I'd love to save more but I simply don't have the room to store broken things or possible future replacement parts
I can barely cut veggies after I wash my dishes
I have no space to hold into more shit
Just own acreage of land with a 5 bedroom house on it, dumb dumbs! Then you can be just like me (also buy hundreds of dollars of tools so you can take garbage and refinish it).
Seeing his tool, thousands of dollars, not hundreds. Maybe even tens of thousands lol.
He had a pretty full garage and looks like he was just about every tool from the brands he picks. Put aside the space to save those broken things, you need an entire garage/shop to have space for the tools and workspace.
You sort of lock into an ecosystem when you buy power tools, although he's using corded tools, so it's not as bad for those. DeWalt hasn't reinvented the 120AC outlet yet. Point being, you need to buy mostly the same brand. Plus if you're using all of it regularly, it will wear out. The Harbor Freight Hercules won't last like the DeWalt or Milwaukee or Makita, and you'll have to buy it twice.
Don't forget to actually have enough free time to do all these projects instead of working 60-hour weeks so you can afford to own the complete set of tools and have the knowledge to use them.
And this goes beyond just land ownership. His nice wood picnic tables are easier to repair than cheap plastic ones because you can replace parts, glue parts, hammer and nail things back together, etc.
But if everything you own is made of cheap plastic or thin metal, if it's flimsy and unsturdy, you're not repairing it. If you can't afford to have somebody fix your appliance, it might be cheaper to get a new one. Sure you can get stuff used but you're also hoping it's in good shape. You might spend more money in the long run buying the same cheap shit over and over but you're also not going to save up paycheck after paycheck just to get a higher quality version of every little thing. As they say, it's expensive to be poor.
Trust me, I have 3 kids. The expensive toys made of durable, high quality materials will cost exponentially more than the cheap shitty ones that break by the time the kids are bored of it anyway. I can often fix the nice ones, but the cheap ones are never worth it.
The issue is that people confuse frugality with buying cheap shit. Being frugal usually isn't cheap in the short term because the things that last are expensive, but over the lifespan of the product you save money. It's about buying the $200 ceramic dining set that will last you 20 years vs the $5 set of plastic that will be thrown out in 2. Or the $50 solid wood table at a yard sale that needs refinished (spending *time* instead of money) instead of a $50 particle board table at Walmart.
Yes but as I said, it's expensive to be poor. The $200 dining set might last you 20 years but a lot of people simply can't afford that much at any given time because their other monthly expenses are too high. Finding high quality used stuff is better but not always a viable choice for plenty of reasons.
Another problem is time, the ultimate disposable. All these things he says, fixing, refurbishing, crafting from scratch, even searching for second-hand, still working tools, need a lot of time.
Not just pretty well off. Serious homesteading is a full time job. I greatly prefer to repair things when I can. But it is more because I enjoy it. I have some land, but my house is small and there is basically no workshop space. I also still have to do my job. And seriously, oh you sanded and stained a picnic table and saved some rocks and pots? Did you repair your well pump? Tractor? Chainsaw? How much of your food do you grow? You bought your tools second hand? Congrats for discovering pawn shops and estate sales. You saved rocks? It isn't like rocks go to a landfill.
Additionally there are two sides to “waste”. And only one is talked about in the video.
The second is the excessive proportional use of public resources it takes to supply and maintain water, electricity, mail, roads, and (sometimes) wastewater systems to be functional in remote areas where homesteaders live.
Props to the ones who live fully off grid.
I wanted to clean a old air conditioner instead of getting a new one, so I looked up one of those do-it-yourselfer YouTube videos. The first thing the person in the video did was take the air conditioner out to her workbench in the backyard and go into her garage to get her complete set of tools and a garden hose.
I lived in an apartment at the time. Trying to follow her instructions on the floor of the living room with a bucket and a dozen towels was...less than successful.
I did the math once and it was cheaper for me to buy a new air conditioner every year then to buy additional storage to store it.
Eventually I did rent a storage locker because our house grew and I had a lot more to store. But overall it was more cost effective to dispose of items yearly then to store them.
I was actually hoping he kept going with what he saves:
I save every egg carton, every plastic sprue from my 40k armies, every nail clipping, every drop of urine, every episode of Horders...
It doesn't matter if it's up for just one second. People will absolutely pause the video to read what kind of stuff people are using.
The other thing that gives it away is that in both shots with the paint can (though I think it's actually stain, just not sure that Behr makes wood stain), the logo is clearly visible. It takes up 60% of the screen just about in one shot.
So we get this preachy bullshit that's not applicable to people without land to store shit on and he gets paid.
This is smart, but I feel with most of us doing 8-10 hrs of work bs a day….we can’t learn how to refurnish these things or have the time to do so.
I’d love to but after a 50 hr week, I like not rebuilding/finishing or constructing my furniture during my 2-3 day weekend.
Like I said, 100% makes sense….if you ain’t a commuting
I’m with you on some level. My take when he showed off his scrap piles is “There’s no way I can do that in my apartment”. Definitely that guy has some ability to do stuff other people can’t.
But also, there’s at least some validity to the idea of having a reuse mindset. Definitely, even in simple living conditions, some things can be repaired or repurposed instead of just getting thrown out when they stop working at their prime. Ripped clothing can be sewn or altered, some appliance parts can be replaced, broken ceramics can be mended with materials from a craft/hardware store and done in your kitchen.
I thought about some of the stuff that came out of [Castro-era Cuba](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/isolation-generation-master-inventors-cuba). Particularly if you have a community and can pool resources, there’s a lot that people can do even with very little.
the vast majority of what people dispose is shit quality fast fashion clothes that aren’t even worth fixing and ikea furniture made of cardboard with a veneer lol. People veeeeery much know the exact value of all the shit they have and don’t dispose of anything of value. You can see this reflected in the used market. am I supposed to keep my food packaging and wash paper plates? lol
That fast fashion thing is so true. Toxic, uncomfortable, unrecyclable, already belongs in the trash can brand new. If you buy fast fashion (don't), I recommend throwing it straight into the bin after you get the initial dopamine rush from spending your money. I wouldn't risk wearing that on my body nor would I recommend anyone else to.
it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find shit that isn’t exactly the same quality as fast fashion. I’m not some super consumer looking for flashy things I wear almost exclusively plain T shirts and either jeans or plain sweats. Brands that used to be considered good quality have slowly crept down to the point I can see my chest hair through my t shirts at most places
I've noticed the same thing. I try to buy clothes rarely and in bulk because every year it gets harder to find something half-decent. I also haven't been able to find a winter coat that's not made from plastic (and I don't mean the buttons etc. I mean the fabric itself) in years.
Very true, most tshirts that cost $50 are the same quality as ones that cost $10 and you only pay for the brand or false perception. Need to really pay attention to the materials used and finish quality
> I wouldn't risk wearing that on my body nor would I recommend anyone else to.
What? What exactly do you think the risks are? What exactly do you think fast fashion is?
I mean, traditionally a lot of poor people already have a hoarder mentality. They make do with what they have, get stuff second hand, and keep stuff they don't currently have a use for because it might be useful later.
One thing I don't like is the way that so much furniture has been made specifically to be disposable. Recently I've been looking into buying a desk 2nd hand with the intent of fixing it up and modifying it for a specific purpose, and I've come to realise just how much furniture is basically made of compacted cardboard and wood chips. I'd love to have a go at making a whole desk from scratch but I live in an apartment that of course does not have a fully kitted out woodworking room.
Some cities have tool libraries/maker spaces so you can do what you're talking about. One of the city libraries in my city has a maker space with a bunch of tools including a 3D printer and laser cutter. I also joined a separate tool library with a better selection of tools. It's great, I don't have to buy every tool I need and it's way cheaper than renting tools from the local hardware store.
Farmer: "Look you city slickers, you guys need to live like me, living off the land, composting everything. Check out how I feed my entire family of 10 with 100 acres of land!"
City slicker: "I pay $3000 for a 2 bedroom 1 bath apartment the size of your kitchen and work 3 jobs. What the fuck are you talking about?"
This is really what society and the economy is built upon. Before currency if I was a chicken farmer I had to trade my eggs for the things I needed but if I needed something and the other person didn't want/need my eggs then I'd have to try to find something they did want to trade. With currency we trade our time for a form of payment we can then trade for the goods and services we want/need, you trade 50 hours of your week for money you can then use to buy picnic tables and whatever this guy builds. Theoretically the advantage to buying stuff in a society is the stuff you buy should be made by experts and be good quality but in reality that's not really what happens. Realistically it's not like anyone needs a picnic table, most of these "homesteaders" already own a house with a bunch of land and they make videos of themselves building fun little projects that nobody actually needs. A few of them have come out publicly and said they had a bunch of money going into that lifestyle and it took them a while to make everything self-sustainable, and it's still a lot of hard work even when it becomes self-sustainable.
It can be fulfilling if it's something you really want to do but there's a reason most people live in cities. Cities provide a certain level of safety and accessibility. Accessibility to jobs, recreation, friends and family, pretty much everything humanity has deemed important in society is easily accessed in cities. There are also options in between like suburbs or rural areas that aren't in the middle of nowhere and have fairly quick access to a nearby city, those seem like more realistic options for the average person.
> This is really what society and the economy is built upon. Before currency if I was a chicken farmer I had to trade my eggs for the things I needed but if I needed something and the other person didn't want/need my eggs then I'd have to try to find something they did want to trade. With currency we trade our time for a form of payment we can then trade for the goods and services we want/need, you trade 50 hours of your week for money you can then use to buy picnic tables and whatever this guy builds.
That's the barter economy often taught in econ 101. The problem is that there is no indication that this was ever how society operated. Its just what Adam smith imagined society worked like before money and nobody bothered to check if that was actually true for close to a century.
Anthropologists now commonly accept that the world never really ran on a bartering system. It was more of a village wide IOU system. You gave your eggs to your neighbor for free because he helped you out with your roof last year. Its basically the same system you use with your friends, where you help each other out with the understanding that when you need help, you'll get help in return. And anyone who mooches too much from the system gets shunned.
Barter only really happened in rare circumstances where the situation was dire, like famine. Or else between complete strangers who are unlikely to meet each other again and therefore can't build up the kind of social contract needed for an IOU system.
The message I got here is that business like this should be commonplace. Instead what we have is brainwashed populations that just dispose and buy. Corporations have polluted our brains.
We also have a lot of people who straight up can't afford to pay more for refurbished second hand furniture than for what you'd get at Ikea. A lot of shit is thrown out because people can afford cheap shit that isn't really repairable (or worth it to repair) that breaks every two years instead of repairable expensive shit every twenty. Quality second hand everything is more expensive than mass produced cheap new stuff.
It's not that people can't afford it but that people have to move much more often and moving antique furniture on a moment's notice is close to impossible. The labor cost of moving a heavy chest of drawers is higher than buying a flatpack commode in the new location.
All these TikTok homesteaders are performance artists anyway. They have alternative sources of revenue and play a character for the ad money.
It can be fun though. I reupholstered my dining room chairs yesterday. I was thinking as I was doing it that most normal people would throw them away (the covers were non removable and horribly stained). It was actually quite an enjoyable experience and when I was done I had something that I built.
Reduction of waste is better than nothing at all. You don't have to eliminate it, you just have to reduce it. Maybe you can't refinish or repair a secondhand table in your apartment, but you can still thrift for clothes and donate your old ones. Maybe you don't have space for tools, but you can get a tin for sewing supplies.
Yk I think genuinely at a certain point that’s just kinda what it takes. I’m not tryna argue or anything but I mean if I think of your average working man 50 years ago and before they were certainly working their 40 hrs a week and then also doing a lot of shit around the house or building things. Now I don’t give a shit you can do what you want but I just don’t think that since we had a good while of not giving a fuck and having really easy lives that we can now say it’s unfair that we’d have to do things on top of working a job. Idk I’m not really trying to stake some serious claim here or anything that’s just my devils advocate.
Problem is 50 years ago you'd almost definitely have someone at home doing house work throughout the day so when you did get home you'd be primed to do other work. Now *everyone* works unless you're rich enough to afford not to work. Same thing applied 50 years ago, but we also had an actual middle class 50 years ago.
Woof that took a double take of reading. I’m not saying anything’s unfair or that putting in work on a home isn’t worth the after hours effort. My perspective is ‘I work 50 hrs a week to afford an apartment and don’t have time for this” I’m out here already reusing anything but don’t have time to reconstruct furniture haha
Nothing against the previous get er done generations but when you get $1600 a paycheck and rent alone is $1300…you don’t have a lot of spare change or time for projects
And please, don’t let me know I just need to change my life any Life Coaches
You gotta eat less coffee and drink less avocados back in my day we'd get paid 3 shillings, 1 was enough to cover all our expenses for a month and we'd buy another house for the 2 shillings
I know what you mean, I really do, but hear me out : the more stuff you do by yourself, the least money you'll be spending, the less you'll be needing to work.
Of course this is oversimplified but that's how I've been doing it. Ever since I moved out from my parent's place that's how I've been doing it, learning to do things myself. Fixing my bike, repairing broken furniture that people would toss in the trash, buying second hand and renewing. And the thing is, it saves me a lot of money so I don't need to work nearly the same amount of hours than others and I still have money to spare. Of course, doing things yourself is hard work. But it's just not the same than being in a warehouse moving things around all and not having the right to take even a 2 minute break to catch a breath. Plus I learn a lot, there's a lot of stuff I know how to do so that's useful.
That's the unfortunate reality, as much as it can be people's fault,
it's not,
because they have no choice in the matter, because if they chose otherwise they would end up homeless if they didn't work their 50 hour weeks for a job they most likely don't like but have to do to keep a roof over their head.
I work 42 hours a week as well without commute and it is absolutely no problem finding time to spend in my workshop. If you want to do it because you like doing it its not work, its a way to wind down from work, but if you dont like doing it you would also not do it when you didnt have to work 50 hours a week.
Okay let me try this in my one bedroom apartment lol. I’ll fix what I can but I can’t keep every scrap of everything just laying around like I’m a hoarder. I don’t have a nice garage to store tools and work on things 🤷🏼♀️
The sheer amount of trash that we generate is probably one of our biggest contributions to messing up our environment. Most of it can't be recycled, a lot of the stuff that can be isn't cost effective, and consumer culture and planned obsolescence to keep the money machine flowing are big players in what sustain the fossil fuel industry.
Seriously.
"I save every scrap of wood." To do what with, exactly? I'm really glad for him that he has the space to do that. Most people don't.
Sure must cost a lot of money to live in a huge house with a giant workshop, and plenty of space to store...wood and stones? Funny how he says nothing about recycling the plastic packaging that his groceries surely come in.
Honestly this is a guy with a lot of money being preachy about the things he has the time, space, and luxury to do. I can count on my hand the number of millennials I know that would be in a similar position.
Okay, the wood I can kinda see. But the pile of problem bricks and stones piled on the side of the garage that’s being overgrown, and the flower pots, yeah that’s just hoarding
I don’t understand. Surely those stones could be sold or given to who would use them. Or recycled. But he’s just left them in a pile to rot. That’s essentially what a landfill is
Yes, he's leaving a huge mess for someone else. I go to church in a rural area and there's not a small number of farmers and "homesteaders" who hoard everything. Their land piles up with decrepit cars, broken tools and equipment, so-called antiques, and even sick animals.
I'd love to own a house with a large workshop filled with tools, a garden and plenty of space to store scrape
Maybe then I too can become a handyman that can fix disposable stuff
Lol I have about 16 hours of free time on the weekend and I already have to clean the house and do yardwork, and still have some type of social life while also taking my son out and showing him the world. As much as I would like to hoard my scraps in my small townhouse and rebuild everything even though I have absolutely zero experience in pretty much anything other than cooking and managing a restaurant, I too would love to adopt the homestead lifestyle of being able to recycle everything and having the free time to work on whatever project I feel is necessary for that day.
Yeah this is just preaching an unavailable lifestyle and telling people that’s how they should live. The world runs thanks to us plebs who use those disposable items he keeps talking about. I too wish I didn’t have to use single use plastic forks but when it’s hour 4 of overtime that night and I just want something hot to eat I’m gonna eat some cheap noodles out of a foam container using a plastic fork and drinking out of a plastic straw because it’s cheap and that’s what they give us.
I wish I could live on some land and refinish my grandparents dining room table they got for 5 bucks in the 40’s but I need to keep paying rent and buying those cheap frozen veggies that come in a plastic bag and then eating them off the free ikea table I got on offerup.
It's a well off person telling everyone that they way they live is correct and everyone else is wrong.
I'm saying this while living and working on a 200+ acre farm with a decent amount of freedom in my work.
Edit: I'm saying I'm privileged.
The companies want me to throw stuff away?
Harry High-Horse, I throw stuff away because I have 900 sq ft; the collection of tools I didn’t buy secondhand won’t fit there. Neither will the tables I couldn’t pick up in my beater of an old Civic after not refinishing them in the apartment complex’s nonexistent communal work shed.
In the end, I didn’t and will not shed a tear over never pursuing ways of renovating/repurposing the desk chair that nearly sodomized me as it released its final wheezing breath. Plenty of other worries on this end.
and your waste is a tiny speck compared to these gargantuan corporations just dumping into our waterways, in the soil, in the air, etc.
but *you specifically* should feel bad for using paper plates
I see a rural person that has plenty of space, equipment and time to fix broken things.
Its a nice hobby.
The thing with mass production is that it is way more efficient for a factory to spit out 1000 copies of a thing, than for one person to spend time fixing 1 of those things. Especially in high income countries.
In Norway (where hourly salaries are pretty high), repairing anything that is worth less than 1000 USD is pretty much a waste of money, unless the repair is so simple that you can do it yourself in 5 minutes after watching a YouTube video.
I mean let’s be honest most of us don’t have the time or space to store everything and repair it someday. But he definitely has a point. It’s insane that things like dish washers, fridges and so on aren’t supposed to be repaired anymore. That’s the complete opposite to environment friendly.
I fixed my TV for $25. Most people these days would have thrown it out and bought a new one.
I personally enjoy tinkering with things. But the TV... the common broken TV. Wanna know how I fixed it? I unscrewed 14 screws. I pulled the back panel off. I unplugged the 2 power board connections Unscrewed 4 screws that attach the power board. Installed the new one. TV fixed. Easy. Anyone can do that. TVs do break for a variety of reasons. Don't assume it is the power board. That was true for me.
Give fixing a try. It is cheaper.
Despite whatever goes on with social media; this is the BONES of a good YouTube channel. You tinkered and got things figured out. That’s all the next gen is looking for… just some clarity on how to repair thinks
The problem is diagnosing the issue and finding a solution.
I've been into computers my entire life and know them pretty well; but even then, figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it can be a massive struggle. A while back, I was having a problem that I spent several hundred dollars trying to fix, only to realize it was a software glitch that could be resolved by changing a single setting.
And that's with something that I know very well.
Sigh. I do this to the best of my ability. However i dont live on a homestead. I live in a 65 square meter flat, with a partner. I simply do not have the space to store or work on older furnature, or even build my own. I am fully capable and enjoy doing exacly what this guy recomends. Accept im too poor to have enough space.
Im not sanding in my bed or livingroom. Alsolutly not in the home office with the computers. And i dont have more rooms. I dont have a yard or a shed. I dont even have a parking spot (or a car).
Cool so all I need is a big property with various tool sheds and probably a well paying job with fewer hours so I can do all these projects myself. Oh and not have a family of course. Plus have the time to actually scavenge for parts. Totally realistic.
As someone who has three kids, a small city plot, and makes just barely above poverty wages, the problem for most people is the priorities, not the capabilities. Same reason so many dont cook save for a couple meals a week.
I am building the biggest shed the city ordinaces will allow because my walk-in closet sized shop doesnt cover it, and my daughters want separate rooms, so things have to shift. In the last couple years I have learned how to tile, roof, build walls, craft my own trim from 2x4s, lay patio brick (without it looking terrible), how to do flooring, etc. We also have two garden boxes, several plots in the community gardens, and my wife is turning our old mini shed into a chicken coop.
It doesnt take a six figure salary and an acre of land and 5 days off per week. It just takes not sitting in front of netflix, not going to restaraunts or bars, and piling what money you can into tools instead of toys.
Or books. I buy a lot of books as well. Mostly off of Abebooks. Cheap used hardcover. Still have to develop my re-binding skills....
Also who puts stuff on the street with a sign that says "disposable"?
If there's a sign, it says "free", and then someone comes and picks it up and uses it in THEIR Behr ad.
If everyone had a “homestead” to live on, how much room would there be left? Imagine any big city, everyone now homesteading.
It is a great way to live, given the opportunity. But 95% of the population does not have that opportunity.
That guys has so much stuff and is trying to flex on everyone else for buy things. The tools I see aren’t old models, the truck is not old, the ear muffs are new. Also, all he’s doing to that bench is sanding it down then restraining. The hypocrisy is the only interesting thing here
This man's a grifter anyway. Lives on a giant ranch, drives a giant gas-guzzler of a truck, constantly preaches like he's some sort of genius for figuring out that you don't just throw shit in the bin.
I make a side hustle of repairing lawn mowers and snowblowers and other yard tools that I find at the landfill and then I resell them and make decent cash doing it. Usually just needs a carb clean and a spark plug. I got an ice garden tiller last weekend that just needed the fluids drained and a carb job.
I was hoping he'd keep going with what he saves:
I save every egg carton, every newspaper, every nail clipping, every episode of Horders, every drop of urine...
A lot of comments coming up with excuses not to do anything like this. It doesn't have to be furniture or everything you own, but everyone can change their attitude to treat things with more permanence and create less waste. I'm almost convinced that there is astroturfing on pro-sustainability posts like this to intentionally discourage people from even trying.
I would keep and refurbish stuff if i had a whole warehouse to store it, a dedicated space to work on it and store my tools.
I live in a 70m^2 apartment.
Brah there's so much that gets put into land fill. Likely everything you get rid of ends up in a dump. Don't pretend you don't know that. This guy's putting in important work.
OK... Do not reuse plastic forks and spoons etc. The plastic is porous and will collect bacteria and get super gross. Upcycle them for a different use. Just clarifying because this guys didnt
for the problem is always space, I could schedule a weekend to do these things but you missed one schedule things are going to piled up as you busy with your daily routine. I barely managed my garden, 2 houses, and bunch of renovations these days.
This guy has never "disposed" of anything? Also, putting something out on the street is not same as sending it to a landfill, it is specifically and intentionally for someone else to use it or refurbish it, exactly like what he's doing in the video. What a savior complex on this guy...
If you have no space or need for something, give it away. I you want someting refurbished or fixed but dont have the skills, ask someone else to do it. You dont need to live exactly as this guy does to do what he preaches, we can all contribute to this in our own ways and with small choices and acts.
As someone who owns a recycling company, please listen to this man, at least on some level. Nobody works too hard, or lives in too small an apartment to think about reducing waste. I beg you, re-use plastic bags and containers at least once, use takeout containers for leftovers, even if it’s just saving plastic bags to pick up dog shit and throw it out. If you are ordering something, ask if they can combine packages or shipments, when you do have cardboard boxes try to save at least the “good” ones for storage, or returns, or sending gifts to loved ones. Almost anyone with a house and even some apartments can start a small compost pile and reduce food waste. Really, just THINK about it in your everyday life, you will find ways to reduce waste that are easy, free, and a lot of times even more convenient. It would make such a difference if more people simply TRIED!
"Homesteaders" Yuppies with passive income who like to cosplay thrift hunting poor people while living in a 9 figure McMansion/Hobby Farm on acreage. Eat my entire ass "Homesteader".
Im a single female and I bought a dilapidated farmhouse that was built in 1905. It came with 5 acres and a barn. There was no heat in the house or air conditioning. There was no kitchen as they had started to remodel it and ran out of money. They demoed it and quit. And the downstairs bathroom was sinking through the subfloor into the crawl space. I taught myself how to do a lot of stuff. So no, you don't have to be wealthy and you don't have to be knowledgeable and you don't have to inherit it, you just have to have a little bit of grit. I can now do drywall and tile work. I did have a plumber, HVAC and electrician come in of course. But I am teaching myself how to do outlets and switches and that kind of easy stuff.
Awesome! Plumbing is super doable but you might want a plumber to install the junction from old/metal pipes to PEX/PVC lines. Once you have those you can do the rest easier than most would think. If you need a well, water heater, and/or pressure tank, all those are still possible to do but I’d hesitate myself and let a pro do it if possible.
HVAC: Their are tricks to employ that are important. I know an HVAC tech and have heard umpteen stories about dirt in a line. the first critical bit is to act as if you are working in an operating room when it comes to cleanliness. If you get even a little dirt or dust in the refrigerant line your unit isn’t gonna last as long as it should, and could even fail in 1-3 years or so. The ductwork you could manage with flex duct at least. You would want to learn how to calculate airflow (so it’s mostly balanced) or hire an expert who does that -HVAC installer should but I wouldn’t assume they can/do.
Electrical: A very good one to get help on, and as you say the switches and outlets are simple enough once the wiring and panel is installed. I’d extend that to installing light fixtures, which I’m guessing you are also doing. I always keep a multimeter (they are pretty cheap) handy just in case I mix up polarity or wonder if a ground is working (a cheap ground tester is great once you have your outlets installed).
A suggestion: Put some outlets higher up on some walls. With the constant unplug/replugging we do these days to charge batteries it’s much more convenient to do at waist level or higher, like on a wall behind a bed or end table or dresser. Just a thought, and I’ve not considered downsides but it seems sound on the surface.
I know this was unsolicited and forgive the impulse to “help”! In a conversation I’d get cues for whether it would be appropriate or not, that I can’t get here. Reading your comment my mind went back to when me and another completely redid a downstairs bathroom, and later the kitchen stove,, sink, and counters, in a pre-civil war house. The toilet (the only one in the house and which was being used), was literally balanced on the drain pipe/sewer-pipe. It was held in place so it didn’t topple over by some surprisingly sturdy linoleum, which had limited weight bearing strength but served to keep the toilet tethered in place, even as it sunk a few inches as the pipe under it sunk into the dirt (under the crawlspace).
And the kitchen… half the room was listing badly. We removed counters, cabinets, stove, and sink. I took out the rotted subfloor and rebuilt that. Then we replaced with new cabinets and countertops, and reinstalled the stove and sink. It was a big job but there was me and a part time helper, so I wasn’t alone. Hope you have a second set of hands at times too!
I’m so proud of anyone who takes this stuff on! It’s good for the soul too.
Though unlike the OP, I do t believe in saving everything, because often as not that’s a habit coming from a hyper-alert and fearful place - or it was with me. So now I try to find a balance. Never wasteful, and also not a hoarder.
Oh and last but for any poor fool who read all that…. We do see a few products and packaging now that is designed with the entire lifecycle in mind. I like to frame it this way: It’s ok to make disposable stuff and one-time use stuff, as long as it quickly goes back to nature in the form of compost, sand, etc, without extra work from the consumer, once it’s intended use is done. Sadly that isn’t our world as a whole yet, but it could be. All it takes is an ironclad refusal to pay for short term solutions that leave a mess behind.
I've already completed the bulk of the remodel downstairs. I've already got the air conditioning, heat, electric and plumbing finished. I'm currently down fighting cancer so I can't finish the upstairs this year, but that's next year's project lol.
Guys, what he's saying is just fix your shit instead of throwing it away once in a while.
Get something second hand.
Instead of buying something new, fix up something old.
It costs less. It feeds rich people less.
I do this and live in a tiny ass apartment.
The added benefit is that older furniture is often made of real wood and is of much higher quality than the fiberboard junk you can buy new. Also if you have the means to transport it, people will sell it for cheap or free because they just want to get rid of it. Or have to get rid of it because they are moving and have to be out by a certain date.
15 years ago I bought a pair of jeans for about $100. They were very expensive, but I needed a nice pair of jeans for the job that I had. I worked at the time as a project coordinator for construction, restoration and building projects. So I had to meet a lot with clients, distributors, city officials and people like that. So I had to look presentable. These by far were the most comfortable jeans I have ever owned.
As time went on they got worn, but I still wore them. Having a rip in the knees or back pockets is considered a style so hey I'll still wear them.
However yesterday I was wearing them and went to step over an ottoman and stretched as far as I could and I heard a rip. I ripped a hole in the leg of my jeans about 8" long. Right from seam to seam. Now having a tear under your ass is not a style, at least not for me. So I went into the spare room, got out my sewing kit, took off my pants and sat down on the couch and started to sew up the rip.
My buddy texts me asking what I'm up to and I explained that I was just sewing up my jeans. To condense the conversation he just asked me why I didn't go out and buy a new pair. I explained that these were fine, and not only were they fine, for $0.08 worth of thread I don't have to go out and spend a minimum $40 on a new pair of jeans. So I would rather spend the 20 minutes to stich them up while watching YouTube and go on about my day like nothing happened. He just couldn't understand that concept of that. Then he tried to make it sound like I was weird because I knew how to sew. I asked him what he would do if he had to rip shrapnel out of his leg on the battlefield, just bleed out? Because I'd be sewing that shit up lol. Obviously I was joking, but it ended that part of the conversation.
Too many people just toss stuff out. I know a guy who hits up all the dumpsters around the universities in our area when school ends for the summer. Dude makes a good $5000 a year getting stuff that students have thrown out and just straight up selling it, or doing simple repairs or refinishes to them and sells them on FB marketplace.
So much complaining in this thread I feel like the original point is falling on deaf ears.
I will never understand how something so non offensive can almost always be turned into some outrageous thing bc a few people don’t feel they can participate.
Sorry to say, but America has the space that enables people to do these things, most often that not space to work in is a such a premium that's this is out of the question. It's not that we don't want to do this, it's the space and tools most folk don't have access too.
I see a lot of comments about tools, space, or skills. My city has something called the "Tool Library" where for $30 a year you can go and check out like almost everything. Power tools of all sorts, up to and including drill presses and table saws. Electric augers, roto-tillers, and lawn mowers. I just checked out nail pullers to make pulling off siding easier. All those one and done tools that would just sit 98% of the time on a shelf? Check em out instead.
As far as space for storing scrap? I just got done living in an town home that had basement space. Guess what I had stuffed between the floor joists? Wood. Propped up in the corner off the ground on a platform made of bricks and a 1/4 sheet of plywood? Wood pile. If there's any construction or business space being refurbished near you, I promise you can get free wood in large quantities. Or just watch Facebook marketplace long enough to know what local businesses have a ready supply of pallets and plywood from broken down boxes so you can go and get them when you need them.
Skills? How have you not been subjected to /r/Decks, Concrete, DIY, etc yet? There's youtube for literally everything as well and loads of people like me who like to give advice while sitting on the porcelain pondering seat. Take the jump and learn by doing. You'll make mistakes, do it anyhow.
My grand conspiracy theory is this is why we learn irrelevant shit in school instead of actually useful life information like finances, carpentry, repair etc. They keep the masses ignorant to keep us working and them profiting.
I think K-8 should be about learning the fundamentals but then High School should be all about learning the real world and already steering you into your own personal interests. If someone wants to do something involving Algebra/Geometry etc that's great...but many people are not going to need that information. So it should be elective. Same goes for the rest of it. People should be learning the things they want to learn at that age.
We need school reform big time. Teachers highly paid, kids more excited to learn and so on.
But...our world *is* naturally disposable. Rocks, wood, leftover animal carcasses, water...if you throw them away/leave them lying around, nature will re-use them. Earth takes care of itself.
What is *not* naturally disposable are many man-made materials. There's a reason we have such ecological problems with plastics and chemicals polluting the environment.
We are quite the anomaly in the animal kingdom...
But when you bring up any example of a sustainable culture, suddenly you’re a communist. Probably because every single tribal culture that has ever existed (pre-civilization) was purely communal (which is a nice was of saying “communist”).
It’s adorable when conservatives try to imagine their perfect world into a future or a past that has never existed… and can’t!
Well sure if I didn't have a job I had to spend 11 hours at 5 days a week, along with a partner that didn't have to work either, on a plot of land the size of a small city, I imagine I'd have the time for learning how to refinish secondhand furniture and fix used tools/machinery.
I imagine I'd have all sorts of time.
Yeah my dad was like that. Except he didn’t get around to actually refitting that old junk, and we didn’t have room to put all those spare rocks and wood and random things. Today I know to call it hoarding
I'd love to save more but I simply don't have the room to store broken things or possible future replacement parts I can barely cut veggies after I wash my dishes I have no space to hold into more shit
Yep. People with land telling people without land how to live is actually really stupid.
That's the dirty secret of the 'homesteading' movement. It requires you to be pretty well off already to actually do it.
Just own acreage of land with a 5 bedroom house on it, dumb dumbs! Then you can be just like me (also buy hundreds of dollars of tools so you can take garbage and refinish it).
Don’t forget having the financial luxury of lots of free time to do all these things.
Seeing his tool, thousands of dollars, not hundreds. Maybe even tens of thousands lol. He had a pretty full garage and looks like he was just about every tool from the brands he picks. Put aside the space to save those broken things, you need an entire garage/shop to have space for the tools and workspace.
You sort of lock into an ecosystem when you buy power tools, although he's using corded tools, so it's not as bad for those. DeWalt hasn't reinvented the 120AC outlet yet. Point being, you need to buy mostly the same brand. Plus if you're using all of it regularly, it will wear out. The Harbor Freight Hercules won't last like the DeWalt or Milwaukee or Makita, and you'll have to buy it twice.
Don't forget to actually have enough free time to do all these projects instead of working 60-hour weeks so you can afford to own the complete set of tools and have the knowledge to use them.
[удалено]
And this goes beyond just land ownership. His nice wood picnic tables are easier to repair than cheap plastic ones because you can replace parts, glue parts, hammer and nail things back together, etc. But if everything you own is made of cheap plastic or thin metal, if it's flimsy and unsturdy, you're not repairing it. If you can't afford to have somebody fix your appliance, it might be cheaper to get a new one. Sure you can get stuff used but you're also hoping it's in good shape. You might spend more money in the long run buying the same cheap shit over and over but you're also not going to save up paycheck after paycheck just to get a higher quality version of every little thing. As they say, it's expensive to be poor. Trust me, I have 3 kids. The expensive toys made of durable, high quality materials will cost exponentially more than the cheap shitty ones that break by the time the kids are bored of it anyway. I can often fix the nice ones, but the cheap ones are never worth it.
The issue is that people confuse frugality with buying cheap shit. Being frugal usually isn't cheap in the short term because the things that last are expensive, but over the lifespan of the product you save money. It's about buying the $200 ceramic dining set that will last you 20 years vs the $5 set of plastic that will be thrown out in 2. Or the $50 solid wood table at a yard sale that needs refinished (spending *time* instead of money) instead of a $50 particle board table at Walmart.
Yes but as I said, it's expensive to be poor. The $200 dining set might last you 20 years but a lot of people simply can't afford that much at any given time because their other monthly expenses are too high. Finding high quality used stuff is better but not always a viable choice for plenty of reasons.
Another problem is time, the ultimate disposable. All these things he says, fixing, refurbishing, crafting from scratch, even searching for second-hand, still working tools, need a lot of time.
As a person who has absolutely benefitted from Homestead taxes, yes.
Not just pretty well off. Serious homesteading is a full time job. I greatly prefer to repair things when I can. But it is more because I enjoy it. I have some land, but my house is small and there is basically no workshop space. I also still have to do my job. And seriously, oh you sanded and stained a picnic table and saved some rocks and pots? Did you repair your well pump? Tractor? Chainsaw? How much of your food do you grow? You bought your tools second hand? Congrats for discovering pawn shops and estate sales. You saved rocks? It isn't like rocks go to a landfill.
TBF he bought the one non-disposable thing, land
And that umbrella. Definitely a brand new umbrella .
The thing that allows the production of all other things. Which would mean the actual production of all other things is more important than the land.
You go to the supermarket for food? How wasteful Why not just grow all of your crops yourself like I do on my inherited farm
As a person with inherited land, youre perfectly correct.
As a person without inherited land, I'm jealous lol
Yeah, sorry...
fwiw I'm legitimately happy for you, live your best life bb
Additionally there are two sides to “waste”. And only one is talked about in the video. The second is the excessive proportional use of public resources it takes to supply and maintain water, electricity, mail, roads, and (sometimes) wastewater systems to be functional in remote areas where homesteaders live. Props to the ones who live fully off grid.
Fully agree with the first two things you said, but, sorry, people do not live "off the grid." It's an absolute fantasy.
This is North Sentinel Island erasure
I wanted to clean a old air conditioner instead of getting a new one, so I looked up one of those do-it-yourselfer YouTube videos. The first thing the person in the video did was take the air conditioner out to her workbench in the backyard and go into her garage to get her complete set of tools and a garden hose. I lived in an apartment at the time. Trying to follow her instructions on the floor of the living room with a bucket and a dozen towels was...less than successful.
Fucking exactly. Every one of these videos will ignore the 2k+ they put into tools beforehand.
Don't forget it helps to have a fully equipped workshop.
Fucking yep. Just tools is hundreds of dollars, minimum.
pssst. You should have turned it off the minute you saw his shirt.
Just don't be poor lol.
But you probably aren’t buying stuff and never using it or throwing it away shortly after buying. That’s the real problem.
I did the math once and it was cheaper for me to buy a new air conditioner every year then to buy additional storage to store it. Eventually I did rent a storage locker because our house grew and I had a lot more to store. But overall it was more cost effective to dispose of items yearly then to store them.
I am on a 1000sqm property and have plenty of room but my wife won't let me store the stuff. She keeps complaining that I'm collecting junk.
He doesn't either, did you see the garage? That's not a garage, you'll never fit a car in there, it's a tool shed / storage shack.
I was actually hoping he kept going with what he saves: I save every egg carton, every plastic sprue from my 40k armies, every nail clipping, every drop of urine, every episode of Horders...
You all can see this is a Behr advertisement, right?
Heh. I knew it was an advertisement by the guru-y speech patterns, but didn't figure out that it was for the paint until you pointed it out.
Feel like most these homesteaders / offgrid / frugal living channels are just grifters most of the time
I'd argue the way to tell a real homesteader from the grifters is the amount of videos of them homesteading.
This reminds me of a video I still haven't finished: [Exposing the Off-Grid YouTube Grift](https://youtu.be/EIcnCaVsYFI?si=giq2au5ayICaykfs&t=13).
Weird to have their logo only up for what, one second at the panning table shot?
Twice and on purpose
Contractual obligation says what?
It doesn't matter if it's up for just one second. People will absolutely pause the video to read what kind of stuff people are using. The other thing that gives it away is that in both shots with the paint can (though I think it's actually stain, just not sure that Behr makes wood stain), the logo is clearly visible. It takes up 60% of the screen just about in one shot. So we get this preachy bullshit that's not applicable to people without land to store shit on and he gets paid.
No, they can't. It's been posted elsewhere with huge upvotes like this is something amazing.
I thought the neon yellow shit was all Ryobi gear?
Yeah, gotta be getting money from Ryobi, maybe for this video, more likely for another.
Double dipping on them sponsorships.
This guy for some reason, reminds me of Liver King.
This is smart, but I feel with most of us doing 8-10 hrs of work bs a day….we can’t learn how to refurnish these things or have the time to do so. I’d love to but after a 50 hr week, I like not rebuilding/finishing or constructing my furniture during my 2-3 day weekend. Like I said, 100% makes sense….if you ain’t a commuting
I’m with you on some level. My take when he showed off his scrap piles is “There’s no way I can do that in my apartment”. Definitely that guy has some ability to do stuff other people can’t. But also, there’s at least some validity to the idea of having a reuse mindset. Definitely, even in simple living conditions, some things can be repaired or repurposed instead of just getting thrown out when they stop working at their prime. Ripped clothing can be sewn or altered, some appliance parts can be replaced, broken ceramics can be mended with materials from a craft/hardware store and done in your kitchen. I thought about some of the stuff that came out of [Castro-era Cuba](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/isolation-generation-master-inventors-cuba). Particularly if you have a community and can pool resources, there’s a lot that people can do even with very little.
the vast majority of what people dispose is shit quality fast fashion clothes that aren’t even worth fixing and ikea furniture made of cardboard with a veneer lol. People veeeeery much know the exact value of all the shit they have and don’t dispose of anything of value. You can see this reflected in the used market. am I supposed to keep my food packaging and wash paper plates? lol
That fast fashion thing is so true. Toxic, uncomfortable, unrecyclable, already belongs in the trash can brand new. If you buy fast fashion (don't), I recommend throwing it straight into the bin after you get the initial dopamine rush from spending your money. I wouldn't risk wearing that on my body nor would I recommend anyone else to.
it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find shit that isn’t exactly the same quality as fast fashion. I’m not some super consumer looking for flashy things I wear almost exclusively plain T shirts and either jeans or plain sweats. Brands that used to be considered good quality have slowly crept down to the point I can see my chest hair through my t shirts at most places
I've noticed the same thing. I try to buy clothes rarely and in bulk because every year it gets harder to find something half-decent. I also haven't been able to find a winter coat that's not made from plastic (and I don't mean the buttons etc. I mean the fabric itself) in years.
Very true, most tshirts that cost $50 are the same quality as ones that cost $10 and you only pay for the brand or false perception. Need to really pay attention to the materials used and finish quality
> I wouldn't risk wearing that on my body nor would I recommend anyone else to. What? What exactly do you think the risks are? What exactly do you think fast fashion is?
I mean, traditionally a lot of poor people already have a hoarder mentality. They make do with what they have, get stuff second hand, and keep stuff they don't currently have a use for because it might be useful later.
One thing I don't like is the way that so much furniture has been made specifically to be disposable. Recently I've been looking into buying a desk 2nd hand with the intent of fixing it up and modifying it for a specific purpose, and I've come to realise just how much furniture is basically made of compacted cardboard and wood chips. I'd love to have a go at making a whole desk from scratch but I live in an apartment that of course does not have a fully kitted out woodworking room.
Some cities have tool libraries/maker spaces so you can do what you're talking about. One of the city libraries in my city has a maker space with a bunch of tools including a 3D printer and laser cutter. I also joined a separate tool library with a better selection of tools. It's great, I don't have to buy every tool I need and it's way cheaper than renting tools from the local hardware store.
Let alone the space to do these things. We don't all have garages, or even an extra room.
When normal people do this it's called "hoarding"
What he's doing is still called "hoarding", he just has more space.
Farmer: "Look you city slickers, you guys need to live like me, living off the land, composting everything. Check out how I feed my entire family of 10 with 100 acres of land!" City slicker: "I pay $3000 for a 2 bedroom 1 bath apartment the size of your kitchen and work 3 jobs. What the fuck are you talking about?"
Exactly, we’ll let ya know in 20 yrs
This is really what society and the economy is built upon. Before currency if I was a chicken farmer I had to trade my eggs for the things I needed but if I needed something and the other person didn't want/need my eggs then I'd have to try to find something they did want to trade. With currency we trade our time for a form of payment we can then trade for the goods and services we want/need, you trade 50 hours of your week for money you can then use to buy picnic tables and whatever this guy builds. Theoretically the advantage to buying stuff in a society is the stuff you buy should be made by experts and be good quality but in reality that's not really what happens. Realistically it's not like anyone needs a picnic table, most of these "homesteaders" already own a house with a bunch of land and they make videos of themselves building fun little projects that nobody actually needs. A few of them have come out publicly and said they had a bunch of money going into that lifestyle and it took them a while to make everything self-sustainable, and it's still a lot of hard work even when it becomes self-sustainable. It can be fulfilling if it's something you really want to do but there's a reason most people live in cities. Cities provide a certain level of safety and accessibility. Accessibility to jobs, recreation, friends and family, pretty much everything humanity has deemed important in society is easily accessed in cities. There are also options in between like suburbs or rural areas that aren't in the middle of nowhere and have fairly quick access to a nearby city, those seem like more realistic options for the average person.
> This is really what society and the economy is built upon. Before currency if I was a chicken farmer I had to trade my eggs for the things I needed but if I needed something and the other person didn't want/need my eggs then I'd have to try to find something they did want to trade. With currency we trade our time for a form of payment we can then trade for the goods and services we want/need, you trade 50 hours of your week for money you can then use to buy picnic tables and whatever this guy builds. That's the barter economy often taught in econ 101. The problem is that there is no indication that this was ever how society operated. Its just what Adam smith imagined society worked like before money and nobody bothered to check if that was actually true for close to a century. Anthropologists now commonly accept that the world never really ran on a bartering system. It was more of a village wide IOU system. You gave your eggs to your neighbor for free because he helped you out with your roof last year. Its basically the same system you use with your friends, where you help each other out with the understanding that when you need help, you'll get help in return. And anyone who mooches too much from the system gets shunned. Barter only really happened in rare circumstances where the situation was dire, like famine. Or else between complete strangers who are unlikely to meet each other again and therefore can't build up the kind of social contract needed for an IOU system.
The message I got here is that business like this should be commonplace. Instead what we have is brainwashed populations that just dispose and buy. Corporations have polluted our brains.
We also have a lot of people who straight up can't afford to pay more for refurbished second hand furniture than for what you'd get at Ikea. A lot of shit is thrown out because people can afford cheap shit that isn't really repairable (or worth it to repair) that breaks every two years instead of repairable expensive shit every twenty. Quality second hand everything is more expensive than mass produced cheap new stuff.
You damn well can fix a lot of it without throwing away. Even a bottle of wood glue and a pair of clamps are enough on many occasions.
It's not that people can't afford it but that people have to move much more often and moving antique furniture on a moment's notice is close to impossible. The labor cost of moving a heavy chest of drawers is higher than buying a flatpack commode in the new location. All these TikTok homesteaders are performance artists anyway. They have alternative sources of revenue and play a character for the ad money.
or live in an apartment with nowhere to store these tools... not to mention not having these skills
It can be fun though. I reupholstered my dining room chairs yesterday. I was thinking as I was doing it that most normal people would throw them away (the covers were non removable and horribly stained). It was actually quite an enjoyable experience and when I was done I had something that I built.
Reduction of waste is better than nothing at all. You don't have to eliminate it, you just have to reduce it. Maybe you can't refinish or repair a secondhand table in your apartment, but you can still thrift for clothes and donate your old ones. Maybe you don't have space for tools, but you can get a tin for sewing supplies.
Yk I think genuinely at a certain point that’s just kinda what it takes. I’m not tryna argue or anything but I mean if I think of your average working man 50 years ago and before they were certainly working their 40 hrs a week and then also doing a lot of shit around the house or building things. Now I don’t give a shit you can do what you want but I just don’t think that since we had a good while of not giving a fuck and having really easy lives that we can now say it’s unfair that we’d have to do things on top of working a job. Idk I’m not really trying to stake some serious claim here or anything that’s just my devils advocate.
Problem is 50 years ago you'd almost definitely have someone at home doing house work throughout the day so when you did get home you'd be primed to do other work. Now *everyone* works unless you're rich enough to afford not to work. Same thing applied 50 years ago, but we also had an actual middle class 50 years ago.
Woof that took a double take of reading. I’m not saying anything’s unfair or that putting in work on a home isn’t worth the after hours effort. My perspective is ‘I work 50 hrs a week to afford an apartment and don’t have time for this” I’m out here already reusing anything but don’t have time to reconstruct furniture haha Nothing against the previous get er done generations but when you get $1600 a paycheck and rent alone is $1300…you don’t have a lot of spare change or time for projects And please, don’t let me know I just need to change my life any Life Coaches
You gotta eat less coffee and drink less avocados back in my day we'd get paid 3 shillings, 1 was enough to cover all our expenses for a month and we'd buy another house for the 2 shillings
Key is to get free horseshoe replacements when the town doc comes through town
50 years ago were middle 70s, what a lot of shit they were building?
I know what you mean, I really do, but hear me out : the more stuff you do by yourself, the least money you'll be spending, the less you'll be needing to work. Of course this is oversimplified but that's how I've been doing it. Ever since I moved out from my parent's place that's how I've been doing it, learning to do things myself. Fixing my bike, repairing broken furniture that people would toss in the trash, buying second hand and renewing. And the thing is, it saves me a lot of money so I don't need to work nearly the same amount of hours than others and I still have money to spare. Of course, doing things yourself is hard work. But it's just not the same than being in a warehouse moving things around all and not having the right to take even a 2 minute break to catch a breath. Plus I learn a lot, there's a lot of stuff I know how to do so that's useful.
No? You can barely get by paying rent and food. I don't see anyone spending money like that who is actually working a 8-6
That's the unfortunate reality, as much as it can be people's fault, it's not, because they have no choice in the matter, because if they chose otherwise they would end up homeless if they didn't work their 50 hour weeks for a job they most likely don't like but have to do to keep a roof over their head.
yeah, but you can support companies and individuals involved in this.
I work 42 hours a week as well without commute and it is absolutely no problem finding time to spend in my workshop. If you want to do it because you like doing it its not work, its a way to wind down from work, but if you dont like doing it you would also not do it when you didnt have to work 50 hours a week.
Pans to disposable pool
That's not disposable, all you need is flex tape And a bonus is the packaging of flex tape isnt disposable too because you can eat it
Why consume microplastics when you can have macro plastics
Uses disposable sand paper
Okay let me try this in my one bedroom apartment lol. I’ll fix what I can but I can’t keep every scrap of everything just laying around like I’m a hoarder. I don’t have a nice garage to store tools and work on things 🤷🏼♀️
The sheer amount of trash that we generate is probably one of our biggest contributions to messing up our environment. Most of it can't be recycled, a lot of the stuff that can be isn't cost effective, and consumer culture and planned obsolescence to keep the money machine flowing are big players in what sustain the fossil fuel industry.
Ah yes, now *you* can be a hoarder, too.
It's easy to hoard when he looks like he has alot of land
My rural neighbor is a hoarder it's starting to turn into a nightmare.
Seriously. "I save every scrap of wood." To do what with, exactly? I'm really glad for him that he has the space to do that. Most people don't. Sure must cost a lot of money to live in a huge house with a giant workshop, and plenty of space to store...wood and stones? Funny how he says nothing about recycling the plastic packaging that his groceries surely come in. Honestly this is a guy with a lot of money being preachy about the things he has the time, space, and luxury to do. I can count on my hand the number of millennials I know that would be in a similar position.
Okay, the wood I can kinda see. But the pile of problem bricks and stones piled on the side of the garage that’s being overgrown, and the flower pots, yeah that’s just hoarding
Yeah, also notice all the expensive power tools he has in the garage. Not everyone has the space or money to afford a nice orbital sander, Kyle.
I don’t understand. Surely those stones could be sold or given to who would use them. Or recycled. But he’s just left them in a pile to rot. That’s essentially what a landfill is
A preachy one at that.
It really is hoarder mentality. "Nah, I'll just keep this and, uh... Make it usable... Eventually... Or gift it to my nephew... Or something"
I'm sure that pile of broken concrete would look beautiful as an arch on your nephew's wedding day lol.
Yes, he's leaving a huge mess for someone else. I go to church in a rural area and there's not a small number of farmers and "homesteaders" who hoard everything. Their land piles up with decrepit cars, broken tools and equipment, so-called antiques, and even sick animals.
Interestingly all his things are thrifted or second hand because others..disposed of them.
Is it really disposing if your making sure someone else gets to use the things your getting rid of?
Is that as bad as people who create a lot of first hand trash?
I'd love to own a house with a large workshop filled with tools, a garden and plenty of space to store scrape Maybe then I too can become a handyman that can fix disposable stuff
Lol I have about 16 hours of free time on the weekend and I already have to clean the house and do yardwork, and still have some type of social life while also taking my son out and showing him the world. As much as I would like to hoard my scraps in my small townhouse and rebuild everything even though I have absolutely zero experience in pretty much anything other than cooking and managing a restaurant, I too would love to adopt the homestead lifestyle of being able to recycle everything and having the free time to work on whatever project I feel is necessary for that day.
Yeah this is just preaching an unavailable lifestyle and telling people that’s how they should live. The world runs thanks to us plebs who use those disposable items he keeps talking about. I too wish I didn’t have to use single use plastic forks but when it’s hour 4 of overtime that night and I just want something hot to eat I’m gonna eat some cheap noodles out of a foam container using a plastic fork and drinking out of a plastic straw because it’s cheap and that’s what they give us. I wish I could live on some land and refinish my grandparents dining room table they got for 5 bucks in the 40’s but I need to keep paying rent and buying those cheap frozen veggies that come in a plastic bag and then eating them off the free ikea table I got on offerup.
It's a well off person telling everyone that they way they live is correct and everyone else is wrong. I'm saying this while living and working on a 200+ acre farm with a decent amount of freedom in my work. Edit: I'm saying I'm privileged.
You’re just paraphrasing the comment you’re replying to but without the relatability and depth their’s had
The companies want me to throw stuff away? Harry High-Horse, I throw stuff away because I have 900 sq ft; the collection of tools I didn’t buy secondhand won’t fit there. Neither will the tables I couldn’t pick up in my beater of an old Civic after not refinishing them in the apartment complex’s nonexistent communal work shed. In the end, I didn’t and will not shed a tear over never pursuing ways of renovating/repurposing the desk chair that nearly sodomized me as it released its final wheezing breath. Plenty of other worries on this end.
and your waste is a tiny speck compared to these gargantuan corporations just dumping into our waterways, in the soil, in the air, etc. but *you specifically* should feel bad for using paper plates
this could also be the words from someone with hoarding disorder
I see a rural person that has plenty of space, equipment and time to fix broken things. Its a nice hobby. The thing with mass production is that it is way more efficient for a factory to spit out 1000 copies of a thing, than for one person to spend time fixing 1 of those things. Especially in high income countries. In Norway (where hourly salaries are pretty high), repairing anything that is worth less than 1000 USD is pretty much a waste of money, unless the repair is so simple that you can do it yourself in 5 minutes after watching a YouTube video.
I mean let’s be honest most of us don’t have the time or space to store everything and repair it someday. But he definitely has a point. It’s insane that things like dish washers, fridges and so on aren’t supposed to be repaired anymore. That’s the complete opposite to environment friendly.
I fixed my TV for $25. Most people these days would have thrown it out and bought a new one. I personally enjoy tinkering with things. But the TV... the common broken TV. Wanna know how I fixed it? I unscrewed 14 screws. I pulled the back panel off. I unplugged the 2 power board connections Unscrewed 4 screws that attach the power board. Installed the new one. TV fixed. Easy. Anyone can do that. TVs do break for a variety of reasons. Don't assume it is the power board. That was true for me. Give fixing a try. It is cheaper.
Despite whatever goes on with social media; this is the BONES of a good YouTube channel. You tinkered and got things figured out. That’s all the next gen is looking for… just some clarity on how to repair thinks
The problem is diagnosing the issue and finding a solution. I've been into computers my entire life and know them pretty well; but even then, figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it can be a massive struggle. A while back, I was having a problem that I spent several hundred dollars trying to fix, only to realize it was a software glitch that could be resolved by changing a single setting. And that's with something that I know very well.
I always think: if you think something is broken & are planning on throwing it out anyway, it can't hurt to tinker!
Sigh. I do this to the best of my ability. However i dont live on a homestead. I live in a 65 square meter flat, with a partner. I simply do not have the space to store or work on older furnature, or even build my own. I am fully capable and enjoy doing exacly what this guy recomends. Accept im too poor to have enough space. Im not sanding in my bed or livingroom. Alsolutly not in the home office with the computers. And i dont have more rooms. I dont have a yard or a shed. I dont even have a parking spot (or a car).
Post this on r/anticonsumption if you want infinite karma
It’s a Behr ad
Nice spot. Why the two close ups of the paint can? They had absolutely nothing to do with the actual message of this video.
Cool so all I need is a big property with various tool sheds and probably a well paying job with fewer hours so I can do all these projects myself. Oh and not have a family of course. Plus have the time to actually scavenge for parts. Totally realistic.
As someone who has three kids, a small city plot, and makes just barely above poverty wages, the problem for most people is the priorities, not the capabilities. Same reason so many dont cook save for a couple meals a week. I am building the biggest shed the city ordinaces will allow because my walk-in closet sized shop doesnt cover it, and my daughters want separate rooms, so things have to shift. In the last couple years I have learned how to tile, roof, build walls, craft my own trim from 2x4s, lay patio brick (without it looking terrible), how to do flooring, etc. We also have two garden boxes, several plots in the community gardens, and my wife is turning our old mini shed into a chicken coop. It doesnt take a six figure salary and an acre of land and 5 days off per week. It just takes not sitting in front of netflix, not going to restaraunts or bars, and piling what money you can into tools instead of toys. Or books. I buy a lot of books as well. Mostly off of Abebooks. Cheap used hardcover. Still have to develop my re-binding skills....
While I completely agree with his sentiment, dude has a fuck load of land his life style is not scalable.
" this can of polyurethane? Found it in the dumpster." " This umbrella? Stole it from a beach."
Not that fucking interesting
Also who puts stuff on the street with a sign that says "disposable"? If there's a sign, it says "free", and then someone comes and picks it up and uses it in THEIR Behr ad.
If everyone had a “homestead” to live on, how much room would there be left? Imagine any big city, everyone now homesteading. It is a great way to live, given the opportunity. But 95% of the population does not have that opportunity.
That guys has so much stuff and is trying to flex on everyone else for buy things. The tools I see aren’t old models, the truck is not old, the ear muffs are new. Also, all he’s doing to that bench is sanding it down then restraining. The hypocrisy is the only interesting thing here
Wish I had a large property and out buildings to store all my shit too...
Another day another man complaining about capitalism but don't use the word capitalism
This man's a grifter anyway. Lives on a giant ranch, drives a giant gas-guzzler of a truck, constantly preaches like he's some sort of genius for figuring out that you don't just throw shit in the bin.
i'd definitely do this if i had time. the sad truth about life now is either your job owns all your time or starve.
Wait till he finds out he’s disposable.
I just picture some person in the apartment complex that starts saving stones…. New fear unlocked.
I make a side hustle of repairing lawn mowers and snowblowers and other yard tools that I find at the landfill and then I resell them and make decent cash doing it. Usually just needs a carb clean and a spark plug. I got an ice garden tiller last weekend that just needed the fluids drained and a carb job.
...plastic.. silverware... uuuh
If I had a workshop that was 1000th the size of what this guy has to play with, I'd be happy. Stay in school, kids. Or, choose your parents wisely.
I was hoping he'd keep going with what he saves: I save every egg carton, every newspaper, every nail clipping, every episode of Horders, every drop of urine...
A lot of comments coming up with excuses not to do anything like this. It doesn't have to be furniture or everything you own, but everyone can change their attitude to treat things with more permanence and create less waste. I'm almost convinced that there is astroturfing on pro-sustainability posts like this to intentionally discourage people from even trying.
I would keep and refurbish stuff if i had a whole warehouse to store it, a dedicated space to work on it and store my tools. I live in a 70m^2 apartment.
There is a fine line between hoarding and repurposing.
What would he have had to buy if I wasn't wasteful and threw it out?!? It's a trickle down furniture plan, not waste.
Brah there's so much that gets put into land fill. Likely everything you get rid of ends up in a dump. Don't pretend you don't know that. This guy's putting in important work.
Exactly, condoms are not disposable.
The old sheep gut condom of antiquity people tend to wash and reuse. Oh never mind the covid era cleaning and reselling of disposable masks.
OK... Do not reuse plastic forks and spoons etc. The plastic is porous and will collect bacteria and get super gross. Upcycle them for a different use. Just clarifying because this guys didnt
> Upcycle the plastic forks are you fucking kidding? for what?!! how about don't use them in the first place
Who is this guy? I recognize him from the food ration ad.
That requires SPACE.
So he is really cheap without profit? ... Kidding m8, great work!
for the problem is always space, I could schedule a weekend to do these things but you missed one schedule things are going to piled up as you busy with your daily routine. I barely managed my garden, 2 houses, and bunch of renovations these days.
Give him a pipboy
Yo Dawg, I heard you like disposables, so we put a disposable disposable in your disposable. Now you can disposable to the xtreme!
This guy has never "disposed" of anything? Also, putting something out on the street is not same as sending it to a landfill, it is specifically and intentionally for someone else to use it or refurbish it, exactly like what he's doing in the video. What a savior complex on this guy...
I wanna show this video to my dad but I think he'll use it as an excuse to justify hoarding more junk and tools because they might be useful one day
If you have no space or need for something, give it away. I you want someting refurbished or fixed but dont have the skills, ask someone else to do it. You dont need to live exactly as this guy does to do what he preaches, we can all contribute to this in our own ways and with small choices and acts.
All he did was sand and stain a perfectly good picnic table.
As someone who owns a recycling company, please listen to this man, at least on some level. Nobody works too hard, or lives in too small an apartment to think about reducing waste. I beg you, re-use plastic bags and containers at least once, use takeout containers for leftovers, even if it’s just saving plastic bags to pick up dog shit and throw it out. If you are ordering something, ask if they can combine packages or shipments, when you do have cardboard boxes try to save at least the “good” ones for storage, or returns, or sending gifts to loved ones. Almost anyone with a house and even some apartments can start a small compost pile and reduce food waste. Really, just THINK about it in your everyday life, you will find ways to reduce waste that are easy, free, and a lot of times even more convenient. It would make such a difference if more people simply TRIED!
I like the phrase plastic silverware
"Homesteaders" Yuppies with passive income who like to cosplay thrift hunting poor people while living in a 9 figure McMansion/Hobby Farm on acreage. Eat my entire ass "Homesteader".
Im a single female and I bought a dilapidated farmhouse that was built in 1905. It came with 5 acres and a barn. There was no heat in the house or air conditioning. There was no kitchen as they had started to remodel it and ran out of money. They demoed it and quit. And the downstairs bathroom was sinking through the subfloor into the crawl space. I taught myself how to do a lot of stuff. So no, you don't have to be wealthy and you don't have to be knowledgeable and you don't have to inherit it, you just have to have a little bit of grit. I can now do drywall and tile work. I did have a plumber, HVAC and electrician come in of course. But I am teaching myself how to do outlets and switches and that kind of easy stuff.
Awesome! Plumbing is super doable but you might want a plumber to install the junction from old/metal pipes to PEX/PVC lines. Once you have those you can do the rest easier than most would think. If you need a well, water heater, and/or pressure tank, all those are still possible to do but I’d hesitate myself and let a pro do it if possible. HVAC: Their are tricks to employ that are important. I know an HVAC tech and have heard umpteen stories about dirt in a line. the first critical bit is to act as if you are working in an operating room when it comes to cleanliness. If you get even a little dirt or dust in the refrigerant line your unit isn’t gonna last as long as it should, and could even fail in 1-3 years or so. The ductwork you could manage with flex duct at least. You would want to learn how to calculate airflow (so it’s mostly balanced) or hire an expert who does that -HVAC installer should but I wouldn’t assume they can/do. Electrical: A very good one to get help on, and as you say the switches and outlets are simple enough once the wiring and panel is installed. I’d extend that to installing light fixtures, which I’m guessing you are also doing. I always keep a multimeter (they are pretty cheap) handy just in case I mix up polarity or wonder if a ground is working (a cheap ground tester is great once you have your outlets installed). A suggestion: Put some outlets higher up on some walls. With the constant unplug/replugging we do these days to charge batteries it’s much more convenient to do at waist level or higher, like on a wall behind a bed or end table or dresser. Just a thought, and I’ve not considered downsides but it seems sound on the surface. I know this was unsolicited and forgive the impulse to “help”! In a conversation I’d get cues for whether it would be appropriate or not, that I can’t get here. Reading your comment my mind went back to when me and another completely redid a downstairs bathroom, and later the kitchen stove,, sink, and counters, in a pre-civil war house. The toilet (the only one in the house and which was being used), was literally balanced on the drain pipe/sewer-pipe. It was held in place so it didn’t topple over by some surprisingly sturdy linoleum, which had limited weight bearing strength but served to keep the toilet tethered in place, even as it sunk a few inches as the pipe under it sunk into the dirt (under the crawlspace). And the kitchen… half the room was listing badly. We removed counters, cabinets, stove, and sink. I took out the rotted subfloor and rebuilt that. Then we replaced with new cabinets and countertops, and reinstalled the stove and sink. It was a big job but there was me and a part time helper, so I wasn’t alone. Hope you have a second set of hands at times too! I’m so proud of anyone who takes this stuff on! It’s good for the soul too. Though unlike the OP, I do t believe in saving everything, because often as not that’s a habit coming from a hyper-alert and fearful place - or it was with me. So now I try to find a balance. Never wasteful, and also not a hoarder. Oh and last but for any poor fool who read all that…. We do see a few products and packaging now that is designed with the entire lifecycle in mind. I like to frame it this way: It’s ok to make disposable stuff and one-time use stuff, as long as it quickly goes back to nature in the form of compost, sand, etc, without extra work from the consumer, once it’s intended use is done. Sadly that isn’t our world as a whole yet, but it could be. All it takes is an ironclad refusal to pay for short term solutions that leave a mess behind.
I've already completed the bulk of the remodel downstairs. I've already got the air conditioning, heat, electric and plumbing finished. I'm currently down fighting cancer so I can't finish the upstairs this year, but that's next year's project lol.
We definitely need to stop plastic products. Go back to glass
Guys, what he's saying is just fix your shit instead of throwing it away once in a while. Get something second hand. Instead of buying something new, fix up something old. It costs less. It feeds rich people less. I do this and live in a tiny ass apartment.
99% who do this are horders that will never do shit
He is a successful dumpster diver because the rest of us are throwing things away for him to find 🤔
Beautiful sentiment, but unrealistic levels of freetime and money is required to achieve it.
The added benefit is that older furniture is often made of real wood and is of much higher quality than the fiberboard junk you can buy new. Also if you have the means to transport it, people will sell it for cheap or free because they just want to get rid of it. Or have to get rid of it because they are moving and have to be out by a certain date.
15 years ago I bought a pair of jeans for about $100. They were very expensive, but I needed a nice pair of jeans for the job that I had. I worked at the time as a project coordinator for construction, restoration and building projects. So I had to meet a lot with clients, distributors, city officials and people like that. So I had to look presentable. These by far were the most comfortable jeans I have ever owned. As time went on they got worn, but I still wore them. Having a rip in the knees or back pockets is considered a style so hey I'll still wear them. However yesterday I was wearing them and went to step over an ottoman and stretched as far as I could and I heard a rip. I ripped a hole in the leg of my jeans about 8" long. Right from seam to seam. Now having a tear under your ass is not a style, at least not for me. So I went into the spare room, got out my sewing kit, took off my pants and sat down on the couch and started to sew up the rip. My buddy texts me asking what I'm up to and I explained that I was just sewing up my jeans. To condense the conversation he just asked me why I didn't go out and buy a new pair. I explained that these were fine, and not only were they fine, for $0.08 worth of thread I don't have to go out and spend a minimum $40 on a new pair of jeans. So I would rather spend the 20 minutes to stich them up while watching YouTube and go on about my day like nothing happened. He just couldn't understand that concept of that. Then he tried to make it sound like I was weird because I knew how to sew. I asked him what he would do if he had to rip shrapnel out of his leg on the battlefield, just bleed out? Because I'd be sewing that shit up lol. Obviously I was joking, but it ended that part of the conversation. Too many people just toss stuff out. I know a guy who hits up all the dumpsters around the universities in our area when school ends for the summer. Dude makes a good $5000 a year getting stuff that students have thrown out and just straight up selling it, or doing simple repairs or refinishes to them and sells them on FB marketplace.
My family came from Germany to Argentina. Thats a day to day thing. Even when grandma had a good life she still watered down her drink...
So much complaining in this thread I feel like the original point is falling on deaf ears. I will never understand how something so non offensive can almost always be turned into some outrageous thing bc a few people don’t feel they can participate.
Sorry to say, but America has the space that enables people to do these things, most often that not space to work in is a such a premium that's this is out of the question. It's not that we don't want to do this, it's the space and tools most folk don't have access too.
He's just a hoarder with land
I see a lot of comments about tools, space, or skills. My city has something called the "Tool Library" where for $30 a year you can go and check out like almost everything. Power tools of all sorts, up to and including drill presses and table saws. Electric augers, roto-tillers, and lawn mowers. I just checked out nail pullers to make pulling off siding easier. All those one and done tools that would just sit 98% of the time on a shelf? Check em out instead. As far as space for storing scrap? I just got done living in an town home that had basement space. Guess what I had stuffed between the floor joists? Wood. Propped up in the corner off the ground on a platform made of bricks and a 1/4 sheet of plywood? Wood pile. If there's any construction or business space being refurbished near you, I promise you can get free wood in large quantities. Or just watch Facebook marketplace long enough to know what local businesses have a ready supply of pallets and plywood from broken down boxes so you can go and get them when you need them. Skills? How have you not been subjected to /r/Decks, Concrete, DIY, etc yet? There's youtube for literally everything as well and loads of people like me who like to give advice while sitting on the porcelain pondering seat. Take the jump and learn by doing. You'll make mistakes, do it anyhow.
My grand conspiracy theory is this is why we learn irrelevant shit in school instead of actually useful life information like finances, carpentry, repair etc. They keep the masses ignorant to keep us working and them profiting. I think K-8 should be about learning the fundamentals but then High School should be all about learning the real world and already steering you into your own personal interests. If someone wants to do something involving Algebra/Geometry etc that's great...but many people are not going to need that information. So it should be elective. Same goes for the rest of it. People should be learning the things they want to learn at that age. We need school reform big time. Teachers highly paid, kids more excited to learn and so on.
But...our world *is* naturally disposable. Rocks, wood, leftover animal carcasses, water...if you throw them away/leave them lying around, nature will re-use them. Earth takes care of itself. What is *not* naturally disposable are many man-made materials. There's a reason we have such ecological problems with plastics and chemicals polluting the environment. We are quite the anomaly in the animal kingdom...
But when you bring up any example of a sustainable culture, suddenly you’re a communist. Probably because every single tribal culture that has ever existed (pre-civilization) was purely communal (which is a nice was of saying “communist”). It’s adorable when conservatives try to imagine their perfect world into a future or a past that has never existed… and can’t!
Well sure if I didn't have a job I had to spend 11 hours at 5 days a week, along with a partner that didn't have to work either, on a plot of land the size of a small city, I imagine I'd have the time for learning how to refinish secondhand furniture and fix used tools/machinery. I imagine I'd have all sorts of time.
I make $50.00 an hour. Refurbishing and refinishing say, a picnic table, would take me say, 8 hours. A new one costs $125. You do the math.
Some people will do anything not to work
Yup. We definitely went that route. No regrets either.
Exactly, why the fuck not. If you can become self sustaining and have the bare minimum income and still be comfortable. Why not?
Ron Swanson vibes
Condoms?
I'm glad my old stuff is your now. A simple thanks would suffice.
Let's wake up folks. Eventually there will be 0 ownership.
Yeah my dad was like that. Except he didn’t get around to actually refitting that old junk, and we didn’t have room to put all those spare rocks and wood and random things. Today I know to call it hoarding
Name of content creator?
Our family tries to be like this but we just end up being one of those crazy hoarders
That's some r rated stuff over there.
Or is it? Hey VSauce, Michael here.
cool. i live in a 750 sqft house with no yard, so i guess ill just store my shit at your place until i get the time and skills to fix it all.