It’s confession time. “Uh-oh,” you’re thinking. “What am I suppose to confess?” By a show of hands, how many of you have a junk drawer at home--a place that has become a repository for things you can’t find somewhere else to keep? What’s in your junk drawer? When you open it up, are you surprised by what ends up in there?

The average American home has too much stuff in it, and we don’t know what to do with all of it. We cram things in closets. Under beds. In our junk drawer. We may even rent a warehouse to hold our unneeded goods. Did you know that the self-storage industry in the U.S. is a $38 billion industry? (1)

It gets even worse. According to the reality TV show Auction Hunters, in 2011 there was about $1 billion worth of goods auctioned off from about 50,000 abandoned storage unit…