People who have lived in one house for a long time will inevitably come to the realization that they've got too much stuff that's accumulated over the years and decades. These people may not be chronic hoarders but there are usually some impractical items that aren't good enough to give to charity but may be useful someday far in the future. Things like damaged chairs, broken old grandfather clocks, boxes of old magazines, rusty toolboxes, picture frames coming apart at the corners, interesting liquor bottles - all the common items that are candidates for a junk removal service to pick up.

If you've ever wandered through your house and exclaimed "this place is a junkyard!" it's time to consolidate your possessions to reclaim some square footage. You've been walking around things that should be put away somewhere or thrown out; chances are you have used up all the storage space so the only option left is to separate the wheat from the chaff and kiss some prized possessions good-bye. Then with a steady hand and the wife with a knife standing behind you, it's time to pick up the phone and place an order for rubbish removal to come and get your 17 boxes of old Playboys and that dilapidated chest-o-flex home exerciser that will never be used but looked good on the infomercial.

If you have children perhaps a dumpster rental is called for; growing children get bored with their possessions and they demand a never ending stream of new toys to play with while they ignore last year's gifts. The build-up of large plastic representations of the outside world (such as scale replicas of entire kitchens) that are offered as gifts to youngsters can become a problem when no one wants to play with them but they still want to keep them. Since World War 2 the proliferation of plastic was explosive. The toxic material became the building block of the toy industry with millions of cheap items of all sizes, for a long time bearing the words "Made in Japan" which in the decade following the war became the comic phrase for anything flimsy and cheap. Times have certainly changed now that the Japanese technology is the finest in the world. Long gone are the little toy soldiers and tanks that formed tiny plastic armies that became instantly boring, set aside, and tossed in the toybox.

Clearing the basement, attic, closets, and various corners of the house will most likely yield 10% or so of extra living space. Those who have the self-discipline to sweep away the past and pile up the superfluous clutter out to the driveway and the waiting trucks and uniformed trash removal employees. It's a convenience that will save many trips to some local junkyard that you will never want to see. Time effectiveness and cost effectiveness are combined to save you work; hopefully this will leave you plenty of energy to rearrange the interior for a more roomy and sunny atmosphere now that the shadows of unnecessary garbage. Much of it can be recycled for useful purposes, for one man's garbage is another man's gold.