Whichever show has Robin Zasio is my favourite. Arooooo…
Oh god. She had a pregnant goat with a broken leg, that just limped around, and she kept ducks in a cage and their feet were all bloody from standing on the bars of the cages.
Then she flipped out when they told her that the ducks had to be allowed to go in the nearby pond.
“I AIN’T LETTIN’ THEM GO IN NO POND!!!” I think she was charged with animal cruelty.
Or the old guy whose house was filled with books and he had mounds of them over his bed, ready to fall on top of it. The worst part was that he used his GAS STOVE BURNER TO HEAT UP HIS HOUSE. A total fire hazard, and he refused to admit it. He screamed at his daughter when she tried to have the house cleaned it out. The house was surrounded by trees, and was a complete death trap.
And yes, I go on a cleaning spree after watching as well. I’m OCD and I’m totally fucking paranoid that I’d end up like that. shudder But then, the only “hoarding” I do is pictures on my computer. Which are easily uploaded to a photo site. 
That and bookmarking practically every site I like. But gah, those shows scare the crap out of me.
(I can’t watch the animal ones – they make me want to cry)
I’m amazed at the numbers of people who have this disorder. I know one personally, and just about anyone I’ve ever talked to about it seems to have known one or had one in the family.
I have seen Matt go off on hoarders a couple of times, exactly like that. Well, maybe without actually using the word “lunatic.” But otherwise, he will use exactly those words. It seems even he gets frustrated from time to time.
Ha- that’s awesome! And that one chick does look like Tonya Harding- I think that every time I see her!
You can count me as a sometimes-watcher. And yes, I desperately want to throw away dumpsters full of trash and then bleach everything in sight.
My grandmother was a hoarder to a certain extent. No petrified animal feces, and her plumbing was all functional. But she bought her food in caseload lots, and locked away the good sheets and towels while her visiting family used threadbare linens.
When I start talking about saving stuff, or salvaging items that might be fixable, my sister calls me by my grandmother’s name.
My brother-in-law had a more extreme case of hoarding. He kept it all, trash or treasure. And it probably lead to his demise. It’s truly heart breaking to see.
To Canvasshoes: OMG, somebody who knows what “commercialling” is! When my mother was in a good mood, she let us “commercial” our chores! These days, though, you can paint an entire room in the time it takes for a typical commercial break!
~VOW
The Hallkids hate it when I watch these shows. I spend commercial breaks texting them about how disgusting the Hoarder’s houses are. “You would not believe this–she’s been using her bathtub as her toilet and it’s full of used toilet paper!” type of stuff. It grosses them out.
I also go on cleaning/decluttering binges afterwards, and my house is neither dirty nor cluttered.
One of the things I remember most about that episode was when the cleaning crews found a chicken that had literally been squashed like a pancake underneath all her junk. It looked like something out of a cartoon.
I tend to watch pieces of these shows – I am fascinated by the sheer volume of stuff that these people have accumulated. But when the shouting and screaming starts, I have to turn the channel. Too much anxiety from a stressed-out childhood.
I haven’t seenm Hoarding: Buried Alive (what channel is that one on?) but I’ve seen quite a few episodes of Hoarders. (It’s on our TiVo but I admit we’re not caught up.) I am fascinated by the show. There were a number of years when I was with my ex-husband when our house got out of hand. Not to the level of the homes on the show, or even close, but pretty badly cluttered. I don’t blame my ex-husband for it, nor do I blame myself. It seems to have been a combination of both of our personalities combined with the additional work needed in raising a small child–housework just didn’t get done. When we separated and I got my own place and he got his own place, both of us kept house far better than we did together (though before we had a child, we kept our house pretty neat. We had a weekly chore list and everything. I think we were both just too tired with raising a child and so on).
In some ways because of those experiences with our house, I can sort of relate to the people on Hoarders. I also keep a lot of things I could possibly get rid of. For example, when my grandparents passed, I inherited a TON of stuff. Knicknacks, serving dishes, boxes of monogrammed handkerchiefs, and all sorts of things. My mom didn’t want it so it skipped a generation. I feel obligated to keep it because it was my grandparents’… even though I don’t really need or use it and it just sits in boxes in the attic. Likewise I have things from my son’s childhood that I keep just because I feel like I’m supposed to, but in reality he says he doesn’t care and they just sit in boxes.
Next time we move (next summer when my husband finishes residency) we are going to go through everything and be really harsh about getting rid of things we don’t actively want to keep and use. This will include some of my grandparents’ stuff and some of the stuff from my son’s childhood. I think that having watched so many episodes of Hoarders will help me make the decisions about what to keep and what not to. I’ll go so far as to say that I’m not sure I’d be able to get rid of much of any of it if I hadn’t watched the show so much. The show has taught me that you can get rid of things even if they’re sentimental, etc. I think one thing I’ll do is photograph things that I’m getting rid of, so that I can keep their memories without having to keep the objects themselves.
That said I really have trouble with the Hoarders episodes that involve finding dead animals or abused/neglected animals on the property. That really gets to me on a deep level and upsets me. I wish they had a little note at the beginning of such episodes warning that they contained “bad pet content” so that I could avoid watching them.
I watch these occasionally to make sure that I’m not an actual hoarder. Good news! I’m not a hoarder–I’m just messy. But you can walk through my house, there are places to sit, and there are neither animal carcasses or piles of rotting garbage to be found.
I had friends who were hoarders when I was young. You literally could not set a glass down on any surface in the house, and there was a path you had to negotiate to get through the living room. Nicest people in the world, too. At least they didn’t hoard garbage–it was mostly empty containers, kitchen things, books, etc. Also have an ex who was a hoarder. His door would only open abut 10 inches, and within 3 years his areas of the house were piled a minumum of 4 feet high with…stuff. Empty boxes, office supplies, everything he got ahold of. It was frustrating as hell, even to someone with standards as low as mine.
Give me my messy house anyday.
I watch hoarders on monday, which is my friday. Honestly, it makes me get up tuesday am & clean my house really well and without putting things off.
OpalCat I feel the same way about animal hoarding - I know it happens, but it’s too upsetting to watch. One thing when it’s stacks of old newspapers and trash, quite another when it’s sentient beings trapped in abysmal conditions.
My mom has twice volunteered to help clean up the houses of hoarders. One belonged to a friend of a friend, who had passed away. The house wasn’t too disgusting, though: he didn’t hoard trash or animals, just… stuff. He had a back bedroom that was literally packed solid with diapers. Unused, thank God. Baby diapers, still in their original packaging, filling up a standard sized bedroom like it was a packing crate. (The hoarder had no children.) She also found a plastic bag filled with polar bear paws. The guy who had owned the house had been an elderly gentleman, and his dad had been the proverbial Great White Hunter back before WWI. They also found a collection of antique firearms that were quite valuable.
More recently, a friend of hers fell in her home and broke her hip, and the paramedics could barely get to her, there was so much crap in her house. The water in her place had been shut off for years. There was three inches of bug shit caked into the bottom of her kitchen sink - which they didn’t find out until day two or three of the cleaning endeavor, because that’s how long it took them to get enough crap out of the kitchen that they could enter it.
What makes that case really bizarre is that the woman is very well-off, and is absolutely addicted to antiquing. For the last forty years, every weekend, she’d go around all her favorite antique stores and buy whatever caught her fancy, and just pile it up in her house. There was literally buried treasure in her house. At one point, my mom was cleaning under the bed (the dust on the floor was about six inches deep), and found a couple of paper envelopes. She stuck them in her pocket for the moment, so she could keep cleaning, and forgot about them. When she got home, she found them in her pocket and opened them up. In one envelope were two solid gold dollar coins, minted during the California gold rush - they were smaller than dimes. The other had a diamond the size of a pencil eraser.
More or less happy ending to that story: her friend was tearfully grateful to have her house back. And due to her health (she can’t get out much anymore, so she can’t collect more crap) and her age (she’s eighty, and doesn’t have another forty years to build her collection back up) it isn’t likely to get that bad again.
A sort-of friend of mine when I was a kid lived in a hoarded house, I think. Or borderline so. I spent the night at her house once and the whole place stank like sewage. Found out why. The toilet had stopped working at some point, and so they got some kind of toilet that was… I’m not even sure what purpose it was made for, but instead of emptying into any kind of pipes, it just had a tank built in underneath it and when you flushed it, it just went into that tank. They never emptied the tank. The toilet was backed up but they still used it.
They also had goats, a lot of goats, in a small pen in the back yard. And some (large breed) dogs that they kept in a cage in the back yard. I always felt so sad for those dogs. Nobody ever talked to them, pet them, took them out, or anything. Just gave them food and water and let them sit in their cages. One day, they broke out of the cage (it was just made of chicken wire and wood) and killed one of the baby goats. My “friend”'s dad took the dogs into the desert and shot them as punishment. 
I was actually scheduled to be on that horrible, horrible show “Clean House” which I had never seen before I was scheduled to be on it so I didn’t know how horrible it was. I only knew they cleaned up in exchange for showing the world. (A neighbor of mine works on the show and when I found out I invited her over to tell me if I qualified.)
I actually worked on making it worse in anticipation, then they bailed on me at the last minute because they were too weirded out by what I do for a living.
I’m not a filthy person with dog shit and diapers everywhere, I’ve just gotten completely overwhelmed over the past 5 years of the nightmare that’s been my life. The vast majority of what fills my space is various forms of paper and office supplies.
I work on it sporadically and make progress, my biggest issue now is the fact that the outside black widows have made their way into my kitchen, which has a corner piled with paper and boxes of stuff. Black widows like undisturbed areas. I pretty much feared this would happen and it did, so now I’m working my way through the cupboards and drawers vacuuming, spraying lemon oil… sigh. I have so much to do in other ways it is hard to make the house the priority.
I called one of those organizing companies, they quoted $2500. Oh well.
Like papergirl, I watch these shows a lot to see if maybe I might be a hoarder. Mostly I’ve determined, like her, that I’m just horribly messy. A slob even. But, what’s scary to me, is watching these people and seeing them do things I do. Say things I’ve said or thought. When I was still married, I refused to let my husband clean up because I didn’t want him touching my stuff. When he moved a box of books to the garage at one point I flipped out, completely furious that he had decided to do that with MY books. I’ve also got boxes of things from my childhood. Old stuffed animals, old homework, old knick knacks, that I can’t bring myself to get rid of. Even the ‘if you haven’t thought about it in a year’ trick doesn’t work for me. Because once I open up a box and see that item, all the memories and emotions associated with it come rushing back and I just can’t get rid of it. Bottom line is, I’m pretty certain that I’m one tragedy away from becoming like these people. Sadly, I think the main thing that’s been holding me back is just the lack of money.
[quote=“AngelSoft, post:37, topic:604950”]
Even the ‘if you haven’t thought about it in a year’ trick doesn’t work for me./QUOTE]
I think that’s a bogus rule, anyway. I know that one of my many boxes contains, for example, the video of Dominic’s birth (tastefully taken from the area behind my shoulders–no bloody crotch-cam) which I haven’t seen in years, but would never have knowingly gotten rid of, so I have to keep hoping that one of these days, I’ll open the right box. If I threw away sight-unseen any box I hadn’t opened/used in a year I’d lose things like that forever.
The better way to do the “one year box” plan - assuming you’re not in emergency-level hoarding, just too-much-stuff hoarding - is to pack a box full of things that you’re not sure about, maybe tape a packing list into an envelope on one side, and seal the box, then put it in storage. Now wait a year, and if you didn’t need anything in there, it’s probably time to be throwing it out or donating the items inside. Then you won’t risk the “but I might toss something important and hidden” problem. If you have to go through old boxes and repack them to do this, then do it.
I had a sister-in-law fill our back porch, much of the basement, and her half of the garage when she lived in the same two-flat as us. She cleaned the garage after the landlord threatened legal action, as the new tenant would need to get in there. I dealt with the back porch, and have slowly been cleaning bits of the basement. It sucks because garbage pickup above and beyond our one-smallish-can-per-week (and unlimited recyclables) is pricey, and she didn’t just leave usable stuff down there. There is a large amount of paper garbage (boxes, packing paper, etc.). I’ve threatened before but get the outcry about family heirlooms and crap down there, plus she’s already cost us thousands in unpaid-back loans (yes, you should never loan money to family, but my husband believed her when she said she would, and wouldn’t have outright given her that much as a gift), so it bugs me to think about paying to have her crap hauled away. This year, it’s a promise for us for spring cleaning. One-time dumpster rental and a massive stuff removal into it. Meanwhile I go down there every week and pick a couple small things to put in with our trash.
I’m doing that. I’m taking pictures and taking notes. It helps.
My aunt had dozens of boxes of Christmas things, and everyone in the family remembered her and Christmas. My grandmother kept every letter that had ever been sent to her, I think. When I started going through their stuff, I started a list. A year later, when the list hadn’t done it, I started a blog. I doubt that anyone reads it, but it really does help.
The diaries may be too scary to touch, but they don’t take up much room. I’m determined to get through all of the letters and pictures.