Thats a good point and probably is a sign. If you are constantly throughing thing out yet the pile is growing something is going on beside some violation of the laws of physics.
i live in a 350 sq ft apartment with my SO.
there isn’t much space to put anything in here.
the other day i got rid of five garbage bags full of stuff. old clothes, documents, sorted through my electronics cables and doo-dads.
felt good to make some room in the closet.
Anti hoarder.
When my mom’s oldest sister died in the 90s we had to clean up her mini-hoard and since then my mom and I have been very anti-clutter. I’ve helped a lot of people move house since then too and they all had way too much stuff. I can’t bear the thought of being that way myself, so my place is extremely streamlined.
Clutter drives me bonkers. It physically makes me sick.
My mom is a hoarder–crap stacked so high on her counters and in the sink and on the stove, that you can’t even TELL there is a counter/sink/stove. Same way with every single room in her house. I swear she will trip over the crap clogging the stairway at the top of the steps and kill herself. My brother and I have tried several time to help her “sort stuff out”, but like many hoarders, she’s constantly finding “bargains” at garage sales, or crap at the dollar store, etc. When the Hallkids were younger and still visited her (they don’t anymore), I always told them that if she wanted to give them something, TAKE IT, even if they didn’t want it and it came home and went into the trash. Anything to get one more piece of crap out of her house.
What kills me is that she’s constantly “making a cake to take into the guys at work”. :eek: I’ve forbidden the kids to eat anything that comes from her kitchen. I’d bet that if the “guys at work” saw the state of her kitchen, they’d never eat anything again for the rest of their lives. It grosses me out to no end. Her fridge…OMG, it’s beyond gross. God only knows what is living in there, and what is dead and is decaying.
The windows in her house are never opened (nor are the shades or curtains) because she’s afraid someone might “see in”. (She lives in a rural area, and although people drive up and down her country road, it’s not like they’re slowing down to take a peak through her windows.) In the summer, she MIGHT open the back door for awhile to “get the breeze going through”, but the house is never aired out. I can’t even go over there because within a few minutes, I’m sneezing so badly that I can’t breathe and I can literally feel my throat closing up. It takes me days for my sinuses and lungs to clear completely–and that’s WITH allergy medication beforehand. To top it off, there is an accumulation of YEARS with of pet hair from the dog, guinea pigs, bird, etc.
My brother has told her that when she dies, he will just get a dumpster and back it up to the door and start loading it. I have no doubt that’s exactly what he will do. Anything of value is surely long gone (rotted, etc) by now.
I, on the other hand, am the complete opposite. One of the things I LOVE about living by myself is that my house is not only neat, but clean. (And yes, there is a difference.) I have cats, so I’m always paranoid about “cat smell”, which means the house is vacuumed a couple times per week (minimum) and the litter box is cleaned daily.
In the warmer weather, my doors and windows are almost always open. Up until a few years ago, I used to open the house a couple times during the winter, even when it was freezing out, to air out the house. Every single day, one of the first things I do (after making my bed) is open the curtains and pull up the blinds for every single window.
I regularly go through the items I own and decide if (1) it has a purpose and is used for that purpose and (2) if I really, really, REALLY like it. If not, it’s gone. I regularly haul a bag of stuff to the Salvation Army donation bin, or post it for sale or free on Craigslist. I’m a magazine junkie, but the magazines get read, then put in a particular place until I have enough (a stack or two–about every three months), to be advertised on Craigslist for free. (They’re usually gone within 24 hours.)
If I own multiples of something, it’s for a reason, not because I couldn’t find the first one, two or seven of the same item I bought. One example is scissors. I have multiple general use scissors in various rooms, but each serve a specific purpose–scissors in the kitchen have their place on the magnetic knife rack, sewing scissors have their place in the sewing kit in the laundry room. Scissors in the bathroom medicine cabinet for bang trimming, etc. However, owning multiples of something is rare.
Everything in my house has a place and it gets returned to that place once I’m finished using it. When the Hallkids were little, people used to ask me how I raised three kids by myself–truth was that I was VERY organized, as was my home. No way I could get three kids to school if everyone was sorting through clothes still in the dryer, or looking for a clean bowl for cereal, of couldn’t even find their backpack. Seriously, put it away!
While Unfuck Your Habit sounds like a decent idea and it may work for some, one thing I noticed looking through the pics is that when most people cleaned up clutter, the stuff they were left with didn’t have a designated place. Purses hanging on the closet door will soon drop off onto the floor again, and the room will soon be right back at the same spot it was before. Books stacked on top of each other will soon be piled back onto the floor, bags of clothes stuffed into the corner of a closet will soon have additional stuff piled back on top of them, etc. I read through the comments and what was ongoing was the comment “I found something I’d forgotten I had”–which in reality means “you have too much crap”.
My boss is a pig–her office is filled with half empty boxes of crap, there’s stuff piled on her desk, and there is always at least one half-empty can of soda sitting on her side desk. There are stacks of papers all over the place and every time she needs something, she comes to me to see if I have a copy because she can’t find hers. Having meetings in her office drive me nuts, I’m so distracted by the mess. :dubious: God, it’s stressing me out just thinking about my mother’s house and my boss’s office.
I only keep valuable stuff.
I’m middle of the road, but swerve into hoarding territory for a while every once in a while, mostly when it comes to the items previously owned by my dad or grandmother who have died.
Anti hoarder. I’ve moved often. I"m now in a studio apartment where space is at a premium. I do have a larger than average movie collection, but if something isn’t watched at least once a year, it gets donated unless it is part of a boxed set.
A combination of Hoarders on tv and UnfuckYourHabitat as mentioned above has made life much more bearable. I and my husband both have pack rat tendencies, and a small house. I’ve purged a bunch of crap by donating, beating, and pitching. Now I have to dig into Husband’s stuff and get him to at least tell me what he really wants to keep, and what I can make decisions on.
We’re moving this spring, so I really need to triage. I’m not moving all that crap again!
I’m a pack rat, whereas my husband and daughter tend to toss everything that’s not immediately useful.
I get my revenge, though, when they need an item for a project that HAS to be done ASAP, and it’s improbable that WalMart carries the item, even if they had time to go down to Wally World.
I don’t think of myself as a hoarder as such, I don’t really have enough stuff to constitute clutter, but I am definitely not good at throwing things away.
I would prefer to keep most things, even old useless junk I will never need again, but have it all neatly organised and sequestered safely away. Indeed, that is my “plan” for one day, but I am way too lazy to implement anything like that in the meantime.
I tend to hoard a few particular items, mostly clothing, purses and shoes. Paperwork and books tend to pile up after a while also.
I’m middle-of-the-road, DH has packrat tendencies (he is trying to be reasonable about it). I do have a lot of books and craft stuff, but with the exception of a storage room, the place is navigable and reasonably neat, with enough open space to ease DH’s claustrophobic tendencies. The storage room could be dealt with to the point of navigable and with setting up a 4-foot folding table possible in a few hours, I think. Mostly, it’s a motivation issue.
I do watch “Hoarders” and “Hoarding: Buried Alive” as preventive therapy and for motivation (watching either gives me cleaning urges). I do need a certain amount around me to feel comfortable. A place that’s too “streamlined” feels very cold and unwelcoming to me.
Do you get your revenge by giving them the item they need? Because that’s kind of the opposite of revenge…
I got lots of stuff, although I once had a house and it certainly didn’t look anywhere near as messy or filled up as my apartment does even though I have a lot less stuff now.
But even as I have piles in different places in my apartment, I know exactly what is in them, and each kind of item that comes in goes into specific piles. At least until I re-organize or deal with items and they go to other, more permanent storage locations.
phall0106, sahirrnee do you ever sneak boxes of stuff out of their houses, it’s really shocking to see that Horders program and watch them fingering their way through old newspapers, afraid there’s an important article they’ve forgotten to read.
I don’t like clutter, but I will build up old newspapers, handy sized empty containers etc, I’ll chuck 'em and keep a certain amount - plastic bottles to use for painting/storing stuff. My home is too small to tolerate clutter, and I’ve built it that way. I’ve just started paneling which means I’m losing lots of handy little shelves - I’m so glad to see them go, things were gathering.
I just had a look at that unfuck site - bloody hell, I can’t tell the difference between the before and after! Put the effing scissors away will ya?
Middle of the road – I’ve never been a hoarder, except for some computer files. I like to collect pictures. 
I do tend to be sentimental, though.
And every now and then I go on a “cleaning spree” and get rid of stuff I don’t need or want anymore. Some I’m basically just about right where I should be.
(Watching Hoarders REALLY inspires me to go on cleaning sprees! I practically feel like scrubbing the basement walls with a toothbrush after one episode!)
The Hoarders show kinda inspires me to de-clutter, but it also sorta makes me feel better about my infinitely less clutter than they have. I’m like, shit, so many people would kill to have a house this clean. So fuck that box of a huge tangle of cords that I could conceivably need for something someday even though like 15 of them are phone cords.
Trust me, when I cackle and go right to what they need, and then tell them about all the times they wanted to throw something away and I kept it…THAT is revenge. It is a great big “I told you so” in capital letters. In red. And they have to smile and agree with me, or else I don’t hand it over.
I was an anti hoarder clean freak…
I liked having nothing to do but have fun, drink beer play games, cause all the house work was always done automatically after work.
But now…
I have boxes full of stuff from storage piled up all over the house, now serve no purpose now, mostly out dated, or marginally useful…10 years ago.
To my defense there was no line in the sand when these items became obsolete.
The problem is that the stuff isn’t garbage and I have already made trips to goodwill to drop off the stuff I have duplicates of.
Also, I’ve no place to store the stuff I’ll probably never use again, I keep it because I don’t want to buy it all over.
I think last time I fished or used any camp gear was over ten years ago. 
What if there’s a zombie apocalypse? What if I need to bolt a Sherman Tank together out of spare parts and defeat the Aliens with Microsoft 95 floppies and AOL CD’s? :eek:
I hate to de-clutter and give stuff away just for the sake of tidyness in a small place. I’m not gonna live here forever.
I already miss my old toaster oven. So, It was old scratched and made of steel, but at least it worked. More than I can say about this POS I have now. :mad: