You can say that again. I was a serious slob up until I started grad school. The day after I was accepted to the school, my roommate told me I had to leave because of my mess. So it didn’t inconvienance me but it did make an impression. I cringe now when I think of the state my undergrad dorm room was in. The garbage can under the sink was often obscured under a pile of food containers. Dirty clothing was strewn about and I definately did not wash my sheets enough. If I was to go back in time to start over, I would absolutely be a cleaner kid.
Let me clue you in to the mindset here, B.
EVERY LAST LITTLE SCRAP OF PAPER IS POTENTIALLY OF THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE IMPORTANCE.
My first instinct when confronted with a Big Box o’ Paper is that categorizing it is nearly pointless, because if you have 10,000 pieces of paper you really need 10,000 folders to organize them.
Absurd? Plainly. But anything else is something I can’t get my head around - at least not until I’ve torn myself a new cakehole trying and failing to think up a system.
Honestly, when you have this problem, no system is good enough - all have huge drawbacks - any of which could make you give up on it for good and put you right back into that funk of depression and denial.
Is everybody getting an idea what it’s like now?
Any insights into how tidying up one shoebox of scraps could create enough stress for a whole day? Because it can. Believe you me. It can.
I’ll be looking for you!
Somebody really should organize another HouDopeFest.
Every time I bring it up, people say, “Oh, let’s just wait for Clothahump’s movie premiere.” Unfortunately, the film is in post-production hell. 
Is there a site that actually lists these numbered stages? I would like to see it.
Lost in the earlier pages of the thread, but yes: Loading...
It took a lot of courage to post that, Angel, and I’m glad you did. Clearly you’re not alone in having lived with the struggle during your marriage. Good on ya for facing it and moving on with your life.
This is absolutely true from my experience.
I’ve assisted with cleanups for situations like this as I mentioned up thread. The first few times, I would show up with gloves and trash bags expecting to bag up and throw away massive amounts of paper trash. Everything except the most obvious food wrappers had to be inspected before it was tossed away. An old cardboard soda case might have a phone number or address written on it. My suggestion to put them into some kind of electronic format and then throw away the trash fell on deaf ears.
After an hour or so, I wouldn’t be doing much more than holding a trash bag open for someone inspecting the items. An entire Saturday’s work with 4 adults might only manage to clear a portion of a room under such circumstances. I’d usually leave with an odd mixture of frustration and sympathy.
I honestly can relate. I used to save every scrap, never organized and yet was always losing money and paying penalties because I could never find a recipet or a cancelled check, hell, I couldn’t balance my checkbook to save my life.
I know it would feel as if I’d said, “walk to the edge of a cliff, and jump off, trust me” But here’s what worked for me:
One day, I was fed up with being an unorganized slob so I took my enormous table of paper, reciepts and scraps that had piled up and shoved them all into a trash bag and threw it into the dumpster.
Did I lose a recipet or two? You bet. However, it was as if a giant reset button went off in my life.
Bill came in, paid it and tossed the bill. Why hold onto a phone bill after mailing the check? If the phone is still on, what reason to have a bill from last August?
Did I lose a copy of my lease? Yes. A phonecall to my landlord got me another copy that I filed in a folder marked “lease”.
late notices came, I paid and took my medicine. But only that last time.
Whatever else was tossed has been long forgotten due to it’s unimportance.
There’s lots more but this is a start that worked for me.
That’s an excellent point. In Clear You Clutter with Feng Shui (don’t laugh, I think Feng Shui is crap but the book is actually very helpful with ways to approaching clutter and very low on the eastern mysticism bunk), the auther tells you to calculate how much of your home is unusable due to clutter and figure out what it’s costing you. I found this approach very helpful;beyond the initial investment of buying the stuff, storing it meant I was paying for space I couldn’t use.
I am not even in this league. But …
I bought my Mom a new clothes washer. It was delivered today, so I had to clear a path so the guys could remove the old and replace it with the new.
All basement laundrys are moist and smelly. I found a basket of old curtains. In thebottom there was what seems to have been a shower curtain. It was black with mold. The whole thing stank. I took it to my laundry guy. He said he could not save it.
I tossed in the dumpster behind the Safeway. Heck she let the stuff rot for more than a year. She will never even notice.
I told my Wife about this thread. She is not a horder. And is neater than I. Though she has 3 or 4 boxes full of receipts that are really, really old. Perfectly organised by year. Bank statements from accounts that have been closed for years. Monthly credit card accounts that have been shut down for years.
The boxes of this stuff really can’t do us any good.
She want’s to shread them.
She knows about my Dad.
I have always followed the philosophy that if I come across an item, and I forgot I had it, then I obviously didn’t need it that badly.
A jar of pickles? On the mantle? For five years???
Exactly what was their reasoning? 
A BIG problem with keeping every little recipt or piece of paper is that you can’t find the ones you really should keep.
And hell, Sears will know if you bought a washer from them. And when you did. If that data gets lost in the digital atmosphere, you may be out of luck. But it is a hell of a lot better than living in the conditions we have seen and are talking about.
My father does the same type of thing. There is no reasoning when you try to help other than "I’ll do it tomorrow”. And if that jar of pickles or anything else has been on the mantle for five years, it is no problem. It’s not seen.
I don’t get it. I’m starting to stop trying anymore. It’s a matter of becoming acclimated to conditions I suppose.
People sleep through mortar attacks if they get used to it.
What is very aggravating for those of us that try to bring people back from the mortar attacks to the front line is that they continue to just wander back into the front lines and the disaster they make out of their lives.
I don’t know what to say to the folks that continue to try to rescue the loved ones that continue to refuse to help themselves.
It’s a lost cause. 20 years of help. Can’t be done.
Cause they’re travelling ads!
I said a page or so ago in this thread that my sister-in-law, she who had stuff packed in our basement since before she was evicted from the building nearly two years ago, absolutely promised she’d be over this past weekend/through NYD to clean out the basement, and we agreed to leave it accessible to her. You got it, she didn’t show. At this point I don’t care what’s down there, I just want it gone. I’m big into environmentalism and not throwing things out unnecessarily, but I know I have several boxes of my things down there that have been undisturbed for years and have resisted previous rationalizations to get rid of them. I also know that probably 75% of her stuff down there literally is trash, stuff like packing materials, boxes, newspapers, etc. I really want a dumpster.
I understand this. I know this is why my mother can never organize all of her stuff. There is not enough bins or shelves and there never will be.
It is not a matter of getting rid of stuff, to her it is the matter of not enough space to put everything in an organized manner which she can not do because she won’t get rid of anything but there is not reason to get rid of anything it just needs organized. It is a vicious circle.
The problem is that some of these hoarders are not rational enough to buy the book much less read it. Giving it as a gift is also not an option. It is like a giving an over weight person a book with the title “How to stop being a fat slob”. It will only be met with anger and resentment.
Another problem is a good percentage of the things they keep are not items they bought. They were gifts, things they found or inherited items. That just makes them want to hang on to them even that much more.
To them an old vase that is cracked and has been sitting in the corner for two years is the same as your lamp that sits on the end table of the living room. If someone came in your home and told you the lamp was worthless and attempted to throw it away you would be shocked and angry. I mean it is your stuff. They have no right to determine for you whether the item is useful or not.
The “I may need or have a use for that one day” is the hardest thing to get past. For the most part I think we all have a little of that in us but most of us purge items at least once a year and a big move makes it even clearer. Why move a bunch of junk we have not used or even realized was there for years.
They don’t think that way. They want to move it then organize it later which of course never happens because there are not enough bins or shelves so it just sits.
Years ago part of my mothers career was to organize and document. She does everything in great detail which for a company is the perfect person for the job. Nothing is left out. Not one step or explanation is ever missed. A person that never touched the software before could sit down with something she created and be able to use it. She was damn good at her job.
It is only in life that these skills are in a way her downfall. She can not organize nor document her stuff so it lays in disorder.
I’ll mostly echo what enipla said but there’s also the fact that they don’t see the fact that keeping a semi-tidy house mainly involves a lot of little things. If you bring the jar of pickles down to the living room for whatever reason, take it back to the kitchen on your next trip. If you eat a candy bar while watching television, get up during a commercial break and throw the paper away. Costs you very little extra effort.
If you don’t do those little things the mess piles up, keeping the house clean is no longer just a set of good habits. It involves a lot of hard work up front and the person living there feels overwhelmed by it. That pickle jar on the mantle has probably not even been noticed by anyone but me in the last year or more.
I read somewhere once about the “30 second rule.” Take 30 seconds and put the dish in the dishwasher/put the clothes away/throw away the receipt.
You’re right, it’s the little things that can turn into big things.
I helped clean up after an earthquake once, literally.
The big Northridge earthquake, 1994, a friend’s co-worker was allowed back into her apartment for 1 day only. I was with 6 other people who showed up. We brought 3 pick-up trucks and a huge trailer.
No after a disaster you expect some disorder in a person’s home, but this was off the scale. The lady’s adult daughter was a “renowned poet”, yeah, ok, whatever. She had made a cassette tape of a certain radio show for the last ten years. This was a 2 or 3 hour show 5 nights a week. Over 3000 cassette tapes of just that show! She also liked other shows. The cassttes had been stacked up in her bedroom and had settled into a wall-to-wall pile as deep as my thighs. I started grabbing boxes and shovelling tapes into them. The “poet” was crying and telling me to stop so she could organize. the funny thing was, not one single tape was labeled. How was she planning to organize? By looking at each tape and spending 10 minutes stacking 20 tapes onto the lid of a box, then pausing, then re-stacking.
So, seeing I was not needed in that room, I tried to help in other areas. We loaded the trucks with 14 unopened boxes of a set of dishes (place-settings for eight), 6 giant metal 1950’s office desks, 19 dining room chairs, over 50 contractor-sized garbage bags of unused clothes, toys, lamps, over 20 unopened boxes of dixie cups, 5 unused coffee machines and then I stopped counting. It was as if God had picked up a K-Mart, shook it, then set it back down.
All the time, while trying to get this stuff out, the mother and daughter were crying and frantically trying to “organize” weverything. This entailed looking at every box and making a seperate stack with no disernable logic on the yard. Even to the point that if a box or bag caught their eye that was already packed in the truck, they’d remove it and lay it down on the lawn.
We made 4 trips to a rented storage warehouse. We had become so disillusioned that by that time we didn’t even bother to stack the stuff up in any orderly fashion, just dumped it into a big pile in the middle of the warehouse.
Bear in mind that the mother was not a trailer-park goon, but one of the top paralegals in Century City. My understanding is that the warehoused goods sit undisturbed to this very day, and that her new aprtment was quickly filled up with more junk.
Later on I read in the paper how the daughter thanked evryone in the poet community for all the help and support she recieved during the crisis. Funny, I don’t remeber a single poet showing up to actually help empty her apartment. Darn poets.
When it was all over, I read in the paper how the daughter wrote a piece in the local paper thanking