A bunch of us helped a hoarder friend and his husband move out of their apartment. I was stunned. I had never been there because they didn’t host stuff at home, always at restaurant or another friends house. We just thought because their place was small.
It really was like something from an episode of the actual show. They didn’t just “hoard” stuff in stacks or whatever. The place was filthy and you could not take one step without stepping on something on the floor. You couldn’t reach the stove because of all the crap in the kitchen. Pots and pans, dirty dishes had been left for years. We threw everything out from the kitchen. When clearing out the bedroom, amidst the debris diabetic needles could be found all around the floor on his husbands side (caps back on, but still!). There was a lot of usable stuff that had been “collected” and some of that was ok to keep, but man, I never want to do that again. Honestly, we should have been wearing masks, but we didn’t think about it.
They moved into their new house a couple of years ago and it’s much better. Still really full of “stuff”, but at least it’s clean and the kitchen is staying clean. They have people over and there are places to sit and you can eat there. I’m always letting them know, I’m there to help them clear out the spare bedroom or garage (both are full) anytime they want help.
Had a similar experience when I was about 12. We’d go over to this friend’s house to play quite often, but never had a reason to go inside. One day we decided to go to the movies. He went inside to ask his dad (Randy didn’t live with his mom, never heard what happened to her.) if he could and a couple of us followed him inside. His dad was sitting in the middle of the living room on a sofa chair. His arms were outstretched reading a newspaper. The floor was covered knee deep with newspapers that had seemingly just been thrown to the side when his dad was finished reading them. You had to just gently shuffle your feet through the papers to get around. Randy didn’t say anything about the floor and we just went to the movies.
Yeah, my inlaws, and by extension my wife. I keep telling her I’m going to divorce her and take 2% of her stuff.
Seriously though, while not at “I am Jack’s lack of organization skills” they never seem to throw anything away or know how to properly organize the shit they have.
I’ve known two office hoarders. One was a colleague of mine. His office was an unbelievable pile of papers and old computers (including a Wang mini that had been costing the department $2000 a year for maintenance and when micros came along selling for that or less, they abandoned it to him. I am sure he never used it and it eventually disappeared under the mess. Eventually the fire department officially condemned his office. The building director came around with a shovel and a small dumpster that could fit in the hall. The guy said that he knew it had to be done, but he could not bear to watch it happen.
The second was someone I had known for years but I never saw his office. But it was notorious that you couldn’t get into it it was so jammed with paper. He would meet students sitting in the corridor outside his office. I don’t what happened, but I imagine he retired and someone cleared it out.
My wife and I have hoarding (perhaps you could say cluttering) tendencies but nowhere near the worst. When we moved my son came and helped. I near cried when we discarded 50 years worth of Scientific American and when we left a wooden jeep and a dollhouse, both of which I had built out for trash. I felt a little better that a scavenger actually collected both the jeep and dollhouse before the trashman came. Still there are few unoccupied surfaces in our apartment and there are at least a half dozen boxes of books in our small storage area in the garage that we will likely never open because every book shelf in the apartment is now full.
A number. Including my relatives and my husband’s. It is not rare. I have helped a hoarder clean up her house (her husband got a job in another state, she had to sell the house). It was intense.
I’ve thought a good bit about what collection of traits go into hoarding. It isn’t just one thing, but from my direct observations it is at least several of the following:
A fundamental belief in scarcity (what if I need it and can’t buy another one?)
What might be called a “sorting disorder” – the inability to put like things together, put important or often-used things in the easy-access storage, and so forth. Both my husband and daughter have this problem but not to a hoarding degree. People who have this disorder often also have trouble getting places on time and remembering to pay their bills, too.
An extreme form of the natural human tendency to attach value to things just because they own them.
Some psychiatric theory puts hoarding under the umbrella of OCD, but there are others who say it is a separate disorder.
I have to say, animal hoarding is a really horrible form of it. I have known a few of those too. A lot of animal rescue centers and ‘sanctuaries’ are run by perfectly loony people. Women make up the large majority of animal hoarders.
Too many of both and we’re close to the second ourselves although we tend to purge our accumulations every 5 years or so and no-one ever has had an issue moving around in our house. The most extreme is a friend who is basically living in a chair because that is the only part of an 8 room house he can access.
Had one as a tenant. She was a PhD psychiatrist BTW. She lived in the property when I bought it. Quite wealthy actually but she could not stop buying. She died suddenly intestate wi th no living relatives. After going thru the legal formalities we declared the property abandoned. 2 40 yd. dumpsters to empty it-- boxes & boxes of stuff never even opened.
My brother has a 75 pound pure copper cat scan target living on his living room floor. He has a 6 foot long 0.0005" caliper mounted on his wall. The Nikon oil immersion microscope and surface mount soldering set up are afterthoughts. So is the smallish server farm and the metal lathe/router in the garage. Do not get me started on the refrigerator.
There is some serious crazy here, and some serious ECE as well.
My wife is a hoarder, and it’s really getting to be a problem. I don’t know what to do about it. She does not believe she’s a hoarder.
She thinks the problem is that I am a poor housekeeper She believes that I should be responsible for all housekeeping because she makes more money than I do. I think she is unwilling to get involved with the housekeeping because then she would have to confront the simple fact that she has accumulated more stuff than our apartment has cubic feet.
It’s a real problem. We can’t have anyone over to our place any more. I guess our three children, all very young, think it’s normal, but that won’t last forever. Already the oldest has play dates at other kids’ houses (well, apartments) – surely she can see the difference.
I know of a person (but don’t know him personally) who apparently collects and hoards junk vehicles – cars, vans, some buses, even a couple of totally junked old little airplanes.
Story is, he buys old junk vehicles at auctions, possibly with the fantasy that he will restore and sell them. He is said to have several large warehouses full of old junk vehicles. He is said to be an older retired professor who speaks English with a heavy accent. He has an unpronounceable Polish name.
The vehicles I’ve seen are stashed on one part of a large property in a little-known valley back in the hills an hour-or-so drive south-east of San Jose. There’s an eldritch resident caretaker living in a shabby trailer there who tells me the owner shows up once or twice a year with more vehicles to leave there – evidently the overflow from his in-town warehouses.
The same property has a dirt runway (built by a previous owner in the dawn of time) and flat area where a few aircraft can be tied down. There’s a old-style biker bar-and-grill across the street (the only business for miles around). People fly in occasionally just to eat there. (I did that once with some pilot friends.) A group of pilots from two nearby glider clubs have an annual four-day campout and glider fest there. There is a continual fear that one of these days, the tie-down area will be full of junk cars.
You describe someone with a hobby that just requires alot of space. My wife has this problem since she is into art.
Now sometimes my wife will get into a project and not even realize she has taken up the entire kitchen table or living room with it.
Same with my brother because he likes to work on engines and before he built his garage, would have a torn down engine with tools and spare parts everywhere in his living room.
Now I have inlaws who have almost no “stuff” because they are not into anything really. No hobbies. No collections. They arent big readers. So not alot of stuff in their house and they sometimes give us odd looks.
Two rules work for me:
Obvious crap goes.
If it’s been a decade, and is not ridiculously valuable, in a real sense, it goes.
Gar(b)age sales can be helpful, as they set value.
-More like 2.5 rules.
Do you think this is a kind of generational issue and over time this might become less common?
Looking at your point #1, I think alot of that was learned back in the depression era where people had little and were afraid of losing what they had so they started hoarding. My grandparents were like that. However young people growing up today have always had lots of cheap stuff lying around.
On #2, with todays ability to store information on computers there is little need to keep receipts and such in file cabinets. Photographs, which we have boxes of, are stored online and not in photo albums.
I think your point #3 and the animal hoarding will always be there.
Again, will this change with the younger generation?
Examples: Young people today are:
not into “collections” anymore.
they live in smaller homes and apartments
can have books, movies, music and such online or in digital form so no need to have all the books, vhs tapes, and albums lying around like we all had
dont have the 'fix it" attitude we older people had - they find things are mostly non-repairable and know they should just toss a broken item and buy a new one.
I like that Japanese woman who has an organizing show and she talks about how to get rid of beloved items that you simply cannot keep anymore but you cant bear the thought of getting rid of. basically she talks about how you treat it almost like a beloved pet that you are putting down where you say goodbye, take a picture of it, and then let it go.
Its funny on your 2nd point. I watch “Antique Roadshow” on PBS and they have this sort of look back show where they will show an item with the appraisal say 10 years ago and then show its current value and most often its dropped in value, sometimes by half.
Its really an eye opener and tells me things that your holding on to because you think will rise in value and make you rich later - well its just not happening.
Last year I watched an extensive video series on YouTube as a Canadian antique and knick-knack dealer named Alex Archbold bought a hoarder’s home, cleared it out, and fixed up the house to be sold. The series was eventually referred to as The Potter’s House as the hoarder in question was a ceramics artist who had gone a bit doolally in her twilight years. It is really entertaining, as he embodies that Canadian stereotype of being genuinely nice and low key, we meet all sorts of characters as they come on board to help out, and there are interesting twists and turns as the story unfolds.
It is interesting to note that hoarding as a psychological disorder was just added to the DSM in 2013; prior to that, according to the official line of psychologists, it didn’t exist. Now it does.
So if you’re right, at some point in the future it might stop existing. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Hoarding is way past the Depression attitude of saving things, though, and what is hoarded is often of no value even in Depression terms (piles of old newspapers, for instance.)
I mean, let me ask you this; are young people’s houses any tidier nowadays? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone has objective facts for that sort of thing.
A six foot precision caliper Might go up, but SO MUCH exotic Garbage…
Blimp toys, rocking horses, 90’s drool houses, endoscope, more molds than a fungologist could name.
It’s absurd and depressing.
As a biochemist, II want to 25$K microscope tho.
Horrible situation. He’s getting old enough to need to move to a one story place.
No one could even begin to help.
Yeah, that’s actually something I noticed about my wife and her family.
My wife grew up kind of poor in a rural community. Not really destitute or anything. But she definitely adopts a lot more of a “save money wherever we can” mentality. Making sure we get every last drop out of the toothpaste tube. Saving food a bit longer than the FDA might recommend. Saving every fucking plastic or paper bag because we use bags for garbage and whatnot and not it costs $0.10 to but a grocery bag. Which strikes me as odd because we are a multi-six figure income household.
They seem to have terrible skills when it comes to spatial relationships, organization, or how things go together. In contrast, I was almost an architect and actually have a degree in structural engineering. So I look at their “piles” of clutter almost as a personal affront.
My wife’s parents are constantly holding yard sales where they buy and sell junk from other people in the neighborhood buying and selling junk. There are stacks of magazines from years ago my wife won’t throw away because “I haven’t read them yet”. Let me spoiler this one for you - Whitney Houston dies in a few years.
Lie one thing I would do is clean our apartment whenever my wife takes the kids to her parents. She would inevitably come home and get upset. “I can’t find anything!!”. So…what are you looking for? Bills are in the bills drawer. Books are in the book cases. Dirty clothes in the dirty clothes hamper. Kid’s toys are in one of their 15 toy bins, with the exception of Legos which are on the kitchen table that our son has turned into a Legopolis.