Choie, here’s one thing that you might not have thought about, that may help you go through with this. And that is, that many people, both in the cleaning business and outside of it, LOVE to work on an clean-up job like this. The number one reason is that they will see such a HELL of a lot of difference in just a small time. Talk about a rewarding job!
The next thing is, that you called them in (so while you might have your difficult moments, you wil not fight them every step of the way). Which makes their job a lot easier.
And third, your clean up job is not a tragic one. Things may be dirty and messy, but once that is gone, all that is left is a happy (well, happier :)) choie and three happy cats. These people are used to tragic, and that makes your job a walk in the park. The contractor probably already loves you.
Have you ever seen the movie: “Sunshine cleaning”? Or read “Stuff?” I think you would love both.
I totally understand this. I have a really hard time letting things go also. (My house is a shithole as well, but it’s been better since my fiance moved in. I’ve tried the whole Motivated Moms binder where today we vacuum the living room, etc, and always fall off the wagon.) The longer I’ve had things the worse it is - my ex gave me a bottle of wine ages ago that he got for me on some trip or another. I’ve never drunk it and now I feel so weird about it - if I drink it now, I’ll feel sad about it, but if I don’t drink it it will still be there…
ETA - I love antique stores but find them so incredibly sad - here are all these things that somebody used to love, and now they’re contextless junk. Especially things like old postcards that you always find in antique stores - somebody cared enough to save them, and then what? Did they die? Did they not care anymore?
I had a couple of suggestions for you for some of your specifics.
First off - if your trash place does any level of recycling, then most everything you throw out – broken lamps, small appliances, etc are going to be pulled out and used as the building blocks for new things. Think of it like a karmic reincarnation for objects - this sad old lamp is tired and ready to move on to his new life as a set of freshly created brass candlesticks that someone will love and cherish! Having a grounded, reality-based, and specific thought in mind that items will be re-used or re-purposed can maybe help you feel less like you are “abandoning them” when it’s time for them to move on.
Secondly - you aren’t the only one who keeps stuffed childhood animals - I have boxes of old childhood books that I can’t even read anymore because they are too old and fragile, but there is no way I could throw them away. People get attached to all sorts of things - it’s just how we are.
This is a short Youtube clip that demonstrates this pretty perfectly - humans get attached to things really easily - it’s a very positive thing. I bet that you are extremely empathetic and helpful, and that you care deeply about your friends and family. if the downside to that is that you feel the need to “rescue” stuffed animals and feel bad for inanimate objects, then that’s ok!
Finally - you said that you’re really bad at, and didn’t have much childhood modeling for, looking forward to things in the future. Most people are really bad at that - we aren’t very good at predictions at all, but we still try. What you might want to do is have your sister or a friend write up a description of a scene where you have a nice small dinner party, or a couple of friends over to watch a movie. If so, you can post it to your bathroom mirror or your fridge or your computer desk, where you’ll see it regularly, and that can be a help for you visualizing good things happening in your newly clean and de-cluttered place!
Some good advice that I’ve seen in action, which is really helpful for people who ascribe specific memories to physical objects: if you’re worried about throwing away something, even though it’s broken or you NEVER use it, take a picture of it before you throw it away. Then you can always look at the picture. All of the memories attached to that item do not require that you keep the item itself. As long as you can see the picture later, those memories won’t fade away.
Also, after this, if you can afford to hire a cleaning lady to come in once or twice a week, DO IT. Then you have a clean place that stays clean, and it doesn’t cost you any effort to keep it that way.
And you can keep your stuffed animals, but they’d be better out of the way. How about a corner hammock for them to sit in together? Surely that’s a better way to treat them than living in the middle of a huge mess.
Sorry for the delay, guys. I was out getting some paper towels and spray cleaner. Which as my sister teased, is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Wow, Maastricht. I wanted to quote this whole message because it’s so awesome. Thank you, I hadn’t thought about that aspect–that at least I’m doing this willingly, rather than under duress due to some external pressure (family, social worker, landlord, court edict…). That makes me feel much better. I’m sure I’ll be resistant to some of the cleaner’s activities–at least, internally, even if I try not to let it show that throwing out some random piece of junk is eating my heart out.
And nope I haven’t seen those films, but I’ll definitely check them out. Thank you so much!
Oh God girl, you’re making me cry! Yes, that’s how I feel. These things were loved once, and now they’re not. That disturbs me on several different levels. It’s nice to know someone understands this feeling.
Aw. That is a nice way to put it! I have no idea if there’s any recycling done (well, other than the official recycling day, which is Friday), but I’ll try to imagine there is because that’s helpful. (And thank you for saying “him.” I have a running argument with my sister, because I always call objects “him,” and she says, “why isn’t it a girl?” But that’s crazy talk! Everyone knows inanimate objects are male. Sheesh! :D)
You’re so kind and I hope I can do that! I do over-empathize with things, and I probably do with people as well, though I tend to blockade myself from them (perhaps that’s what the trash is partly for…) but I definitely tend to feel things deeply. Reading Peanuts made me cry as a kid. I think I’ve mentioned this before but I have old editions of Peanuts books where as a kid I’d gone through the entire thing and drew smiles instead of frowns or sad faces on Charlie Brown, Linus and Snoopy’s faces. I’d also write little thought balloons near Charlie Brown’s head after Lucy or whoever insulted him where he’d say “Big deal, I don’t care what you say!” or whatever witty comeback an eight-year-old me would have dreamed up for dialogue.
Hee. I actually do have them up on shelves or in a basket, so that’s one little bit of organization I do. I like the idea of a photograph too. That’s very helpful, thank you!
Thanks to everyone in this thread. You’ve all been so amazingly thoughtful and supportive. I angsted so much about posting this but I’m glad I did. I’ll definitely post tomorrow night and let you guys know how Day 1 went.
Oh and I just took pictures of my “before” apartment, yucko. You’ll all be happy to know (I hope) that the cleaning place called to confirm earlier and I said “yes,” so I did have a chance to cancel and affirmatively decided not to. Yay?
You’ve been so open and willing to be vulnerable in this thread, I can’t imagine anyone snarking or being mean to you. It took a lot of guts to let us know this about you. I applaud you.
I’ve always wanted to live in Manhattan. I’d be willing to clean the place every day if I can move in!
I like to think of sending my old things off to the Op Shops as a triple threat of goodness:
My home is tidier.
Op Shops use the profit for charitible works.
The things go to people who will love and appreciate them all over again.
I just gave away a shopping bag’s worth of art supplies that the Kid has never used - they go back several birthdays. I thought I was doing so well, until the friend I gave them to handed me a huge (hee-oooge!) skein of wool in my favourite colour as thanks. Space saved = 0. Joy = 1 Squillion on both sides.
I have issues like that, too. I first knew things were getting out of control when I once got up in the middle of the night, convinced Something Extremely Important had been thrown out and started going through the garbage. Then I went wait, WTF, this isn’t normal or right.
Yes, I feel sorry for broken things, abandoned things – you aren’t the only one. One reason my current job is so appealing is that I get to FIX things!
Still, it’s important that YOU be in control and not the things. Sometimes you just have to throw something away because, you know, it’s broken. But, you know what? If apologizing to the dead lamp (or whatever) makes it easier for you to toss it then apologize to it. It’s OK. We’re looking for results here, right? And the result we’re looking for is for you to have a cleaner, more orderly residence. Whatever works is OK. Sure, it’s quirky and eccentric but you’ll be quirky and eccentric with a clean apartment! Trust me, you’re not the only one who has a little ceremony or ritual when tossing items you’ve had for a long time.
I have “schedule chafing” problems, too. On top of that, for the past few years I’ve had wildly erratic schedules. I’m also concerned that you tend towards an all-or-nothing evaluation of your efforts, based on your posts.
The way I got around it is by NOT scheduling a set time, but planning a set TASK. For example, washing dishes (I don’t own a dishwasher): I don’t schedule a particular time, but I do force myself to do this every day between getting dressed and going off to work (or leaving the house, or some other arbitrary mark). If for some reason I can’t do ALL of them I at least fill up the dishdrainer and view that as progress, because the next day I’ll do more dishes, and then next day… So while the dishes may not get done by 9 am they WILL be done before I leave for work/whatever. This results in less time-chafing but still gets results, and I don’t beat myself up so much for being “late” or not quite completing a task.
Likewise I might assign myself a half an hour of filing just after dinner, which I have to do before I go off to watch TV or read a book – there’s not a set time for that half hour, but the half hour must be done in sequence, between A and B.
Hell, having helped landlords do post-move-out clean ups I’m not sure I’d bat an eye at the used sausage cans. The point that for the clean up crew this will probably be a relatively happy job is a good one.
And I also heartily recommend the book Stuff – it gave me quite a bit of insight and motivation into my own hoarding tendencies.
I once did a clean up on an apartment where an old lady had died. The people who should have cared for her got lazy and slack towards the end, and she didn’t have the physical ability to cope. I had to shovel knee-deep dogshit out of her front room, then scrub down the place. Dirty clothes discarded on the bedroom floor NOT because she was lazy or crazy but because she physically couldn’t cope with laundry in her final weeks. It was so, so, so sad. Mummified mouse skeletons were the least of the sad horrors in that place.
Seriously, I’ve done clean ups where we had to wear masks because of the stench, and heavy gloves due to the… stuff… both filthy and broken. It’s the moldy books that make me cry, though – not on the job with the tough guys I worked with, but just the LOSS of the written word.
So, really, it sounds like your place is FAR from the worst I’ve seen, much less the worst that a group that does things like crime-scene clean up have seen.
Doing clean-ups for landlords made me realize on a gut level that I wasn’t the only person who was a slob and in fact there were people a hell of a lot worse than me out there.
Hon, I still own my very first teddy bear, the one given to me a week after my birth. Not only that, I have my deceased sister’s first “teddy cat”. You are NOT the only one! Now, I have whittled the collection down to basically those two highly emotion-laden examples, but then, that’s why I kept those particular two. The rest were donated to a charity and went to sick kids in hospitals.
For me, recycling and donating are HUGE – I can get rid of stuff so much more easily if I know it’s going to be “reincarnated”. I’m slowing getting rid of my stash of knitting/crochet needles and extra yarn by giving “kits” to people interested in learning to knit. I used to have every single pair of eyeglasses I ever had in my life - until someone told me the Lion’s Club takes eyeglasses and refurbishes/recycles them for people who need them but otherwise wouldn’t be able to get glasses. Have you considered what you can donate and send on to another home/another life? Do you think it might work for you?
I know intellectually that it works REALLY well (but not enough to do it myself - Himself has to start it) that if you say “I am setting a timer for 20 minutes and I will do nothing but clean until it goes off” that you will get a shocking amount done in that 20 minutes. Yes, that’s the Flylady, but sometimes she’s totally right - you can stand anything for 20 minutes. What I need to do is find a way to let Himself know that he needs to make me do that at least once a week, because I am such a bitch about it.
choie, from checking on your thread tonight I see your posts about (among other things) your feelings for cast-off stuff. Tomorrow might be jolt; as you’re choosing what to get rid of try telling yourself This is a thing. I choose to let it go and clear the way for personal relationships. (Your niece, guitar teacher, etc.)
This is something you share with my sister in law, who is a hoarder. She can’t imagine what a room will look like with a change of furniture until she sees the furniture actually in place; she’s easily “taken in” by my decluttered decorating style, my rooms always look to her like they’re bigger than they are.
My brother and having people in the house keep the hoard in check, but… they’ve got a large flat with lots of storage space plus three Open At Your Own Risk storage rooms in the building’s garage, and she wanted to buy a fourth (Bro put his foot down). She gets hand-me-downs from friends with daughters older than hers, but she’s unable to hand down to anybody; because, what if she has another kid? Once she bought a dress for a wedding; it wasn’t quite what she had in mind, but it was ok, so she bought it; then she saw another one which also wasn’t what she had in mind, but she liked it better, so she bought it; then she finally saw what she’d had in mind, so she bought it and it’s the one she actually wore: she still has all three dresses 11 years later, two of them never worn. Because, what if she ever needs them?
Thank you so, so much, Alice. I’ve just been blown away by the kindness and acceptance in this thread. I can’t tell you how much it’s helped. As I said before, I was debating whether to start this topic, especially when there had been a couple of others along these lines that had been so interesting and encouraging to read (and sure, somewhat depressing, at times).
Then I figured it might make the process easier for me if I sort of journaled my way through it, and then I checked that “Ask the…” compendium and noticed there hadn’t actually been a “Live Hoarding Cleanup!” – sort of a reality show in SDMB message board form – so maybe this would be a new angle for others to watch as well as a method of charting my progress.
Of course I’ve spent the evening cleaning up for the cleaning guy. A tradition from time immemorial. I can imagine my grandmother saying, “What, he should know how messy you are?” It’s still awful but at least the floor easier to navigate without so many freakin’ water bottles everywhere. (I’ve been drinking a lot.)
Anyway in preparation for tomorrow.. well, later today really… I took a bubble bath with lavender (it’s supposed to calm babies, why not myself?). I laid back amid my icky bathroom and closed my eyes in this lovely warm bubble-laden water and thought, “This time next week I’ll be able to relax in a beautiful clean bathroom, and after that I’ll walk into my main room (it’s a studio, remember) that will be just as peaceful and inviting as this bath.” It’s hard to fathom right now but that’s what I’m trying to envision. To keep my eyes on the prize, as it were.
And now for an abrupt change of topic, I’m suddenly wondering… am I supposed to tip this guy at the end of all this? I know I’m paying the service directly, but it’ll feel weird after spending this much time with this one cleaner (a total of 35 hours!) without giving him something extra as a gratuity or whatever. Hm. Maybe I should call the service and ask what’s expected, if anything.
That’s wonderful. I think the only stuff I have that is likely to be useful are the books I know I won’t be reading, or reading again in some cases. (I mean, seriously, a copy of Joan Collins’s Prime Time? I don’t mean to be a book snob but honestly! Where the hell did I pick that up? Oh wait… I think it was a Book of the Month thing back when I was in college.) Most of my excess books are mystery paperbacks, which I was given by someone else cleaning her house. I’m not as catholic in my mystery tastes as she is, so I’ll likely never get to read those books. Then there are some random books I read once and will never do so again, such as Farnham’s Freehold by Robert Heinlein, which to me felt like a creepy paean to incest, and a guidebook to the videogame Doom, which was fun in its day but that day was back in 1994. What a bizarre library.
That sounds ideal! What exactly is your job, if I may ask? I don’t remember if it was mentioned in your other thread.
I remember when I was little I used to make sure all my shoes were next to each other so they could talk amongst themselves and none of them would be lonely. God, what a neurotic kid I was. (Also, lonely myself, so I guess I felt like I was giving good karma, so if I let my shoes have a ‘social life’, maybe I would have one too.)
Thanks. You’re right, whatever gets me through it. If it somehow enables me to do what needs to be done, I might as well just accept it. I’m almost certain this is precisely what my shrink would say. (I realize I haven’t told her about apologizing to garbage yet.)
I like your idea about aiming for one task. And I’ll definitely be grabbing that Stuff book. The Kindle edition only, though! No more actual physical books until I’ve emptied out some of the old ones!
Oy. I can relate. I’ve mentioned elsewhere the agony of visiting home after my mom died and my father was preparing to sell our house, and seeing my mom’s book collection sitting in the driveway, rain battering their leather covers while waiting for garbage men to pick them up. To this day, it pains me to think of those books she treasured being treated so horribly.
Yes, definitely. As I said the books are the only real things I think that would be of value. Normally I’d include clothes, but because of my moth problem, I don’t think they’d be donatable. (Is that a word? It is now.) If the cleaning guy cleans my kitchen he might unearth all my dishes, which if cleaned could certainly be donated. I mean, I coudl use them myself, but honestly they have a bad association with me now (after being in my kitchen-from-hell for so long) that I’d prefer to give them away – as long as they’re thoroughly cleaned – or toss them altogether. I also have a rather bizarrely large collection of glass vases, amassed when I was working at Lincoln Center for one of its constituents and we’d have dinners for patrons. We lowly workers were allowed to take home the flower centerpieces, which included glass bowl vases. So I’ve got like twelve of the damn things, even though I don’t really like flowers. (Because they die. Why would I want something with such a short life span that I only have to throw away eventually?)
Heh. Yeah, I think I used to do five minute clean-ups in between commercials when I had a regular TV. That was quite a while ago though.
It’ll be hard, no doubt. Actually just having a stranger among my stuff will be jolt #1, so I’m prepared for a whole pot-hole-filled road’s worth of jolts tomorrow.
Better get to bed so I can get psyched up tomorrow morning. Thank you again everyone for your extremely encouraging and generous support!
Do you have a plan for keeping it clean? I really think that you should. Maybe something like- clean the kitchen completely right after dinner every night, pick up in general every day, and deep clean every Saturday, or something like that? I know that if I don’t have a schedule and just go all loosey-goosey, I don’t do shit and things get away from me.
Choie, good for you! I am happy for your progress and for the promise of tomorrow! Or toweek – what do you call next week? Well, congratulations on getting where you are right now.
I think you should not feel guilty or embarrassed about anything during a time period over which you are improving what you most need to. The more I think about this the more obvious it becomes.
Also, for what it’s worth, I enjoy your posts. They seem, well, professional.
This is a GREAT technique. I use it myself, not just for cleaning, but for exercising when I don’t feel like it, or tackling any necessary but unappealing chore. If 20 minutes seems too long, set the timer for 10. Chances are, by then you’ll be into the task and want to keep going.
It’s such a great feeling to know your old things are going to help someone who needs help, or give pleasure to someone who needs a grace note of pleasure.
But even for things that are broken and not reusable (though, as someone said upthread, they might be recycled for parts at the trash station), you may take the idea of “reincarnating” the object and use your tendency to anthropomorphize to help you. Pretend you are a Buddhist and wish the item a more fortunate rebirth when you throw it out; imagine that by throwing it out, you are freeing its spirit to go to a better life. It isn’t any nuttier than apologizing to trash before you throw it out, and if it helps you, then it helps.
Looking forward to hearing how things go today. You are doing a good thing. Again, kudos to you.
