14k? I know people who own more than 14k worth of fishing equipment ... not including any sort of boat. A family of four with any sort of hobby, say four sets of skis/boots/poles, will easily hit 14k on that hobby alone. I don't want to think about how much all my climbing gear would cost to replace.
Packing up everything into suitcases is all well and good for single IT workers moving between generic white-walled apartments. People with kids and hobbies have stuff that takes up space.
I’m sympathetic to the point you’re making – it wouldn’t be shocking for a moderately sized well-to-do family to have a bunch of expensive gear for some hobby – but I think you’re underestimating people’s abilities to do things on a budget. I think ski equipment could reasonably come to less than $1k pp, for example.
Respectfully, consider that other people are actual people, and their lives are meaningfully distinct from yours. To wit, “climbing equipment” encompasses everything from the backpack of gym-climbing gear you describe to a half-ton of tents, rope, crashpads, anchors, packs, portaledges, outerwear, camp gear, etc.
Well, you also need quickdraws and anchor gear if lead climbing outdoors, and this doesn't remotely start to touch on trad gear, but you can set yourself up nicely for climbing for about $500.
The person you replied to does not have anywhere near $14k of climbing gear unless they are into serious big-wall climbing that involves sleeping on the side of the wall, or else they run a rock climbing guide company.
Edit: Just saw they actually listed their kit out in another comment, which tracks closely with what I expected. They could probably replace all of it for under $5k.
A full set of say a dozen cams, probably $1000. A set of tricams ($100). A couple sets of good nuts (2x$150). A set of hexes ($150). About a hundred oval crabs (100x$15) and a few beefy lockers (6x50$). Say 24ish quickdraws (24x$30). A half dozen belay devices/eights for various tasks (6x30$). Ropes are about 200 each for 50-60m dynamics. Any serious climber will own four or more. Plus some static lines for hauling. A set of jummars (2x150$). Lots of webbing for connecting stuff. A few thinner ropes for anchors and general utility uses. A couple pulley blocks (2x100). Rope bags. Gear bags. Cleaning tools. And a hundred other bits and bobs. Every wall climber also has an assortment of strange stuff, things few people ever see two of, for particular problems. For instance I have an ascender rated to catch falls, which is a useful self-rescue device. Such rare things are priceless.
Tricams are still sold. They are great in horizontal or shallow cracks. They are also way cheaper than mechanical cams. Hexes are still sold under different names (DMM Torque-nuts are just small hexes imho.)
100 seems like way too many, but things add up fast. Each piece of pro will need one or two. A basic trad anchor setup (three bit of pro) will involve five carabiners (3x plus two to tie off, and maybe a sixth if you want to top-rope the belay). So if you have a long pitch with say 15 bit of pro, and an anchor on either end, you are easily talking about 30+ carabiners in use on a single pitch. But you won't use every bit of pro on every pitch. You will have maybe a dozen other bits hanging off of you. That's another 20+ carabiners. So, on a single not-complicated trad route (no bolts) 50+ carabiners is not unusual. Get into complex things like multiple ropes and owning 100+ is not unusual.
Now having them all be ovals is strange. I took a stance early on that I wanted to standardize as much as possible. I bought BD ovals in bulk over a few years in the early 2000s. I like them, at least for everything other than quickdraw ends, rather than the random assortment many climbers end up collecting bit by bit.
It’s a fair fraction, on one hobby’s worth of stuff, nevermind the rest of the household (member’s!) items.
$14k just doesn’t cover replacing a household’s worth of stuff. If you still think it does, do a replacement value inventory of your place. And then update your insurance!
On the order of a few hundred per at most, but if you're climbing outdoors you probably will need a lot more than just those. Trad gear in particular can add up quite quickly.
In addition, it's not uncommon for dedicated climbers to have multiple sets of ropes/shoes (and even harnesses) for different situations.
When I took climbing, as a teenager, our instructor was very serious about getting the best stuff: shoes, ropes, crampons, carabiners, gloves, jackets, etc.
Not cheap, but he put it as “do you want to die?”.
Crampons are definitely mountaineering/winter hiking gear which I used to do a fair bit of. (For lower-grade winter hiking, various silicon spikes plus single-layer boots are pretty popular even among relative serious hikers up to some level.) Not rock climbing, which I always sort of hated :-)
But, yeah, even a decent collection of 4-season hiking/backpacking/camping gear--even if you exclude the previous gen stuff you don't really use any longer can easily get into the thousands of dollars though people do scrape by with consignment and the like.
But, by the way, that's one of the issues. In the natural course of things, you can pick up relative bargains over time, If you're presented with "repopulate your house in the next few weeks" not so much.
In fact, I'm presented with the latter in the next month or so. Will have to rebuy a bunch of kitchen stuff in particular fairly quickly and I'll probably just place some big orders with Amazon, Sur La Table, and a handful of other companies without doing much in the way of careful shopping other than pulling from various lists.
Yeah, true replacement cost is often well above "retail" because of the time factor. And hiking is one of those sports where you end up with a lot of stuff duplicated in bigger/smaller and/or warmer/cooler.
I never went out to buy a hiking outfit/collection after a class or whatever at a store. Had I, I'm sure it would have been more expensive and ultimately sub-optimal relative to what I own.
I'm talking about things like jackets of various weights, packs of various sizes. I have both medium (for wearing alone) and large (for when I'm wearing layers) jackets. I have gloves in various warmth levels.
Treat it more generally--gear that you are in some fashion going to trust your life to. It doesn't even need to be something fancy--a couple of days ago I was out on a hike and realized a companion was wearing jeans. The terrain was slightly scrambly (nothing that required any skill) and in a canyon that should have had a stream at this time of year. Fall into that in jeans and hypothermia becomes a very real issue.
Figure $3k or so for a complete set of gear to get you up almost anything in the continental US. Of course you can buy more or less depending on your goals.
Personally I'd rather buy one from IKEA and use the change left over from $12k to buy.. a used truck to drive the sofa home in.. but apparently there's a market.
You can certainly go much higher for smaller companies producing actual custom stuff, using exotic materials, for a giant sectional instead of a single sofa, etc.
I think a Stickley dining set or side hutch is probably ~$12k not on sale, and a sofa could probably go anywhere from $6k to $20k, but YMMV. (I don't personally own anything like that.)
But even brands like Herman Miller or Ekornes can really add up. (And I don't think of them as being the highest-end of things. Even hiring a quality woodworker to make something for you can end up similarly priced depending on detailing, finish, wood species, etc.)
Just “made as if it’s not supposed to be replaced every five years” can bump the price of a sofa way higher than $500.
Doesn’t need to be $14k, but probably $4k bare minimum, without paying a premium for a brand name or anything like that, nor going with leather.
The cheaper ones almost always use low-density foam that compresses badly with use in a couple years (IKEA is a big exception here! But also most of their sofas are more than $500…), frames that start to get iffy in a few years, and upholstery that looks ratty after a similar amount of time.
Furniture is on my list of things where there used to be a range of "solid, and you can make some choices" that was accessible to a lot of people, that has turned into "you can get whatever you want as long as it's made of particle board and laminate and will have a very finite lifetime." Because the old "solid and you can make some choices" zone is mostly upper middle class plus now. (Naming of that site aside.)
I see many scenarios where the items would add up to less than this. I see more where it doesn't. e.g.: What you say makes sense for a single person who owns a PC, a TV, and Ikea + amazon furniture.
Now imagine a couple or family, who's been (criticize the capitalist/consumer culture or not) buying nice wood furniture, has a well-stocked kitchen, multiple computers, hobby equipment etc.
I encourage you to run a rough estimate of your own household's items. Do the same for your a neighbor's; a friend's.
My nice wood furniture has had three owners and is almost 70 years old, so I certainly think it’s possible to own nice things and not be a wasteful consumerist.
I built my living room coffee table by hand with my father, who is now dead. I built my shop table by hand (to match the one my father had). Even ignoring the 10s of thousand of dollars it would cost me to refurnish a house to match what I have now (and the staggering amount of time finding suitable replacements), there just a ton of things I could never replace.
And yet when you die, the contents of your house (for inheritance purposes) will most likely be valued at under $10K and nobody will raise an eyebrow at that.
I don't have nice furniture because my kids will value it for an inheritance. I have nice furniture because it is very pretty and extremely sturdy. It is okay to pay for nice things that you get value out of.
It's hard to say w/o knowing what, but even getting a couple reasonably priced and finished Amish pieces for something could easily add up to half that. But if you're talking something like a large and well made leather sofa-recliner-sectional type thing it's plausible that it could add up to that much for one piece depending on size, construction, and leather.
I’m sure they’re wonderful, and congratulations on the new acquisition! But you must know that’s a nonsensical statement. Above a certain level of sufficiency for purpose, it’s all a matter of taste. And like all matters of taste, the price can expand to absorb almost any budget
If you do furniture research seriously, you learn that the difference between Hancock and Moore or similar brands and like crate and barrel is enormous. Go search for Hancock and Moore furniture at your local estate sale and notice that no one will let it go for less than like 50% of its original cost even despite significant usage. This is because those in the know realize that it’s the top quality product.
It’s like boots - whites boots or Thurgood are objectively superior to almost everything else in terms of price to performance ratio. Most don’t buy them because they buy into Nikes bullshit propaganda. Product differentiation based on quality is the single most important aspect of price - even if companies do everything they can to obscure quality discovery.
When you care about the following (google these, they are the marks of quality in the furniture world), paying a pretty penny is worth it.
Kiln-Dried Hardwood, Corner-Blocked, Double-Doweled Joinery, Eight-Way Hand-Tied Sinuous Springs, real full-grain leather (Aniline or Semi-aniline Dyed)
And priorities. I spent a lot on a dining room table but recently decided I'd buy an all-wood with more assembly replacement bed rather a really expensive hand-crafted platform. Can probably just have my contractors assemble and I'll still come out way ahead.
I haven't purchased, but a furniture store near me had a leather "Chateau Chair" of their's marked down from like $6k to $3000-something so it's hard for me to imagine the $12k for 3 larger pieces, though maybe it's a question of leather or non or something.
Heck, even at the low end of not-garbage, a couch runs in the $1k range. Something from Bobs Furniture Outlet, for example.
Note, I love Bob's furniture. I have a couch from there I bought 10 years ago and it's absolutely the most comfortable couch I've ever had. My comment that they're low end is not, in any way, to insult the quality of what they have. Rather, they're not expensive (the same couch at a slightly more "name brand" place would have been twice the cost; for no increase in quality).
All sofas have labor and logistics. The more expensive ikea couches are as good as other big box couches, which is to say, they aren’t premium furniture.
