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Zwaptz
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.

01  ·  of five

You have one.

A garage, a loft, a 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.
An open wooden drawer photographed from above: a watch with a perished strap, tangled earbuds, a folding paper fan, a bunch of keys, a lighter, a brass compass and about nine coins.
One drawer.

The maths nobody does

Not worth a Saturday

You know 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.

Four people, one shelf

You just moved
Four boxes never got unpacked. You know what is in two of them.
Your children grew
Used hard for eleven months, then abruptly never again.
You moved on from the hobby
You were a person who did that thing. Now you do a different thing.
You collect, and you have doubles
You would swap one in a heartbeat. You will not become a shop.

None of them wants money enough to do the work.

Where selling wins

If you need cash, sell it

Not “consider selling”. Sell it. A swap hands you an object, and an object does not pay a bill. The same goes for anything rare or genuinely valuable — a specialist auction reaches buyers you cannot, and the fee is worth it.

What swapping is for is the pile in between: things worth something, individually worth less than the trouble of selling, and collectively worth quite a lot.

The whole comparison, including the four situations where selling still wins, is on sell or swap.

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. The room has not changed, and it has stopped being a problem.

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 is right.

Zwaptz is the middle. Point your phone at the thing and find out what it is worth — twenty seconds, and no forms to fill in.

Try it on one thing

The longer versions