Question: Assuming that the person is not hoarding animals, which is a related but different problem, is there a point at which the house or property would become a health hazard/issue within the city or county?
I have a sister-in-law who shows a lot of characteristics of hoarding/squalor, though not as advanced as most cases I’ve seen on those websites. I think depression feeds her tendencies, but I also know she goes off her antidepressants because (she’s said this) she likes drinking alcohol and the pills and drinks don’t mix. From other conversations, she’s said the meds do work and make her feel good.
She lived upstairs from us for a few years. Her apartment wasn’t that crowded but any storage areas of the house (porches, basement, garage) filled up. She even took over our half of the garage, promising the next garage sale - which oddly never moved much of anything or had many attendees, in an area excellent for garage sales - would clear it all out. She cleaned out her stuff when the landlord flipped at finding it still there, ~5 months after her eviction and only a couple weeks before the new tenant was to move in.
She buys a lot of stuff from resale shops, eBay, wherever - if it was a “good deal” then she acts like it’s ok to buy. She stuffed our basement full of cloth, packing materials, and boxes for the “home business” she was going to do, and left it to molder after she got evicted. The back porch was stuffed full of clothing her daughter wore over 10 years ago, toys from that long ago, etc., that all went bad due to being exposed to the elements, bugs, and so on. That kind of stuff was in the basement too. I cleaned out the back porch and was going to ask for a dumpster for the basement, but she claims now that - nearly 2 years after her eviction - she finally has a couple days off in a row for the first time and wants to clean out her stuff. She says she’ll be in tomorrow or the day after. If she’s not, I’m talking to the landlord about a dumpster.
When she still lived here, she wanted our old artificial Christmas tree because a friend of hers needed it. I think it’s still in the basement. Wanted our old futon mattress for her futon. And the next one we replaced, and the futon too - yeah, they’re down there.
She had bought a dorm-sized fridge (not the cube but the size bigger) because she claimed the landlord was slacking on replacing her broken fridge. Turns out that probably one reason, which we didn’t know at the time, was she was in the midst of her 5-month period of nonpayment of rent, but at the time I suspected it was because she was letting her toy-sized dog pee on her kitchen linoleum, with 2-3 sheets of newspaper put down, while she was away at work. She had tsk-tsk’d about her mother-in-law (the dog’s previous owner) training the dog to go in the shower stall rather than taking the dog outside - well at least the dog didn’t ruin the linoleum tiles that way!
Her daughter’s gone off to college now; I suspect if she comes home on break she’s going to discover that “her” room is now storage.
Look up “Diogenes syndrome”. It’s not just american.
One of my mother’s grandmothers kept a trunk under her bed that she didn’t let anybody touch; she wasn’t able to hoard anywhere else because she simply didn’t “own” any more space (she lived with her daughter and the house was clearly the daughter’s territory). When great-grandma died, they found that the trunk was full of a sweet called peladillas, almonds covered by a hard crust of sugar. She’d been saving every peladilla she got for years.
Hooolleeee crap, Nava. I went from that article to the one on the Collyer Brothers, and that’s an amazing read. That’s some seriously sad/bizarre stuff there.
Yowza! That was an amazing article.
Welcome to my mother’s life. Just about everything written in this thread could be used to describe my mother’s house and garage.
She’s been through a few bouts of health-related issues, however, her house was horrible before her health took a nose dive. She was in a car accident over Thanksgiving, so I went there (about 60 minutes from my home) to “help her out”. The house was in even worse shape than it normally is. I offered to vaccuum, which was really just a path from the front door to the living room recliner. She’s stockpiled so much stuff, it’s impossible to safely move from room to room. She constantly buys toys and books for my two nephews, only the stuff is so stacked everywhere they can’t play with any of the toys and read the same books over and over because they can’t get to any of the other books.
She’s a compulsive shopper who has now gained the habit of buying from QVC. While there, she showed me something she’d bought from QVC. “Would you like to have one?” she asked me. “I bought four of them.” FOUR?!?!?! This is from a woman who is so financially strapped that her cancer recovery support group is giving her food baskets because she “doesn’t have enough money to buy food”. I made a decision to take anything she offered (books, old canned goods, etc.) because although I didn’t want it, at least it wasn’t in her house anymore.
She apologized that she didn’t make Christmas candy this year (because of her car accident over Thanksgiving) and all I could think was, “Thank God”. Her kitchen is a complete pit–she probably couldn’t even find the kitchen table if her life depended on it. The kitchen counters aren’t much better–piled with food, dishes, medication, you name it–and the kitchen cabinets are stuffed to the brim with all kinds of things.
All the windows have shades and curtains covering them (never opened), and in order to open the windows (which isn’t an option for her), you’d have to dig all the stuff away from the windows. She has a three bedroom house and two of the bedrooms aren’t usable because all the stuff is piled in the rooms that the doors can barely be opened.
I get so upset when I go there. There’s nothing I can do, even if she would allow it (which she won’t). I rarely go to her house, and no one is ever invited in. Ever.
I disagree.
This is the mistake that many hoarding-type people make. They think of a reason that some moldy old item can be “useful” and that is enought to paralyze them into inaction.
If everything is clean and organized and you come across an old blanket, by all means take 30 minutes from your schedule and donate it to an animal shelter.
But if you’re cleaning up a stage 2 or 3 mess, the last thing you should be worrying about is what “useful purpose can I find for this smelly old thing?”.
I spent a 2 week vacation cleaning her house, rescuing the living room, kitchen, bedroom and hallway. The week she got home from Florida (where I’d sent her to chill out while I did the heavy stuff). I found that she had gone through the dumpster I rented but that hadn’t been picked up yet.
6 months later you couldn’t tell I’d ever been there.
I say this as the child of a stage 3 parent. As a toddler the house was spotlessly clean. By the time I was in high school, stage 3. I moved out and in college I didn’t even know how to fold a pair of socks. As I got older I lived in apartments. My sinks were always full of dishes and My shower was not pretty.
47 years old. I used to be a messy guy. Somewhere I decided that I very much enjoyed a nice, big, airy living space. Never close the shades or curtains. Sweep and mop regularly and spend 5-10 minutes a night tops putting stuff away. 1 or 2 albums play on Saturday morning while I sweep, mop & dust. I just bought a house and one of my promises to myself is that the basement is for the furnace, washer/dryer, screens and tools, nothing else. If I “have” to store something in the basement, then I’m giving it away or throwing it out.
This weekend I had a discussion about my plans to throw out some books “OH no!” was the horrified reaction, “Donate them to the library or a used book store.”. However, the way I see it is, the books are gifts from mom, bought at a library sale. So already we’ve established that the library doesn’t want them. I already own about 1500 books. All I’ve read and enjoyed and want to keep. what am I going to do with the 10 volume set of Carl Sandberg’s Abraham Lincoln, The War Years ? I read the first volume, it did not appeal to me. The local library doesn’t want it, they sold it to my mom. The Library of Congress already has it. As for the used book stores, rarely is there anything that I’d get money or credit for, and that would be the only reason I’d want to give up a Saturday morning for. It’s really not my calling to be the preserver of all knowledge. Besides, what good is a book going to do society if it’s sitting on my shelf? When I die that’s someone else who has to worry about it. To heck with it. Into the trash.
Without this awareness, perhaps I’d be like my mom. Thousands and thousands of books piled around the house. Bookshelves in front of bookshelves. Dust and droppings and bugs all over the place. And not even 1 in 30 of the books actually read and enjoyed. Certainly you wouldn’t want to borrow one, the urine smell means that you’d be soaking it in Pine-Sol before you’d be able to open it.
This mindset took years to grow. It works for me. I am proud of my house and if someone ever pops over there’s a place to sit and I am not embarassed.
I wish I could help my mom with this, but she does not want to change. Weird too, as she’s bright and funny and smart as a whip. She does not seem depressed at all. Just seemed to have stopped caring about her house.
I was addressing people in this thread who are doing cleaning in their own homes inspired by this thread, not people who have major squalor issues.
My mother is the same way. She is very smart, has many skills, makes friends easy and has a great sense of humor. I love her sarcasim and I am lucky to have inherited it.
I think the thing that hurts me more than seeing the way she lives is the fact that I can’t enjoy the benefits of her wonderful personality. If I get to close to her she tries to suck me in with her controlling ways. Before I know it she is trying to run my life, telling me what I should and should not do. Telling me what my kids should and should not do. A five minute phone conversation about how she needs milk and bread turns into an hour long “if I was you this is what I would do” rag fest because I happen to mention a small problem. If not that then I get an hour long “my life is worse than yours” pity party fest.
I love my mom and I wish I could enjoy her company.
After reading this thread yesterday (and posting), I went home (half day of work–off at noon!) and Hallboy and I cleaned out the basement and I went through the pantry. We hauled off ten (TEN!) garbage bags of clothing the Hallgirls had left when they moved out, plus odds and ends in the basement, plus three garbage bags of trash went out to the alley.
…Today I’ll tackle the attic.
My mom called last night. “What did you do today?” she asked. Omitting this thread, I told her what Hallboy and I had done that afternoon. “I hated going down in the basement to do laundry and seeing all that stuff sitting there,” I admitted. “My intention was to take it to the consignment store, but the women there are always hateful and I could only take 10 items at a time, so I finally admitted I wasn’t going to take it to the consignment store. So, I bagged it up and hauled it off to the Salvation Army. It’s a relief not to have to look at it anymore.”
There was dead silence on the line, until she began with her excuses why she couldn’t get rid of the piles of crap at her house. I just let her talk… :rolleyes:
I’m tackling our linen closet today.
BMalion, please please please don’t throw out books. If you don’t want to donate them to the library, leave them in a doctor’s office or at a cafe. Give them to a homeless shelter. Set them free, in other words. I’ve read where some people mention bookcrossings, but from what I read that cost nearly $100 to join, much more than I want to spend to get rid of a few books.
Books should never be thrown out unless they are falling apart. If they are in good condition, please consider passing them along anonymously.
Eh, some books can/should be thrown out, for various reasons. Awful writing, horrible “moral of the story”, outdated scientific/medical information, etc. Some magazines may hold as much or more value than many books yet most non-clutterers think nothing of tossing those, perhaps after clipping a particular article or recipe. If you’re in a situation where you need to get rid of book clutter, don’t feel bad about sending some into the trash if you’ll save your sanity in the process.
Books are my vice. After running into too many situations where charities and such couldn’t/wouldn’t take books for various reasons, I have maybe a half-dozen boxes full of “I should really do something with those” books and could probably start on another. This year they will go, one way or another.
Not all books are worthy of preservation forever. Some books really are just plain junk. My library Friends group always accepts donations, and have a booksale every week–the proceeds go to buy new books for the collection. But they throw away some of the books they get. Old textbooks are the worst, but there are other categories too.
I’m a bookcrosser and have never heard of it costing money to join. Must be some sort of bookcrossing copy-cat out to make a buck. 
All you’d need to do for my group (the original) is put up a list of what you’ve got, and they’d be gone pretty quickly.
Books “set free” where they shouldn’t be are just litter.
I have a ton of books that people really don’t want. It’s not that I couldn’t find someone for each, but I don’t want to track down thousands of individual someones so that each book can go to its forever home. They really are just paper.
I heard back from my Mom today: my “intervention” didn’t work. She’s still completely in denial about her situation, though she admits to being depressed. I will ask her to get counseling for the depression, but I think I’m done trying to talk to her about the house. I am so, so sad right now. What a crappy way to start 2008.
Here’s an idea for those books. I personally struggle with mild hoarding behaviors, and definitely suffer angst when throwing things away. So, anything I don’t want goes in a pile for Freecycle (search Google for your local group, they’re everywhere). Then, I post them in a bunch. If it’s not claimed in a couple of days – for free, by people who are constantly scrounging for free stuff – it’s probably useless.
I literally had people begging me to be picked to get a TV/VCR combo (VCR broken, no remote) and ugly, bright green shelves that looked like they had been put together by monkeys (a college purchase at a garage sale). Both of these items were claimed within minutes of posting and picked up within hours.
This helps me avoid the giant pile of “Oh, someday I’ll have a yard sale”, plus, a lot of the people on Freecycle really need stuff like books and baby clothes.
When we moved up here, my daughter left 14 boxes of books behind in my house that she didn’t want any more. A local freecycler came and picked up them all; his family is composed of voracious readers, and when they’re done, they re-freecycle what they don’t want. Best of all? With freecycle, they come pick up the stuff from you; all you have to do is agree on a pickup time!
Not having time to worry about freecycling books the last couple of days, I took seven full boxes to our local Goodwill. They take all books except textbooks. They also have an annual book sale; when I was riding the subway, I’d go to the book sale and buy myself 2-3 grocery bags full of books, read them on the subway, and then return them to Goodwill to be resold the next year.
Just because they’re crappy books doesn’t mean they have to get tossed; if they’re in good shape, you’d be surprised at how many places you can find to pass them on with a minimum of effort.
I agree, however, that for serious hoarders, taking time to worry about donating stuff here and there is just too big an issue. I’ve been fortunate in that my worst hoarding behavior has been (a) books and (b) yarn. My yarn I’ve actually got completely indexed in a spreadsheet, and I’m a constant knitter, so it gets used up – or freecycled if I decide I don’t want to use it after all. I used to move around endless boxes of books, but finally decided that it’s just not worth it; now I keep my favorite authors, primarily those whose works are now out of print.
I know you’re feeling bad for your mom, but the motto you and everyone else dealing with a hoarding family member need to cross stitch on a sampler and hang in your kitchen is, “This isn’t my burden to carry.” These are all adults we’re talking about here; they are making their own decisions, and living their own lives. Their lives may not be what we would choose for them, but there isn’t a damned thing we can do about that.
I got the linen closet cleaned out! A whole bunch of sheets, towels, and washcloths were tossed.
Now, I can get some new towels…the ones I pitched were rather ratty, and we need new ones anyway. Now I actually have room to put them away!