Jon, your hoarding style sounds remarkably like my mother's. When I cleared the cellar and box-rooms of my parents' house after her death, I found dozens of containers full of a range of fasteners that rivalled the stock at Home Hardware -- except nothing was new and unused. Literally pounds of nails that had been wrenched out of old boards, pickle jars full of screws marred with rust and daubed with paint, even a wooden butter box full of porcelain electrical junctions of a type forbidden in Canadian construction since about 1960. The false beams (quarter-sawn oak!) from the dining-room ceiling of the old rectory down the street lay on the cellar floor -- God alone knew what she had planned to do with those. I had to hire two guys with a truck to help me clear the jungle, and they were ready to quit at three o'clock in the afternoon.

My husband hoarded office supplies. Just yesterday, I hauled a file box full of part-used yellow legal pads down to the basement; don't know yet if it's going into the recycle or out on Freecycle, but it's going. There's also a shoebox full of pens and highlighters, four gadgets for making holes in paper (one single punch, one double, and two three-holers), a stack of accordion files with wrap-around elastic, a much larger stack of three-ring binders ranging in size from modest to enormous, five staplers, and other items too numerous to mention (as they used to say in farm auction flyers).

I did not inherit the hoarding gene, or perhaps the experience of clearing out after my mother switched it off -- I was only 26 at the time.