An overstuffed bedroom closet: folded jumpers piled on the shelf, about thirty hangers of coats and shirts, a cricket bat leaning against the frame, and fifteen pairs of shoes heaped on the floor.

A suburban garage with the door up: three stacked cardboard boxes, folded chairs, a mountain bike with flat tyres, a plastic tub of tangled cables, a pegboard of shovels and rakes, and a treadmill with a towel hanging over the handrail.

You have one.

Maybe it is the garage. Maybe it is the loft, or the cupboard under the stairs, or one drawer in a dresser that you open about twice a year and close again.

The drill you have used twice. The bread maker from a Christmas you can date exactly. Ice skates in the size you were. A treadmill that has become somewhere to hang a towel.

None of it is rubbish. That is the whole problem.

An under-stairs cupboard seen through an open door: an upright vacuum cleaner, a folded pushchair, a tennis racquet, a canvas holdall and carrier bags stacked to the sloped ceiling. — Under the stairs.

An unconverted loft lit by one bare bulb and a shaft of light from a skylight: three leather suitcases, stacked picture frames, a rolled rug, plastic crates and a birdcage. — The loft.

A fitted bedroom closet packed to the rails with clothes, with boxes and bags stacked on the shelf above. — One cupboard.

The maths nobody does

Not worth a Saturday

You know roughly what selling it involves. Photograph it in decent light. Work out what to call it. Guess a price. Answer three people who ask if you will take half, and one who asks whether you would deliver.

Then wait in on a Sunday for somebody who does not turn up.

For sixty pounds it is a fair trade of a day. For a bread maker it is not, and everybody quietly knows it. So the thing stays where it is, and every year it is worth slightly less than it was.

Two men laughing in the same garage doorway, one crouched beside a mountain bike and one standing, with three open boxes of books, a tub of cables and a pegboard of garden tools around them. — The same garage, later. The room has not changed; what is in it has.

The middle option

There is giving it away, and there is doing the work of selling it.

Almost everything in that garage is sitting there because neither one is right.

Zwaptz is the middle. Point your phone at the thing. Find out what it is worth. Trade it for something you would actually use.

Twenty seconds from photograph to range. Just point and find out.

Try it on one thing

The valuations behind that button are running today, and the reveal says on every item how sure it is and what it looked at. Some of the items already on the site are examples rather than real appraisals, and each of those says so on its own card.