I think people who are into crafts. They have all of these yarns, construction papers, various tools and stuff. All so that they can say that they have all of these projects in mind that they want to do. But they never do them so they get more crafting stuff and it just eats away storage until their place is practically consumed by it.
Hobby electronics?
Need a small part? Better buy 10 in case you break one and because it’s only marginally more expensive than getting one. Now repeat for every project you do
Don’t get me started on the broken or obsolete thrown away shit I keep around “for parts or that one time I might need it”
Well, last week I finally soldered the cut cables of the otherwise working basic (literally a transformer, bridge rectifier, fuse and voltmeter) 12V lead acid battery charger from 2007 I found earlier this year to charge a tractor battery, so that’s a plus
oh god i have so many junk boards i keep just in case i need some part. ive stripped them for parts maybe a handful of times over years.
please send help.
I don’t want to desolder all the relays off this washing machine board to throw it away only to find out I needed a double optocoupler!
Oh god yes. I have so many extra switches, connectors, resistors, capacitors, microcontrollers, little screens, sensors, etc……
Then I had to buy so many little containers to hold them all. When I die my family is gonna hate me.
And then never even one of the parts…
Collecting stuff is basically the ultimate hoarder hobby.
I collect rocks and yes the clock is a rock
Some asshole Transformers action figure sellers on eBay who DISASSEMBLE THE FIGURES AND THEN SELL EACH PIECE SEPARATELY. Fuck those people, seriously.
Or toy resellers in general.
“Uh, I uh got this ActionGuy’s left arm…$14 please…will throw in some random unnecessary junk from other toys to make up the value”
It’s obscene and I’m happy for 3-D printing to exist as it is today, is to tell these assholes to get fucked.
For real. Or they remove the weapons and sell them separately, or the figurines from Lego sets. Special place in Hell for those people.
Warhammer.
Model Railroading.
It’s not the worst, but it requires all the key ingredients - you need to own a home large enough to have a ‘spare’ room, which means you’ve got disposable income. And displaying the trains is almost as much fun as running them, so you end building shelves and shelves, which then sprawl out to the rest of the house. Only to realize you’re missing the ‘key’ one from that set, got to go find that, obviously.
And then of course you can’t throw away the boxes, because that would lower the resale value, so you need to rent a second storage unit. Not that you would ever sell them of course. But your kids will be sitting on a goldmine!
And that’s just the collection portion. It’s a crafty hobby, from making scenery & waterfalls & little trees all the way to the special paints to make the engines look aged. That will need a room as well.
And now that we’ve got the train shelves in the kitchen, you know, I could put a food themed railroad on the table there. Yes I already have the desert themed one in the train room and the prairie themed one in the living room and the snow theme layout in the hallway, but I don’t have a silly one. No of course the Halloween theme one doesn’t count.
Junko pop
Pinball. Because a lot of the classic pinballs are 25 years plus old they tend to have extra of everything in case something breaks.
If you own a pinball machine, you have a whole lot of other stuff too. Ramps, decals, balls, fuses, you name it.
Plus hardly anybody who owns pinball machines owns only one. Four or five seem to be the norm, and I know several people who have a house with 20 or 30 in it. That’s 20 or 30 full size pinball machines in a normal house.
Cycling can get bad. Some dudes have a garage full of $20k of bikes.
I am on the low end of the bike hoarding spectrum. I have two very modestly priced bikes (one road, one fat) and a 20” box of parts and accessories. You could count the 4 water bottles in the cupboard, 4 bike shorts in the drawer, and 6 bike jerseys in the closet as well. 2 pairs of bike shoes, a hook of tires and tubes in the garage, oh god never mind I have it bad.
This week I actually got to use some old cranks I had saved from a bike I replaced.
Ok I’m not actually going to ride those cranks. I just needed to fit them on the bike to confirm the other cranks were bent and not the bike frame itself.
Now I’m going to buy new replacement cranks and keep the old ones AND the bent ones for some reason…
My first answer would have been retro game collecting, but that’s already been discussed, so I’ll posit custom PC building. That’s a hobby rife with keeping spare parts “just in case”.
Source: Self
This is the one hobby where you actually might use the thing you’re hoarding just in case.
last week i needed the dvi to hdmi converter cable i’ve been saving in my cable hoard for like 8 years and i have never felt so validated
Nice! So vindicating when that happens.
but it is a double edged sword, lol. now that i have proved to myself that those cables really will come in handy one day, i am forever stuck with a slowly growing stash of cables!
True. But do I really need all those case fans that I’m holding onto? Or that big bag of DDR3? Probably not but it’s cool ok…
All I can say is that you’ll need them within 6 - 12 months of getting rid of them.
I feel like you’re attacking me for my
drawerboxcratetotestorage rental of cables…No no, I’m sure my box of IDE Hard Drives & CD Burners will be of use to me at some point…
You laugh and you joke but I stumbled into a PS2 original, the fat one, with a network adapter so you can slot a hard drive in. I went into my spare parts and pulled out an old IDE hard drive, as the PS2 was before the spread of SATA (I think even before SATA was announced) and it popped right in and guess who doesn’t have to worry about discs
I’m sure if you add up all those hard drives, there’s like 1 GB of storage! That’s valuable, right?
As shit, I’ve got one of those for spare car parts…
Oh man, the car parts one take up so much space too.
Do I need three exhausts for my WRX? Nope, but I keep banging them up off reading.
3 engine blocks, all needing some form of rebuilding. Mostly just new bearings. Or an entire extra wire harness because in the last rebuild it was just easier to buy a new one.
All my old shocks and springs after I replaced them with outback gear.
And that’s just what fits on the car. I’ve got big brake kits for cars I don’t even own! But they’re like $2k if I can ever find a buyer.
I would actually love to know what hobbies don’t have some sort of hoarding aspect! I’m trying to think on it and I can’t come up with any at the moment.
I’m sure one of you can help me?
Playing music. Sure some people can collect guitars or whatever, but really that’s a separate hobby from actually playing.
But you need equipment to actually play?
I’m not a guitar collector/fetishist at all, but still need at minimum an electric (preferably at least two for humbuckers & singlecoils), a steel string, a nylon string and a bass to be able to play what I want to play. Not to mention amps, pedals etc. And this is strictly for playing gigs and home practice, when you get into home recording it piles up even more. Even if you restrict yourself to things you actually use, the possibilities for hoarding are pretty much endless.
Yeah collecting instruments, parts, strings/reeds, and accessories is totally part of it. People hoard to varying degrees but any hobby requiring physical objects is hoardable.
Idk, I know a pianist and his house is just filled with boxes and boxes of sheets music!
Hmmm yeah I have learned a ton of fiddle tunes. Does it count as hoarding when its in your head?
Oh man, woodworking is pretty bad. Tools galore, scrap wood everywhere, and half-finished projects all over the garage.
Shhh! I swear I can build that for only twice the cost and take three times as long, but it will be waaay quicker if I have this new tool.
Your mistake is in what you are making your comparisons to. You can’t compare your solid wood bookcase to an Ikea cardboard bookcase, you need to compare it to the fancy brands that actually do make things from solid wood.
That is a personal attack I do not appreciate
Is this a place to cast shade or self reflect? In the former experimental scientist. They have closets of oscilliscopes, vacuum pumps, cryostats. Enough to furnish 3 or more labs. They always say they’ll use it, but the pile only gets bigger.
For me, I have the opposite problen in general. I throw everything away and end up buying or making new shit. Worst is probably code. Fuck making a repo. This is a one off. I can write the same code 3 times before I keep it, but I like to say that is what makes me a decent programmer. And I’ll keep telling myself that until I die.
Any “retro” collection. Old video games, for instance. In many cases, the barrier to entry is sky high, because there are very few old consoles or games on the market; The collectors have bought all of them, and are never planning on selling.
I had to give up my retro game collection when I moved and I realized how long overdue it was. I hope someone out there is enjoying my old consoles and games.
If I were a collector, this would be my thing.
I am not a collector though. I don’t have the house for it and I don’t want a house big enough to be able to do that.
Cars because they are so big, and ugly when in disrepair. Small scale hoarding is a small scale problem.
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They’re also wasteful pollution machines when they’re run, and for no practical purpose. They’re just toys to these people.
To be fair, the same can be said about most forms of entertainment.
Same as the social media servers you utilize and the streaming services that you utilize.
Data centers use a ton of power for subjectively no practical purpose.
Backpacking. I have a big plastic bin filled with equipment that I decided to go another direction with.
But makers are the kings of hobby hoarding, just look at Adam Savage. He has parts for things he hasn’t even thought of building. He has a plethora of tools that overlap entirely just because the set of tools is closer to a given work aspect. Walls of bins with various degrees of filled because he bought 100 of something a decade ago that may have a future use.
Adams cave is so beautiful and well ordered these days. He’s the best kind of hoarder.
Those videos are so relaxing to watch
The rare occasion that “the thing” ends up being exactly what you needed is incredible, though.
It’s almost always whatever you you threw out last week though.
Or what you put in a storage unit that is inconveniently far away. I still need those 5mm magnets…
Opposite with me. I’ve got 25+ years of hiking in, never been a gearhead. That shit’s expensive. I buy one and make it work until it don’t work no more
My first backpacking trip, my bag was 40lbs. I said fuck that jazz, and now my pack is 20lbs and it has made trips so much better.
The ultralight stuff is a whole new set of gear I’ve considered buying but don’t know if I’ll use it enough to be worth it. My old school ass carries about 50lbs on a weekend trip though it drops fast as I eat up the food and drink the beer. I managed this for decades while my body weight was about 130lbs. Now I’m at 170 with plantar fasciitis, mild arthritis and possibly Covid lingering effects.
I’m not even ultralight. I have a framed pack and a whole toothbrush. Those guys are nuts.
Perfect example.
