What hobby seems to have the worst hoarders?
I think people who are into crafts. They have all of these yarns, construction papers, various tools and stuff. All so that they can say that they have all of these projects in mind that they want to do. But they never do them so they get more crafting stuff and it just eats away storage until their place is practically consumed by it.
Oh man, woodworking is pretty bad. Tools galore, scrap wood everywhere, and half-finished projects all over the garage.
Shhh! I swear I can build that for only twice the cost and take three times as long, but it will be waaay quicker if I have this new tool.
Your mistake is in what you are making your comparisons to. You can't compare your solid wood bookcase to an Ikea cardboard bookcase, you need to compare it to the fancy brands that actually do make things from solid wood.
That is a personal attack I do not appreciate
Any “retro” collection. Old video games, for instance. In many cases, the barrier to entry is sky high, because there are very few old consoles or games on the market; The collectors have bought all of them, and are never planning on selling.
If I were a collector, this would be my thing.
I am not a collector though. I don't have the house for it and I don't want a house big enough to be able to do that.
I had to give up my retro game collection when I moved and I realized how long overdue it was. I hope someone out there is enjoying my old consoles and games.
Cars because they are so big, and ugly when in disrepair. Small scale hoarding is a small scale problem.
They're also wasteful pollution machines when they're run, and for no practical purpose. They're just toys to these people.
To be fair, the same can be said about most forms of entertainment.
Same as the social media servers you utilize and the streaming services that you utilize.
Data centers use a ton of power for subjectively no practical purpose.
Backpacking. I have a big plastic bin filled with equipment that I decided to go another direction with.
But makers are the kings of hobby hoarding, just look at Adam Savage. He has parts for things he hasn't even thought of building. He has a plethora of tools that overlap entirely just because the set of tools is closer to a given work aspect. Walls of bins with various degrees of filled because he bought 100 of something a decade ago that may have a future use.
Adams cave is so beautiful and well ordered these days. He’s the best kind of hoarder.
Those videos are so relaxing to watch
Perfect example.
My first answer would have been retro game collecting, but that's already been discussed, so I'll posit custom PC building. That's a hobby rife with keeping spare parts "just in case".
Source: Self
This is the one hobby where you actually might use the thing you're hoarding just in case.
The "hobby carpenter" and handymen sort. Guys who like building stuff and own land to do it on. So much crap and sub par materials. Hundreds of salvaged half rotten 2x4s that might be enough to hold a person with a couple dozen of them. Shit tons of insulation just getting soaked outside, tons of random cinder blocks and bricks, etc. Add in a side of drywall, random carpet scraps, tons of various wiring, and a massive assortment of tools that have probably seen more house dust than wood dust.
Not taking a dig at these guys, but you have to be realistic with what you can accomplish. Unless its a crazy good deal/find that you know you will use or be able to give away, don't touch it.
For the sake of space and organization, just buy materials for the project RIGHT before you build it, and AFTER you plan EVERYTHING about it. Account for EVERY piece you need so you never need to buy a bunch extra "just in case".
But that's a good board!
I'll definitely hold onto good wood, things with zero knots, nice grain or simply rarer species, but I'll never hoard used construction lumber.
This guy diy's
And when these guys discover local auctions, the storage requirements explode. So many half-broken mowers, engines, chests of old tools - all needing sorting out, fixing and keeping forever.
This is me but I at least keep my stuff indoors, clean and organized.
My Dad's a carpenter and growing up this essentially describes our backyard. So much timber that gets left over at the end of the job that he'd grab for a carton of beer. So much of it soaked and white-ant ridden.
nervously glances at the bin of scrap wood
Warhammer.
Anyone into restoring cars probably has one or two cars that don’t run on their lot. Time goes by and those cars are rusting faster than they’re being fixed.
I’m starting to get into making my own flies for fly fishing. It’s a ton of fun to buy like local feathers and shit but it does take up a lot of space and you’d be surprised at how expensive some of the materials can be
Relevant and interesting if you've never heard the story.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/great-feather-heist-180968408/
Hobby electronics?
Need a small part? Better buy 10 in case you break one and because it's only marginally more expensive than getting one. Now repeat for every project you do
Don't get me started on the broken or obsolete thrown away shit I keep around "for parts or that one time I might need it"
Well, last week I finally soldered the cut cables of the otherwise working basic (literally a transformer, bridge rectifier, fuse and voltmeter) 12V lead acid battery charger from 2007 I found earlier this year to charge a tractor battery, so that's a plus
Oh god yes. I have so many extra switches, connectors, resistors, capacitors, microcontrollers, little screens, sensors, etc…..
Then I had to buy so many little containers to hold them all. When I die my family is gonna hate me.
And then never even one of the parts…
Automotive, back yards becoming junkyards of old cars that "will be fixed one day". Piles of used oil, broken parts, tools that are for only one purpose. Extra car parts, that may or may not work.
Every collecting hobby is definitionally a hoarding hobby.
Crafters are definitely up there, overall - but I think wargamers might beat them. Hundreds to thousands of models, paints, brushes, terrain, carrying cases, books - it adds up to a hoard of epic proportions. That's just personal experience though. Lego fans can also get to be out there, and TCG players.
Gotta second the card gamers. I have no idea what cards are in my collection anymore, and i only have three longboxes of cards. I've seen far bigger collections. There's a few reasons a quit that hobby, and this is one of them.
Collecting stuff is basically the ultimate hoarder hobby.
I collect rocks and yes the clock is a rock
I would actually love to know what hobbies don’t have some sort of hoarding aspect! I’m trying to think on it and I can’t come up with any at the moment.
I’m sure one of you can help me?
Playing music. Sure some people can collect guitars or whatever, but really that's a separate hobby from actually playing.
But you need equipment to actually play?
I'm not a guitar collector/fetishist at all, but still need at minimum an electric (preferably at least two for humbuckers & singlecoils), a steel string, a nylon string and a bass to be able to play what I want to play. Not to mention amps, pedals etc. And this is strictly for playing gigs and home practice, when you get into home recording it piles up even more. Even if you restrict yourself to things you actually use, the possibilities for hoarding are pretty much endless.
3d printing, if you start it’s a wormhole, where you end up wanting more and more different types of printers, print a lot of useless crap, have a lot of filament lying around, and spare parts. Not as space consuming as automotive or woodwork etc but if you live in a small apartment without a dedicated room for hobbies it can get pretty crazy.
I keep trying to get into it. I have one and do some neat things with it. But personally. I've found it to just be another tool to fabricate for some other projects. But the little knick knacks keep being the main models showing up on printables and thingiverse.
I'd love to see a repository of 3d models of parts for various machinery and car parts. My entire interior is basically molded abs, why aren't there models of all those pieces I can just print?
I wonder if one of those 3d phone scanning apps would be enough for something like that with a few measurements.
Hams maybe. All the different electronic components, radios, cables, and parts they collect over the years. And before you know it, the antennas are through the roof!
I grew up near a guy with literally dozens of towers on his land. He would get paid to decommission old towers then he'd put them up at his place rather than scrapping them.
The antennas can be a lot more than just through the roof.
Model Railroading.
It's not the worst, but it requires all the key ingredients - you need to own a home large enough to have a 'spare' room, which means you've got disposable income. And displaying the trains is almost as much fun as running them, so you end building shelves and shelves, which then sprawl out to the rest of the house. Only to realize you're missing the 'key' one from that set, got to go find that, obviously.
And then of course you can't throw away the boxes, because that would lower the resale value, so you need to rent a second storage unit. Not that you would ever sell them of course. But your kids will be sitting on a goldmine!
And that's just the collection portion. It's a crafty hobby, from making scenery & waterfalls & little trees all the way to the special paints to make the engines look aged. That will need a room as well.
And now that we've got the train shelves in the kitchen, you know, I could put a food themed railroad on the table there. Yes I already have the desert themed one in the train room and the prairie themed one in the living room and the snow theme layout in the hallway, but I don't have a silly one. No of course the Halloween theme one doesn't count.
Everything that has yarn.
Yarn just seems to take over a home everywhere I've seen it.
I pretty much had to set a limit with my wife. Like you can have these 4 giant tote bins filled with yarn supplies and two baskets of projects in progress but if you want more than that you have to give some away.
I had to make a boundary because it was getting out of hand.
I got rid of all my yarn one day last year because I was overwhelmed. Haven't gotten any since but I really want to get back into knitting/crocheting. I'm afraid I'll just end up with way too much again
Is this a place to cast shade or self reflect? In the former experimental scientist. They have closets of oscilliscopes, vacuum pumps, cryostats. Enough to furnish 3 or more labs. They always say they'll use it, but the pile only gets bigger.
For me, I have the opposite problen in general. I throw everything away and end up buying or making new shit. Worst is probably code. Fuck making a repo. This is a one off. I can write the same code 3 times before I keep it, but I like to say that is what makes me a decent programmer. And I'll keep telling myself that until I die.
You must have met my wife. My oath, the amount of fucking yarn and fabric in her stacked to the ceiling sewing room is horrendous. She couldn't knit enough blankets in her lifetime to use up half of it.
antique airplane restoration. So many parts, so many unreplaceable parts, soo many tools, soo many large parts as well.
sounds like a Lego builder
I know people are giving some very good examples, but a pet that can easily turn into a hoarding hobby is hamsters. You get one, get super attached, and then three years later whoopsie doodle, the living room is filled floor to ceiling with cages for all twelve of your little dudes.
This is just due to how much space the little guys need. In the wild hamsters will viciously defend miles of land, so bigger cages are always better. As a general rule, an ideal cage should have 900 sq inches of space and be at least 2 feet deep to allow several inches of bedding. So, one little dude will take up at least 12.5 cubic feet of your living room, or .07 cubic smoots for our friends across the pond. This adds up fast, and it can be easy to get in over your head because each individual little dude requires so little cage cleaning per month.
Yep, but imagine a Klingon falling in love with the warrior spirit of the fearless tribble. That's basically the appeal of a hamster.
Cycling can get bad. Some dudes have a garage full of $20k of bikes.
I am on the low end of the bike hoarding spectrum. I have two very modestly priced bikes (one road, one fat) and a 20” box of parts and accessories. You could count the 4 water bottles in the cupboard, 4 bike shorts in the drawer, and 6 bike jerseys in the closet as well. 2 pairs of bike shoes, a hook of tires and tubes in the garage, oh god never mind I have it bad.
This week I actually got to use some old cranks I had saved from a bike I replaced.
Ok I'm not actually going to ride those cranks. I just needed to fit them on the bike to confirm the other cranks were bent and not the bike frame itself.
Now I'm going to buy new replacement cranks and keep the old ones AND the bent ones for some reason...
Junko pop
Some asshole Transformers action figure sellers on eBay who DISASSEMBLE THE FIGURES AND THEN SELL EACH PIECE SEPARATELY. Fuck those people, seriously.
Or toy resellers in general.
"Uh, I uh got this ActionGuy's left arm..$14 please...will throw in some random unnecessary junk from other toys to make up the value"
It's obscene and I'm happy for 3-D printing to exist as it is today, is to tell these assholes to get fucked.
For real. Or they remove the weapons and sell them separately, or the figurines from Lego sets. Special place in Hell for those people.
The reptile-keeping hobby. ):
As a crafter who is more on the Marie Kondo side of things, it’s way worse than that. I’d say a lot of time, knitters and sewists (my two main hobbies) buy yarn and fabric with no specific pattern or project in mind but rather just because it’s pretty. Some of them seem to be proud of their room-filling stashes. Personally I think most people just like the instant gratification of purchasing craft supplies but don’t have the patience to actually create the craft, especially since knitting in particular is very, very slow. I have tried really hard not to fall into this trap and have been actively not purchasing yarn for a few years now, though I’ll still put it on my Christmas list.
There is a sweet spot with buying tools and materials just because you want to and having the right thing when you need it because of an impulse buy. That is me never.
Haha exactly! I got frustrated as an early knitter when I bought pretty yarn and then realized when I got home that it wasn’t enough for a project. I stopped making that mistake pretty fast and have been fairly disciplined about it.
Extreme couponing
People who pick stuff off the curb, refurbish it, and resell it.
My neighbor (apartments) does this but mostly around the time rent is due because she doesn’t have a job. She leaves her shit all over the property: half-finished furniture, tools to move it, etc.
Pinball. Because a lot of the classic pinballs are 25 years plus old they tend to have extra of everything in case something breaks.
If you own a pinball machine, you have a whole lot of other stuff too. Ramps, decals, balls, fuses, you name it.
Plus hardly anybody who owns pinball machines owns only one. Four or five seem to be the norm, and I know several people who have a house with 20 or 30 in it. That's 20 or 30 full size pinball machines in a normal house.
I've read some really good answers, but imo there isn't a worst type. This will vary from person to person, some people don't get buried under the whatever they buy and others do, regardless of what their interests are.
Mini DIsc enthusiasts
collecting
Fishing. 5 bucks here and there, it adds up. Even more so, fly fishing. I have some many materials
Yarn and Tamagotchi. 😒