There is a moment in every shed clear-out where you realise you are not sorting objects so much as confronting earlier versions of yourself. Ours was a strong field.
There were the bikes. Not just any bikes, but the full spectrum. One was my son’s once-cherished £1000 machine, now looking faintly betrayed at having been downgraded from prized possession to mild inconvenience. The other was my own creation, an electric bike built with what might politely be described as an enthusiastic interpretation of the regulations. It went rather well. Possibly too well. The sort of thing that makes you grin on a quiet lane and then, later that evening, read a news story about an e-bike setting fire to a terrace house and wonder if perhaps you’ve built a small mobile insurance complication.
That one, I decided, needed to go. Not because it didn’t work, but because it worked in a way that increasingly felt like tempting fate.
Up they went on Facebook Marketplace. The bikes drew the usual sort of interest. Short messages, straight to the point, people who clearly knew what they were looking at and had already decided what it was worth to them. Even a tired bike has a future. It might be transport, it might be a project, but it has a role.
I had a separate go at selling a tandem as well. We have two, because apparently one tandem is not quite enough absurdity for a household. The spare one is a Dawes with drop handlebars, which I have never really agreed with. A tandem already contains enough scope for disagreement without adding the riding position of a minor Alpine stage. I much prefer the other one, which has normal handlebars and therefore feels less like a joint application for divorce with pedals.
I priced the Dawes at £125, which felt fair to the point of generosity. Within minutes, a message: “What’s your best price?”
It’s an odd way to start. Not an offer, not a question about condition, just a gentle nudge to see if you’ll knock money off before anything has actually been said. I replied, “the advertised price,” and left it at that. If someone doesn’t make an offer, there isn’t really a negotiation going on, just a bit of hopeful fishing.
Meanwhile, back in the shed, there was the composting toilet.
Listed with the same optimism, it produced a completely different sort of response. Messages were longer, more tentative, as though people were thinking out loud. You could almost hear the kettle boiling while they tried to work out whether they were ready to take full personal responsibility for the end stage of their own digestion.
Because a composting toilet is not quite like the other things. You’re not just buying a bit of kit, you’re signing up to the idea of it. We had tried it in one of the cabins. On paper it was flawless. Eco friendly, efficient, and capable of producing what the brochure described, with admirable restraint, as “valuable compost”. In practice, it turned out that not everyone shares the same enthusiasm for closing that particular loop. Some guests took to it gamely. Others approached it with the air of someone being asked to participate in a slightly experimental pilot scheme.
After five years in the shed, it had acquired a sort of moral authority. The bikes looked tired. The pond pumps looked obsolete. The composting toilet looked as though it was quietly judging us.
At one point I suggested we might struggle to sell it because the obvious buyers would be off grid and therefore not on Facebook. It sounded plausible for about ten seconds.
In reality, it was simpler than that. Anyone properly off grid has already sorted this sort of thing out for themselves. The rest of us are still close enough to civilisation to have a choice, and most people, when it comes down to it, quite like flushing and forgetting.
So in the end, we gave it away. A £1600 piece of eco engineering, offered for free, which rather focuses the mind. Not so much a sale as an admission.
And then, somewhat unexpectedly, it went. A perfectly pleasant person turns up, asks sensible questions, loads it into the back of a car and drives off, apparently entirely comfortable with the arrangement. No manifesto, no lifestyle declaration, no visible hesitation. Just a straightforward transaction, as though we’d been giving away a lawnmower.
Which rather undermines the theory. It turns out the market does exist after all. Not a tribe of off grid purists living beyond the reach of WiFi, but someone local, practical, and evidently untroubled by the finer details of waste management. Different bits of clutter seem to summon entirely different tribes, though you only really notice it when you try to get rid of them.
The toilet’s quiet authority disappears down the drive, and the shed looks suddenly more like a shed again. Less a shrine to good ideas, more a place where things end up when you’re not quite ready to admit you don’t need them anymore.
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