I’m more of an anti-hoarder. I hate having clutter or too much stuff so I chuck anything I don’t need/want.
I, like probably most people will, said middle of the road. I have hoarding tendencies, but I also have neat freak tendencies. Sometimes I do have to explain to myself that I don’t need to keep every cardboard box and accompanying bubble wrap in case I move. But it usually works. Although I do have a ton of my daughter’s outgrown clothes that I really, really will sell on eBay one of these years.
I have too much stuff. I acknowledge this. One of my resolutions this year is to get rid of half of my stuff. And then do it again.
I have a ton of clothes, books, movies and cds. Books can stay, cds transferred to computer and then donated, clothes donated, movies on the shelf with the books. My biggest problem is that I don’t have appropriate storage. My first few projects this year are going to be shelf building.
I have boxes in the basement that have been there since I moved in five years ago. It has always driven me crazy, but now it drives me crazy enough to do something about it.
Next week is bulk garbage collection. Should be good.
Middle of the road. I have some packrat tendencies, but I also like to keep my living space very neat.
@minionkat - I’m a huge fan of Unfuck Your Habitat. That blog can inspire me to clean my bathroom two weeks in a row.
This looks fantastic! Thanks for the tip. On quick first glance, I see I already tackle my dishes (my most loathed chore) with the 20/10 trick. I have always done it thus.
I will not be taking before pictures. :eek::o
Kind of a hoarder - but mostly because I’m such a lazy slug. It isn’t that I mind tossing stuff out, it is just I procrastinate for too long.
I used to be somewhat of a hoarder but somewhere in there I realized I wasn’t owning stuff, it was owning me.
However now that I live with a bunch of hoarders I’m slowing becoming anti-hoarder. There are days where I feel like I am suffocating in this house because of all the junk, and they keep bringing in more and more.
My mother’s bf is the worst. I once counted - he had 12 pairs of khaki pants hanging off a pipe in the basement - that is NOT including what he has hanging in the closet here, in the closet at his house and the closet at his vacation house.
He took over the (what used to be the guestroom closet) and I counted 50+ plus shirts in there and that is not counting what he has in the other closet, the closet at his house and his vacation house.
The man is almost 80, I told my mother he could wear a shirt one time, throw it out and he’ll be dead before he runs out of shirts.
My mother is 76, hasn’t worked in at least 10 years, yet she has kept every business suit she ever owned because she paid good money for them and they are too good to get rid of. She will never wear them again. Even if she has a reason to they don’t fit anyway.
She won’t throw out the 50+ year old encyclopedias because they cost a lot of money and are still good.
I can’t hang anything of mine in the coat closet because my mother has 8 coats and still bitches that she doesn’t have anything to wear. At one point her bf had 3 jackets exactly alike because he got them brand new at (different) yard sales for a good price - look at all the money he is saving.
Throw in my sister and bil and all their shit and they keep buying more and more too.
Every weekend my bil and my mother’s bf make their sacred pilgrimage to wal-mart with the side trips to yard sales and second hand stores and come home to show off their relics and brag about all the money they saved.
Then there’s all the duplicate food because the two above buy everything at wal-mart even though most of that shit tastes horrible, so we have two bottles of catsup, two jars of mayonnaise, two boxes of crackers, etc and it’s the name brand stuff I buy that gets used up.
Meanwhile, almost everything I own is in an 10x11 bedroom. It has to be because if I leave so much as my flip flops in the other room I get bitched at for cluttering up the house. Well not anymore since I pointed out the absurdity of the situation.
We’re not to the point of what you see on TV but it’s getting there.
Give me a dumpster (or 2 or 3) and a week alone and I’d have this place cleaned out in a hurry, and I doubt they’d even miss the junk.
The cabinets are stuffed, the closets are overloaded, you can barely walk through the basement or across the sun room, and they just keep on bringing in more stuff.
Anyway, sorry about the rant, carry on.
I try to keep stuff from accumulating too much. My father was a full-blown OCD shit hoarder, never threw anything away. Mom was a compulsive spendthrift, and profoundly lazy; she enabled Dad and contributed to his “eccentricities.”
By contrast, I ended up being an organizer; although I’m not compulsively clean or neat, I find clutter, disarry, disorganization deeply upsetting.
That’s the same with me. I just can’t function properly if things are all cluttered and messy. It has an emotional and physical affect on me.
When I was a kid I was friends with one of the neighbourhood girls and I went to her house and there were paths around the house from room to room. The fridge was so stuffed full of things that it wouldn’t close properly and there was rotting food dripping out of it. Then I went down to the basement and :eek:. The entire basement was full to the ceiling of stuff. It was overwhelming just being there, I couldn’t imagine living like that.
I think I’d rather live on the streets.
I tend to hoard but at least once a year thin everything out to a dedicated storage area which does not infringe on my living or workspace. It kills me to get rid of stuff I have scavenged but I do it anyway. I rarely miss it once it is gone.
I started as a hoarder as a kid because I got too emotional when it came to getting rid of any of my stuff, but I moved more towards being an anti-hoarder as an adult. It’s more of a laziness thing now like Khadaji said.
That blog looks fantastic.
At least when it comes to electronics you might say I am a hoarder, but then while I keep a lot of stuff, I also organize all of the parts I strip from stuff I pick up by the curb (recently no less than 4 CRT monitors, which I nearly totally stripped of parts, as in only a handful of parts remaining on the PCBs, I also saved one of the CRTs and case to make my own monitor with; I have 3 other such CRTs/cases awaiting use, plus maybe 20 cases from various electronics to use as enclosures and several small CRTs). Of course, I also have everything, and I mean everything, I have ever built (over 70), some of which are nearly 20 years old. Other than the basement though, the rest of the house is reasonably clean of clutter.
Anti-hoarder.
It puts me on edge knowing that I have more stuff than I need and I want it out of my life. So I give a lot of stuff away. Clutter and unecessary stuff disturbs me on a fairly deep level; I’ve never really figured out why.
Also I love that blog! Right up there with flylady.net.
No one could ever call me a hoarder. I don’t have a sentimental bone in my body, and I generally loath redundancies. I have never understood those people who have a million pairs of shoes or enormous movie collections.
But I’m a slob. When I get preoccuppied, I can let my house get into such a state that it looks like I’m a hoarder. I’ve never skirted outside of first degree squalor, but I’ve gotten pretty damn close. Cleaning and tidying do not come naturally to me.
I feel good now because I cleaned up my house last week, when I didn’t have to go to work. But it won’t take long for entrophy to regain control.
I am a borderline hoarder living with another one. Me, mostly because I save stuff thats not bad. She because everything is a memory storage device. I also have an antihoarding leanings in theory. This not surprisingly leaves me with a low but constant level mental stress. And the fairly common “can’t find shit in all this shit!” or “this craps in the way!” events send me almost over the edge.
I’m getting to the point where lighting storms and tornado warnings give me moments of hope.
Anti. My SO probably leans a little towards hoarding, so together we do Ok. I would rather throw things out, every time.
Hoarder. And so is my wife. Which is bad enough, since I can’t throw out her crap. But from time to time I can manage to get on a cleaning kick, but I can’t throw out our stuff either, and I can’t get her to participate very often. Fortunately we have a basement, so most of it is out of sight there.
I tell myself that when our kids have all left for college, we’ll have more time, and be abler to get rid of most of it.
In reality, our kids will probably have to throw it out when we die or move to a nursing home.
If there was a poll option for “I’m a gigantic hoarder”, I would’ve chosen it.
Ugghhh. And this is one of my pet peeves. The last thing friends and relatives want to do after you die is go through your stuff. At best, its just makes a tragic event worse. At worst it makes it much worse with the bonus risk things of value will just be tossed because there is too much crap to deal with.
I have made minor progress with SO on this front. Saving something for someone? Lets give it to them NOW so they actually get and can use it/enjoy it. It ain’t do us any good gathering dust in the back room.
I am definitely a hoarder. I’m always throwing stuff out, yet the stuff I’m keeping grows anyway.