I’m a hoarder. Good thing my wife is the opposite.
Me: Do you want to keep this shopping bag?
Wife: No.
Me: But it’s from that hotel we stayed in while on holiday!
I gotta ask those anti hoarders: how do you get rid of working stuff you don’t use? Do you mind throwing working stuff away?
Easy enough for me to part with something that I’ve upgraded from (I don’t feel an urge to keep the old one as a backup spare for the most part), and if something’s still usable but I just don’t use it enough or have enough of an attachment to justify space usage, donating to a charity so someone else can use it works for me.
I tend to be middle of the road. I will keep a few various things way past their usefulness, but eventually I will get into a mood where I just want to throw things away, and then they will be gone and I feel good, and then I don’t miss it 
I’m the slovenly kind of hoarder and my wife is the “but we might use this some day!” kind of hoarder. So at least she can keep me clean while I can offer a second opinion on whether it’s worth keeping a 5 year old jar of olives.
I’m a middle of the road, but I think I’m starting to become very anti-hoarder. My mother was pretty bad, and when she died I spent a few weeks cleaning her house out and it sucked. After that I started to throw things out.
Yesterday I cleaned my attic, it wasn’t bad, but I started getting rid of baby clothes, a friend is going to have a baby in a few months so they got it all. The only thing left up there is decorations and some of my old toys that I’d like to sell.
My bedroom is pretty clean, not much in there besides a few books and clothing. The kitchen is almost always clean. The living room is good except when the kids are over. My desk is another thing, it is a mess, lots of papers, photos and such.
The basement is another matter, that’s where all my stuff has been put while I figure out what to do with it. It looks worse then it really is because there’s some furniture down there and a kayak.
Over the past 2 years I’ve gotten rid of 4-500 books, a few hundred CDs and a bunch of movies. I get rid of clothes all the time and when I finish my closets in my house I’m sure I’ll get rid of more.
I’m not sure what I’ll do with all my extra room, I’ll have a whole basement that will be empty. I’ll have to find something to hoard just to use the space! :eek:
I’d like to but I’d get caught.
I did clean out the two junk drawers a while back and I threw out a lot of crap. My mother’s bf also likes to save the twist ties to bread bags I threw out hand fulls of them along with all the pens that didn’t write anymore, dry rotted rubber bands and other junk. I found out we have 8 pairs of scissors, 3 staplers, several boxes of paper clips, enough extension cords to circle the earth (ok not really but almost) and all kinds of stuff that nobody even knew what they were.
I’d love to get into the clothes closets.
What’s funny around here is everybody points their fingers at everyone else for keeping junk,my mother’s bf is the worst about it but he has the most junk of any of us.
Anti-hoarder.
My husband has hoarding tendencies, but he’s also a neat freak. So (IMHO) we have way more stuff than we need, but it’s put neatly away.
Yesterday we were putting Christmas decorations back up in the attic, and he found a box of decorative cookie tins he didn’t know we had…he carefully stacked it with the rest. I was mentally saying to him, “Honey, can you imagine any possible scenario in which we would ever, ever want those?” but since we have had this conversation before, I know he would reply, “But they’re perfectly good!”
When he dies, all this “perfectly good” shit is outta here.
You reminded me of a friend of mine who is genuinely puzzled as to how I get rid of things. He would like to declutter, but does not know physically what to do with things. I had to explain - if it is still working, someone wants it. It may be sellable on eBay or Craigslist. Or you donate it IF it is really still working.
Then I found myself explaining that you just show up, with your bag of stuff or truckload of stuff, and ask where they receive donations, and that’s that. (I realize this works differently if you live in a big city like NYC or someplace rural fifty miles from anywhere. If you live a basic American suburban life, this is how it works.)
That would be for general stuff. Old linens and towels get donated to the SPCA. Hazardous materials (paint thinner, old epoxy, everything in Grandpa’s garage) to to a facility that specializes in that stuff - here, I pay for the privilege, and gladly. Computer/tech stuff I send to Greendisk. I pay for that, too. Some communities have special events to take these things.
Emotional/psychological attachments to the object aside, is my friend the only one who doesn’t actually know how to get rid of things? (I am willing to grant he may be a little strange.)
Not in the least. It’s more enjoyable to chuck it in the trash than have to look at it sitting somewhere, taking up space. I have pictures and the odd, tiny memento from trips.
A shopping bag is a good receptacle for more trash!
I went for middle of the road but it’s for exactly this reason. I go in cycles, stuff accumulates until it bugs me and then I get rid of as much as possible so I can have a longer time until it bugs me again.
If I had my way around my house a ton more things would go right in the trash. I hate the clutter and the mess. Right now our sunroom is an ungodly mess but that’s mostly because I’m storing my dad’s stuff too. Once my dad’s stuff is out of there (this spring, I hope) I will clean out the entire sunroom. Once I had it so I could sit in the middle of it and read books. Sigh. But at least I was able to get the christmas tree/ornaments in and out.
Other than that my other big issue is his clothes. I’ve never seen a man with so many clothes; he has about 3x as many clothes (and shoes!) as me.
By natural tendency, a hoarder. By being someone who’s moved many times and who’s seen too many wardrobes or storage rooms you opened at your own risk, an anti-hoarder.
Mom finally got rid of some of Dad’s high school books ten years after his death. I have one set of my college classnotes and it’s because I’ve actually used them post-college (stats).
Spain is a hand-me-down culture: there aren’t as many charity shops and in the UK or the US, but it’s very common to just ask around “who’d like this?”. For example, I recently saw that I had two “handheld” vaccuum cleaners. I asked Middlebro whether he’d find one useful, he said yes. Yay! Handheld vaccuum cleaner to good home! He’s getting the more potent and bigger one, I’m getting space in my tools closet.
I keep most things, but I do throw things away from time to time.
I have both tendencies myself, but I’m not too interesting of a case. More intriguing is the dichotomy between my grandmother and my mother. Grandma is a mild hoarder–her living space is impeccable, but it’s been shrinking. Her basement is pretty stacked (relatively neatly, but with things that no one I know would retain) and one of her bedrooms has been colonized by papers that she"will go through one of these days". My mom is the opposite. She saves nothing. I visited one weekend and left a new pair of contacts by mistake. When I got home, I asked if she could mail them to me. Too late–she’d thrown them away.
The biggest thing is to not bring stuff into the house. I don’t do much shopping or browsing. I don’t go to thrift stores or garage sales. I don’t take other people’s junk. Unless I have a definite need/plan for stuff, of course. I don’t have extra stuff to begin with.
Working/useful stuff gets sent to a family member that could use it. If no one can use it and I think I can get some money from it, I sell it online. Otherwise it goes to the Goodwill store, or a charity that comes to the house to pick stuff up (2 or 3 such charities call me regularly).
Broken stuff either goes in the trash or to a recycling center (electronics go to Best Buy).
I don’t like just throwing stuff away. For the most part, stuff doesn’t get thrown away.
This.
Don’t bring a lot of junk in and you won’t have a lot to get rid of.
I wish my mother could get that part down. My aunt got a humidifier so she had to have one. She used it for a few weeks and it gets added to the pile. Her bf’s daughter had some kind of portable oven thingie so she had to get one and it took up so much counter space that it never got used. Her bf found a nice new coffee maker at a good price at a yard sale, now we have two coffee makers on the counter and only one gets used. He had to have a treadmill, found a nice one for a good price. Good luck trying to use it, first you have to remove al the clothes hanging on it and pick up all the paper plates, boxes of cookies, crackers, napkins, whatever off of it.
I don’t know what happened to my mother. She used to hate junk around the house and we never had knick knacks around. After my father died it seemed like she had to fill up all available space. It got worse with her first bf (now deceased) who was a hoarder and even worse with this one.
I pet sit for some hoarders too. The kind of houses you do see on TV, with paths from one room to another. I always feel sorry for the animals. I used to try to straighten things up a bit, not anymore.
I have hoarder tendencies, but I’m also a clean freak and hate clutter. Lucky me.
But I am mostly a digital hoarder. No, I don’t hoard fingers, I hoard computer files; music, photos, old software, etc. That is nice and neat and takes very little room.
Although I voted “hoarder” I feel like it’s at a low and controllable level. I save things from childhood tenaciously, even if they aren’t useful and don’t bring me any real joy. Until recently I felt very anxious about ever throwing away a photograph, regardless of how awful it was. I also kept gifts I’d never use because of my connection to the giver. I’m working through some of those issues now.
Also, for many years I lived under the delusion that one day I’d move out of my shitty apartment to a nice home with lots of storage and more rooms so I saved things for that life. It turns out that ain’t happening so I’m getting rid of things that were for “someday.”
I am an anti-hoarder and experience anxiety with clutter and hoarding. It is my tendancy to take care of shit, and not let shit pile up, and get rid of shit I don’t need or want. My whole family is like this, I never thought of it as neat-freak, just on top of things.
Lucky me, my spouse is a borderline hoarder, and a drop-it-wherever-I-happen-to-be-I’ll-take-care-of-it-later-but-later-never-comes type. They do not believe me when I try to explain that this has a physical and emotional impact on me.