This is a picture of my yucky basement. More specifically, it’s a picture of all the cardboard boxes that need to stop filling up my yucky basement. Yet I’m stumped regarding what I should do with what I refer to as Mount Cardboard.
The only downside of online shopping is all the boxes. They show up in my mailbox and on my porch, I bring them in and excitedly tear off 300 layers of tape to get what I ordered, and I throw the empty boxes in a corner somewhere. Once I get tired of looking at boxes all over the place, I go through the house and offer another sacrifice to Mount Cardboard. What the heck do people do with empty cardboard boxes?
Recycle them. That would be awesome if there was a recycling center where I live. Years ago, there was one in the old Kmart parking lot, but people used it to drop off their trash. (We don’t have city or county trash pickup, so sometimes people are too cheap to pay to take stuff to the dump.)
Reuse them. In the two years that I’ve lived here, I’ve been the BFF to all friends moving to new homes. Need some boxes? How about 20 of them? I can hook you up. Unfortunately, I think all my friends are settled now. Plus I’m not sure how useful a gigantic skinny bookshelf box would be during the moving process. Now I’m stuck with all the big, awkward, or low quality boxes that no one wanted.
Throw them away. The guy who picks up my trash every week will gladly take cardboard - as long as it’s broken down and fits in a garbage bag. Which applied to all the boxes I gave away to my friends, but not to the ones I have left. I’d actually love to watch someone try to flatten the giant box that my desk chair came in and cram it into a 13-gallon kitchen bag.
Burn them. This is the most likely choice. There’s a huge pile of tree branches in my backyard that will need to be burned at some point (AKA Mount Brushmore). Yes, I live in the middle of nowhere and we can set things on fire in our backyards. I could drag Mount Cardboard out to the pile and burn it to its death. That is, until I order some more stuff.
Keep them. Theoretically, I could leave the boxes in the basement for all eternity. My basement is one of those creepy, unfinished horror movie basements where you could totally picture bodies buried in the walls or something. I don’t exactly hang out down there. It doesn’t hurt anything for Mount Cardboard to exist; it just drives me crazy.
What do you do with cardboard boxes? Any suggestions for me? Am I the only weirdo with enough boxes to name and photograph?