Hey, thank you.
I’m even keeping my inbox uncluttered.
My husband is rather obsessive about hanging onto papers, although at least he files them – but he never takes the old stuff out. So the technique we’ve come up with to avoid hanging onto many years of unnecessary stuff is by determining if it’s something that’s needed for tax purposes. If it is, it goes into a folder and come tax time I take it all and put the documents necessary for substantiation in a manila envelope with all the other tax documentation. If it’s not? Toss it. And after I’ve pulled the tax documents, anything left over gets tossed, too. Or shredded – a small home shredder is perfectly fine as long as it’s not vast amounts of stuff to be shredded.
But for those of you facing people who say they can’t just toss all this stuff because someone might steal their identity? There are many places you can get stuff shredded now. Our local UPS Store, for example, offers shredding as one of its many services. So you can haul all that stuff in and get rid of it safely.
Wow, thank you for coming over! Stay a bit and share if you want.
I believe I inherited a few hoarding behaviors from my dad since I tend to keep bank statements and bills far longer than necessary. Though they’re usually confined to boxes in the closet, they aren’t organized. I couldn’t find anything if I needed it anyway.
Partly inspired by this thread, I bought a paper shredder this weekend and spent a couple of hours shredding years worth of the stuff. My closet has a floor!
The fact that this thread is staying active is keeping me on the ball. I got those bags of stuff that I weeded out on New Years Day to Goodwill finally this morning. 
One of the smartest decisions I ever made, clutter-wise, was to stop getting my cancelled checks from the bank. I had never had call to need one in all the time I had them anyway, and on the rare occasion I did need one – applying for a mortgage – I just got copies from the bank.
The bill statements are another thing. I’ll keep the previous year or so of a credit card statement, but why do I hold on to past statements from my electric company and such? I’ve gotten to where I keep no more than 12 monthly statements of anything.
I used to keep all old bills and statements, too. When it got to like five years of old statements bulging my file folders, I finally realized I DON’T NEED THEM! You can get information for almost anything online. I bought a shredder for about $50 that does 8 sheets AND credit cards. I keep a basket on top of the shredder, and when it’s full I shred for about 15 minutes. Or when I’m in the mood - it’s kind of fun!
I’m not a hoarder, but I was married to a big-time clutterbug. I hope y’all don’t mind me coming in here and offering tips. I’m pulling for all of you.
Artist/clutterbug here! This thread inspired me to get a shredder for old papers. It eats paperclips, CDs and has automatic finger not-shredding features. Clutter is hard to handle when you are an arts and crafts type, because you can find a new use for about anything. I find a a glass of white wine and contractor’s size trash bag to be inspiring
I saw a good system that a guy had, that I’ll be using myself. Put all files into a folder/box marked with the year, then five years later, shred them.
I spent Sunday shredding any receipt older than 07. Thanks to this thread I got a lot of clutter organized. No one ever contacted me about the ceiling fans that have been sitting on my floor for three months, so in the dumpster they went! I HATED throwing away perfectly good gear, but I figured they were doing nothing for anyone where they were.
Overall, a good result.
I’ve just skimmed through some of the comments on this thread, and I must admit it’s doing a fine job of making me feel better about the amount of house-cleaning I do (or don’t do).
'im indoors is a packrat. He won’t admit it, but he is. The house isn’t large but we already have one big downstairs room that I want to turn into a dining room, but we can’t because it’s full of crap. He is obsessive about packaging - when he gets new stuff and it comes in a box, the box goes into the dining room. It’s full of boxes that he refuses to get rid of on the grounds he might need them for something else. Every so often, when he’s not around, I go in there and get a few of them out and take them to the cardboard recycler. We have a load of carpet in there from when the hall and staircase was recarpeted. It won’t go anywhere else, it’s not big enough to do any other room, but will he get rid of it?
Then there’s the door. We have a spare solid wood door upstairs, it stood on the landing for years. It doesn’t actually fit any of the doorframes in the house 'cos it’s too small. But we still have it. I offered to advertise it on our local freecycle site but he refused. So eventually I moved the door into the study where it now hides behind the broken multi-gym that he refuses to do anything about.
Oh, did I mention the magazines? Also on the landing was a floor-to-ceiling pile of magazines - mostly film/game/history mags. I moved them from the landing to the bedroom because they were always in the way. I told him that they were well out of date and should be trashed. He refused. In the end, I told him he had 12 months to do something with them, after that I would get rid of them. I can’t get rid of them all at once so every fortnight I fill our paper recycling box with them and the council will take them away.
I am so fed up with living surrounded by all this clutter, I find the place depressing. I don’t look forward to going home because all I see if the mess he’s made everywhere. He never puts things away, he never throws stuff out when it’s broken, he even keeps bags full of plastic bags. One day, he’s going to find a skip outside the front door and the entire contents of the dining room in it!
I just had a nightmare last night about going into a cluttered house and crap being everywhere.
No wonder I haven’t been in my hoarding pal’s house in over five years.
When I was a kid/teen, I thought that wanting a clean and tidy house was the default preference for parents, and that “My house, my rules” was merely a last resort when a parent was tired of reasoning and just wanted the damn laundry folded already. My mom never said MHMR that I recall, but she did often say “When you have your own house, you can keep it any way you want.”
Well, I am. But my mom no longer has the excuses she gave when I was living with my parents (work, school, menopause), and now their house is so bad, they won’t let anyone in. I don’t know what makes it so bad now that they’re ashamed of it, but I know that when I was allowed in, it was pretty close to Kim-and-Aggie fodder. The only thing missing was rotting food. No animal droppings, because they don’t have animals. But pretty darn bad. So I shudder to think. I’m going to visit them soon, and I’m going to just float the idea of a medical crisis and EMTs having to force their way into the house. Just an idea; no pressure.
Point being, it was her house, and it was her rules, if you use the term loosely. She must have had her own reasons for leaving a cake pan on the counter for a week to get crusty, or completely covering the carpet in the spare room with papers and photos and calling it a “system.” (Seriously, it was not a matter of this stack was here and that stack was there, and it made sense the way a photographer’s studio makes sense. It was a matter of her dumping out boxes and walking away.) And those reasons were not to be questioned, any more than a tidy parent’s reasons for not allowing beverages in the room with the white carpet are to be questioned.
I’ve said this before, but I think she simply gets uncomfortable around neatness and order. I did gain some ground when I said, “Isn’t this my home, even if I don’t own the place?” But the funny thing is, she also bitched when I did not do a certain percentage of housekeeping – a percentage determined by her, of course. But I’ve told enough anecdotes for now.
I come from a long line of hoarders. Luckily, it’s always a clutter issue, not cleanliness. Well, almost anyway. My room at home was pretty yuck. And there were goat paths in that first college apartment. I’m currently around a 1.5 on the scale, but I had it down to a 1 there for awhile. I have that paralyzed-by-the-need-for-perfection issue. I’m trying to make a list though; that usually helps lend an aura of perfection to the whole project, especially since it will necessarily be outline style with points and subpoints.
Wow, fascinating thread! Thanks, BMalion, for telling me about it.
I’d read about the Collyer Brothers (wouldn’t that make a great movie someday?) a few years back, but am coming to realize that the little old lady from whom we bought our house was probably mentally ill just like them. She had huge stacks of things everywhere, with little goat paths in between them, and hadn’t done any upkeep on the house in decades. In another few years she’d probably have had two dozen cats pooping all over the place. Although our purchase agreement required her to have the house completely emptied of her stuff before moving out, I think she just got overwhelmed in the end, and there was still a helluva lot left behind. We even found a neatly-labeled, nine-year-old jar of stew in the fridge, for crissakes. Ugh! We had to spend about $1K to have a work crew come in and take everything out, incl. wigs, old newspapers, boxes of dirty clothing, etc. Didn’t have the heart to pass the bill along to her.
My mom has definite tendencies towards clutter, not to say squalor. Someday, I now realize with bleak certainty, my sisters and I are going to have to do something about it.
“When you have your own house, you can keep it any way you want.” Oh yes, I think my mothers was “when you have your own place you can do what you want” or something of that nature.
I did not grow up with hoarding but that was only because of my father. The only reason our house was even as clean as it was because of him. He did not clean anything. I can’t remember my father ever lifting a finger to help other than to “supervise”. It was his complaining and the constant reminder of how clean his mothers house was. Cleaning was my mothers job but since she had a career she did not have time so instead she moved the duty on to us.
There is no doubt in my mind if my mother had not married my dad we would have lived in squalor and we would have been blamed for it. It would have been our lack of help for the reason it was the way it was. Hell we got that as it was. When my dad bitched to my mom, my mom bitched to us to help out more. When my mom was away on business it was my dad complaining to us about our moms lack of cleaning and had us clean the entire house while he supervised and preached that this is how a house should be kept. We were great pawns.
I can’t tell you the times when a massive clean up was in order for holidays or some party. It took weeks because things had to get sorted through. She would spend an entire weekend at the table “sorting”. This usually ended with stacks and stacks of stuff that just got moved to some other unseen location in the house to be continued later. The only reason they were even touched later was my dad threating to throw it out. My mother would again “sort” and it would move somewhere else.
Her hoarding and lack of cleaning came later. After my parents divorced there was no one bitching to keep the house clean, there were no children to do it for her.
She still has the “my house, my rules” and this should not be questioned. If she wants to leave that open half empty peanut butter jar on the stove for months then damn it she has every right to.
With no one to threaten to place items in the trash nothing gets thrown out. “Regular garbage” for the most part does but her idea of garbage and my idea is a vast difference.
I can’t threaten her, I have no right to. It is her home and she will do what she wants.
Here in Cleveland, we just had a couple arrested for:
This staggers me. I accept that someone may choose to live this way themselves, I can even see a couple together choosing this, but children? Infants? Man, I hope they get lots of court ordered counseling and jail-time.
Sometimes I want to scream at these kind of people “THIS IS NOT NORMAL!”
I live in the Cleveland area and I seen that story on TV.
I don’t think most people that live in squalor or that are hoarders choose to live that way.
It is depression that over comes them that creates the feeling of being overwhelmed to the point that there is no way, in their minds, to fix the problem. It is not only such a large task but the way they feel it needs to be tackled makes it an impossbile task.
To me: Throw it in a garbage bag and throw it all on the curb.
To them: It needs sorted and organized to determine what can be thrown away which does not end up being much.
I have a feeling the mother was always like this on her own. The problem is that once she had kids the already impossible task was compounded times two.
I am glad the children are now safe. I do hope they face some type of charges and get some counseling.
It is hard in that case with out knowing more facts if this person was just a basic lazy slob with alcohol/drug problems with no regard at all for her children or herself.
Or is this a person that does have depression and OCD and is living like this without realizing that is not normal and feels helpless to change the situation.
I was catching up on old podcasts of This American Life and listened to the episode “Home Alone”… Act 1 is described thusly:
It caught my attention not just because it was so pitiable and sad, but also because when the investigator entered Mary Ann’s home, she was a hoarder/clutterer. The reporter was horrified, but the investigator actually chuckled and was like, “Oh, no, we can still walk around in here, this is minor.”
http://www.thisamericanlife.com/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=346
A nitpick - you need to keep tax returns/receipts for seven years. Technically, you’re supposed to apply to the government for permission to destroy obsolete tax info, but no one ever does.
I took my old stuff to the Salvation Army yesterday. They sure don’t make it easy to recycle clutter here - one depot in a city of over a million people (there’s one other charity that has a depot, too - I can’t remember the name of it). And you pack it and bring it in yourself - there are no charities that need your stuff badly enough to come pick it up from you.
I think next Christmas I’m going to tell everyone who might buy us a gift that we are no longer participating in the consumption frenzy - if you really think you need to get us a gift, make it something consumable. Or better yet, make a donation in our names to a charity. We have every single thing we need here - any more stuff is just stuff.
That’s why my stuff goes to the curb. Most days an enterprising scrapper picks it up.