730 things — Day 23 of 365

 Things That Come In Packs are a steady source of items to be responsibly passed on. If one is on a limited budget (by choice or necessity), the items available at a very low price often come in sets and packs. 

Recently, for instance, we needed some felt thingummies to put under the feet of chairs so they'd glide noiselessly (not scrape gratingly) across the floor. So we got some, but the pack they came in had enough for a whole restaurant-full of chairs. Consequently all our chairs are kitted out and we still have most of the pack left over. An opened and half-used pack of felt chair foot thingummies appeals to very few people I should think, and this is not the kind of job we do more often than we absolutely have to. So there it will sit in the cupboard under the stairs until we've all died or the glue dries out.

Another household item I recently purchased was a quantity of door stops. Not the heavy sort that sit on the floor, but the stiff foam sort to wrap round either the top or side of a door so it can't bang shut, and the sort that look like a padded version of these fabric masks we're all wearing to slow down the pandemic — with loops to go round the door handles.

In case you haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about, I mean one of these — 

— and one of these.

The nearer you slide it in the hinge direction, the wider open it holds the door.

If you locate it on the side of the door, it allows it to shut but not bang (or trap the fingers of children). The mask-like one also allows the door to close but not click shut.

So we have these and they are very useful, but the mask-type came in a pack of 2 and the foam sort came in a pack of 4. I wanted the mask-type, Hebe wanted a foam one, and the other foam one went on the sitting room door to stop any risk of our cat Miguel getting inadvertently shut in if he was sleeping there. A serious design flaw of Victorian houses is that they are basically built along the lines of shot-gun houses and immediately convert into wind tunnels when you open the outside doors.  Intervention is needed to stop them slamming.

All this means that we had two foam door stops and one mask-like one surplus to requirements. I thought they're exactly the kind of thing that gets overlooked in a charity shop, for two reasons — 

1. no one ever goes to a charity shop looking for a door stop and
2. most casual browsers wouldn't even know what they were looking at if they saw one of these.

So I carefully described their structure and purpose, photographed them just to be clear, and Tony put them on Freegle for me. A nice Polish man came and picked them up one night this week.