes in them ends up looking good.
If it was something nice they weren’t wrong. Everything manufactured today is fucking garbage.
You can get good furniture, it’s just really expensive.
So again, hanging on to a proven good item is the correct move.
The style is wrong though. We have a minimalist modern space, so a big orange cabinet honestly just doesn’t fit. We are allowed to decorate the way we like without being held hostage by our parents and grandparents aesthetic preferences.
Agreed. Can still be cut down or modified, and then painted to update it.
Slaps tabletop This baby can hold so much wargaming terrain
A few years ago my wife and I decided to finish the basement. The first step was to clean it out, which involved going through all the junk that I had inherited from various family members. My mom always asserted that all of it was very valuable and CONSTANTLY checked that I still had it all and was taking good care of it.
I went through each item one by one and looked them up. Dishes, nick knacks, all of it. It took me hours. The highest value item was maybe $10. Several large and heavy boxes that I had been obligated to haul around to all of the places I lived for the last 30 years, as my mother constantly asked me about them. It was all worth maybe $100, if I made the effort to attempt to sell it. Which would have taken a lot of time as we’re talking dozens of fragile things. It just was not worth it.
I shoved it all into the trunk of my car and took it to the dump. My Mom died in 2011, so she wasn’t around to check up on all that crap.
God damn I was so pissed. 30 fucking years of hauling that worthless junk around probably cost far more than it was worth. My mother was so insistent that I even had it sitting around taking up space in my basement 12 years after her death. Just another one of her little power plays.
Glad you freed yourself from all the stuff. I had a similar experience clearing out my grandma’s hoarded house.
I am curious though, why take it to the dump instead of donating it to a thrift store?
Spite.
Honestly, it was all junk.
I’ve read that a lot of that “valuable” china really isn’t - some of it may have been at one point, but the younger generations just aren’t interested, so the market has just dropped out.
Oh yeah none of it matters, gramma’s china is mass manufactured catalog crap.
why did they collect all that? was it for fancy dinners that almost never happened?
My understanding is there are several related things at play:
- The jello effect. So, once upon a time, serving gelatin was reserved for the wealthy because making gelatin from scratch means rendering animal bones. You’ve got to be rich enough to pay servants/own slaves enough to do that for you. Then after WWII, there was suddenly a mass-produced easy to use product on the shelf called Jell-O. So in the 50’s and 60’s you saw an explosion in popularity of jello molds because serving gelatin was, to quote a Redditor I once read, “an impressive feat of housewifery.” Fancy dishes were similar; prior to WWII, fine decorated porcelain dishes were expensive, after WWII there were factories churning them out, and now Gladys from Topeka could have a floral print gilded gravy boat.
- Fancy dishes, and housewares in general, were marketed HARD to young women. Macy’s popularized the wedding registry, supermarkets started offering catalogs…it was common for young women to receive a portion of a china set for most of her adolescent gift-receiving occasions; Christmases, birthdays, high school graduation…this was the era of the hope chest, an entire industry sprang up for manufacturing pieces of furniture designed for young women to squirrel away a physical dowry in. You just weren’t a proper middle class lady unless you could come up with a fancy set of dishes to serve a Christmas dinner worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting on.
So these damn dishes that can’t be machine washed were manufactured in the quadrillions; Gramma got really protective over them, she was taught to value them from a very young age, and they’re delicate, easily broken, her particular set hasn’t been manufactured since the Truman administration so in a way they’re irreplaceable, and they must be hand-washed. So only a few Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, “special occasions” were served on them, and then by the 80’s gramma got sick of washing them, boomer dad “remembers that from when he was a kid” and thus they’re more sacred than God, God’s brother Jod and God’s nephew Zhod. To a boomer, there is no occasion special enough to break out gramma’s china, it’d be like eating dinner off of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence. Unthinkable.
Millennials, who eat a lot of meals out of paper and plastic takeout containers, have no attachment to those damn dishes and haul them to thrift stores by the truckload.
Years ago in college my mom tried to dump her old CRT TV on me with a roku.
“we’re leaving this tv with you”
“I don’t want it, if you leave it here I am throwing it out”
“Oh son you could use it to watch netflix”
“or mom i could watch netflix on my phone, my smart tv, my xbox one, my xbox 360, my ps3, my computer, my other computer, my other other computer all of which would be in high resolution. If you leave that here I am putting it where it belongs, in the trash”
This is a shortened version of the conversation that went on far too long with me getting more and more annoyed with being given garbage.
I would take a CRT in a heartbeat. It makes watching 4:3 content feel right, especially older Star Treks.
Allegedly it is good with vintage video games (e.g. NES). The weird idiosyncracies of CRTs were accounted for when developing the games.
Not just NES; games were largely designed with CRTs in mind all the way through PS2/Xbox/Gamecube console generation!
Legitimately would love a decent CRT TV (and room for it) to be able to authentically play Point Blank again - light gun games of that era only work on CRTs.
all the way through PS2/Xbox/Gamecube console generation!
You just gonna ignore the poor Dreamcast like that?
My bad!
How could I literally forget Sega’s last, beautiful disaster? 🤦🏻♂️ I spent so much time playing Street Fighter III: Third Strike on it back in the day…
