Stockpiling

I have seventy two cans of soup in my walk in cupboard.  That is seventy two actual cans of actual soup.  Ooops.  That is not including the dozen or so tins in my kitchen cupboards.

We only really like Heinz or homemade (though we are getting a few home made soups recently).  It was a good offer from Tescos.  I wish I had realised how many of the tins I had bought over the weeks the offer was good for.  I can only see my stockpile clearly now that I have a place to put them and I haven't got them all heaped in a corner.  This is a good thing.  They don't expire until 2015 and I suspect that they will not last long into 2014.

Clearing out the walk in cupboard has been good.  I had thrown a lot of things in there and really I should have just thrown them out.  I now have clear shelves to fill with my stash and a clear pathway to get to them.  It does bring home to me how many loo rolls we have stashed, how many packs of kitchen roll and how many plastic tubs.  This is not a bad thing.  Some of the plastic tubs may be culled later, but only after I have finished clearing the kitchen cupboards.

One thing that I probably won't put off for too long is clearing out the tool boxes.  I have so many tool boxes and boxes of diy stuff - and we never diy!  We have decorated two rooms since 1994, and we are not rushing into the other seven.  Most of our needs can be met with some screwdrivers, a hammer, some pliers and a drill.  If we need anything more complex we can knock on Nice Mr Next Door's door as he fixes cars for a living.  He has everything.  He has generators and angle grinders and thingies and wotsits and welds things in the street.  I cannot imagine him not having a tool that we needed.  Or we live within five minutes easy walk of a tool hire place.  So why do we have six actual tool boxes?  Most of which had been given to us, one or two bits bought in optimistic faith that this year would be the year we got the shelves put up and the rest is father's.

I suppose that is the difference between a useful stash and a not useful stash.  I am a bit stunned that I have seventy two tins of actual soup (plus the tins in the cupboards) but I know they will be used, just like the loo roll.  I don't even know what are in some of the tool boxes, and I haven't felt the need to crack them open in a long time.  In this house, the new rule is that things have to earn their shelf space.  The tools are going to be much reduced!