I watched that, too! Has he sold the house yet? To be honest, after watching him dig through the piles of crap that the house had contained, I wouldn’t want to live there myself. I was wondering if the documentation of the cleanup helped or hindered him in the selling of the house.
But if he hadn’t dug through everything, he wouldn’t have found the wallet containing all that money. $2,800 Canadian, wasn’t it?
The neighbor across the street. When he died aged 90+ his wife and daughter filled at least two dumpsters with second-hand surplus radio parts. Boxes of resistors, vacuum tubes, etc. I saved a little (including his collection of scrap sheet aluminum plate, got a buck or two from the scrap yard, but no more) but there’s only so much you can take.
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People are always posting their stacks of multi-terabyte hard drives.
I don’t know of a hoarder, nor am I one. I do have a morbid fascination with the assorted hoarding shows, and what never fails to stun me is the amount of garbage/trash in the homes. I watched someone use a Kleenex and throw it on the floor. Throwing food wrappers on the pile. So much of the “hoard” is trash.
I think I’m up to 30 TB of drives; Mostly BU. But I run 7 or 8 computers of various kinds.
I do hoard, but I also clean the crud out of everything every few years.
All my ADB keyboards, rollerball mice, din and rs232 cables are gone. I still have too many USB cables, but I’m running an iPhone 4s and iPad 1.0 for God’s sake. -They ain’t broke.
The house is livable, although I keep several hundred pounds of interesting rocks in the basement. I even look at them, and move a few upstairs when the mood strikes.
The worse was the woman who didnt have a working toilet so she would just use adult diapers and instead of throwing them away when used, would just toss them into a pile. It was so nasty it ate thru the floor and they had to call for a hazardous waste pickup.
Some years ago I noted the existence of two types of hoarders and asked about it here. One type seems to suffer from a complete lapse of domestic hygiene. This is the kind you described above, and results in their home becoming a major biohazard site filled with trash, excrement, bodily fluids, and/or verminous infestations that result from all of those. The other type is the compulsive collector: they still take the trash out and do the dishes, but they’re in danger of being crushed under an avalanche of consumer goods that they’ve amassed over the years. The woman I know (see post #3) is in this category.
I rereading the old thread I just linked to, I was amused to see this line in a post there:
I have a shop in my basement where I do some metal- and woodworking. Along one wall of my basement, I have a collection of lumber and a separate collection of metal stock. It ranges from big sheets of new material down to warped 2x4s with numerous nail holes and little pieces of scrap metal The eternal question is: how small can a piece of leftover material be (and how many can you accumulate) before you decide it’s time to throw away a bunch of the smaller shittier pieces? It’s hard. Afterall, even a 1-square-inch piece of steel sheet occasionally proves useful (but maybe you don’t need 47 of them in your inventory). I’m pretty ruthless about discarding appliances that gather dust on a shelf for a few years, but I have a hard time parting with potentially useful scrap material. As a result, the pile is starting to get a bit unwieldy, the shelves a bit overburdened. Maybe it’s time to thin it out a bit…
Yes, I do know hoarders and could, occasionally be called one myself. One thing I’ve learned is that there are different types of hoarders. Some people collect stuff obsessively, perhaps because it gives them something to do or because they think it may come in handy some day. Or they hate to see “good” things go to waste. Others though, aren’t really hoarding (this is my category), we are depressed and divesting ourselves of clothes that no longer fit or items we no longer use, or even old bills just becomes one of those “impossible” tasks that we can’t seem to do well on our own. We find ways of avoiding the task of sorting and throwing out or giving stuff away. It involves decision-making and we avoid making the decisions.
It took me two years from deciding to sell my house to actually get it on the market because the de-cluttering was hard on me. That said, I did get it done and am relieved to no longer have the majority of the stuff that was weighing me down. I’ve moved into a small condo so there isn’t room for a lot. However, I still have a few items in storage that I need to deal with come spring. Anybody want a huge oak desk from 1956? I can’t get rid of it. I’ve got no takers.
If we’re categorizing hoarders, I have always wondered whether the animal hoarders fit in a different category than the stuff hoarders.
I have hoarding inclinations, myself. One of my best friends is a hoarder, as was his father. A couple of my relatives also tend to be packrats. Not as extreme as the worst examples that I have seen on those shows, however.
I can only watch the shows briefly. Hits to close to home! 
I don’t think I’m a hoarder, but I probably look like one and might be one.
I probably look like one because I have things like a large pile of cardboard boxes in one room that I haven’t got around to breaking down and hauling out to the dumpster. But that’s not me hoarding it; that’s me being a lazy-ass. (And it’s hygienic - I wouldn’t do that with unhygienic stuff.) I also have the odd thing here or there that I could throw away, like my old textbooks from college that I’ll never look at again, but they’re not in the way and hauling that stuff out to the dumpster is, like, work. (Seriously, books are heavy!)
On the other hand I might actually be a hoarder because I’m a collector. Not a random crap collector - I have three (or four, or five) specific things that I collect:
3-5 probably wouldn’t be considered hoarding by people unless they’re the sort of misguided soul who erroneously thinks that because you’ve “bought” a digital copy you own it and that stuff online will be available indefinitely.
The legos probably would look like hoarding because I have so many of them, and all those lego boxes take up a lot of space. Much of it is stacked in bookshelves or stowed in totes, But I do have one or two freestanding piles of stuff in corners which probably look hoarder-like. (I’ve been trying to stow those sets properly but some of them are too large to fit in the totes and storage boxes I have.)
The transformers take up a lot less space than the legos but are actually closer to being hoarder-like because I actually would be willing to get rid of some of them if push came to shove - though sorting out the wheat from the chaff would take some work. And I’m not fond of work, so yeah.
ETA: And also, regarding throwing away stuff like textbooks and transformers, it’s always felt a little wrong to me to throw away a perfectly good book or toy. They’re not garbage, they’re just unwanted, so the garbage feels like the wrong place for them.
Begbert:
I’ve actually used some of those after 40 years. Physics, engineering, math and chemistry change slowly, and memory seems to rot.
All the soft stuff is long gone, except “Cold Mountain” by “Han Shan”. I burned all my Robert Frost. He annoyed me.
Sure, some people revisit their textbooks. I have a friend that does. Myself, I’d be more likely to revisit Frost after you burned him.
I have a friend who is a Christmas-themed hoarder. He lived with his mother until her death last year, and I worry that his tendencies will get really bad now.
There is also a couple down the street from me whose house is packed inside. They have a ladder up to an upstairs window for the cat to come and go. I have sometimes contemplated whether I have any responsibility to alert the authorities to their situation, as the county has an office dedicated to working with hoarders. So far I have told myself not to get involved, but if they were to have a fire…
I kept most of the textbooks related to my field of study (mechanical engineering); they’re at the office, and occasionally come in handy. OTOH, I quickly sold the textbooks related to most of the humanities/social science courses I was required to take as part of my major.
At home, I have a large, heavy box full of files from my undergrad and grad school courses. One file for each course, containing homework, class notes, and exams. The one time they came in handy was when studying for the Ph.D. qualifying exam: the files contained graded homework problems, meaning I could practice working those same problems and then refer back to my file to see if I did it right. Beyond that time I don’t know why I kept them, other than it seemed a shame to just shit-can a collection that was representative of thousands of hours of labor. Also a bit of nostalgia I suppose, although I can’t remember the last time I actually looked at any of these files. They’ve survived over a dozen moves now.
That reminds me of Ron Hackenberger. Like the guy you described, he accumulated a bunch of old junk vehicles, from what I’ve read with the fantasy of building a museum to display them. But really he was just a guy who hoarded a bunch of old cars and left them to sit around and rot. After his death his heirs organized a huge auction to sell them all off. Apparently he had a thing for orphan brands – he had loads of Studebakers, some AMCs, and even a DeLorean.
Dont some people keep old textbooks because, well it makes them look smart?
I mean you have the diploma on the wall but a bunch of textbooks… well they just might make you think you read them now and then.
Isnt that why doctors have all those medical books on shelves in their offices? You dont think they actually read those do you? I think they are to reaffirm their patients that this doctor is well read and knows what they are doing.
I don’t know if my sister the MD re-reads her old textbooks but I read them - lots of stuff in there you don’t usually find on the typical public library shelf. I dunno, maybe she saves them for when I visit and need a bit of light reading.
The Nature of the Chemical Bond is still a great read, as are some of Bohr’s Physics texts. 50-60’s physics and electronics books hold all the core experiments and data we still use elaborations of today.
-But then I read old patents for fun, profit, and design inspirations. They were some really clever people 50 to 100 years ago. If you want to build something at home, patents and old books are a great resource, especially for mechanical stuff.