I’m the exact opposite of a hoarder. I have an obsessive need to get rid of things. Donating bags of my old stuff to charity gives me a rush. So does having a closet that’s almost empty. I used to keep absolutely everything when I was younger. My mom was the same way, and now we’ve both done a 180º. The only exception for me is my writing and my old drawings from when I used to be into art. But I can keep all of that in a small space.
The hardest thing to do was to donate (and often throw away) some things that had belonged to my grandmother, who I was very close to. We couldn’t do it until this summer, 15 years after she died. But my mom and I both looked at each other and said we had to do it. And I have no regrets.
So shows like this are porn for me! I love cleaning. I love watching people clean. I really love seeing something start off as a wreck and become clean.
I continue to be amazed that the people featured in this show are willing to participate. My experience with a family member who hoarded was that the intense shame attached to the behavior was so powerful, they couldn’t even acknowledge the extent of the problem.
So, when can I pencil you in to come by my house? Next Thursday is good for me…?
Serious question for the Dopers: I have an old chest full of newspapers that my grandparents kept. They’re each in a plastic sleeve/bag thing. They’re almost all the New York Times (my grandparents lived in Larchmont, NY, which is very close to NYC) for the day of/day after major news events. For example, the NYT issue announcing Kennedy’s assassination. That sort of thing. I added my own by putting in the Washington Post issue about 911 the next day. I think that’s the only one I’ve added. So my question is… is there any value in these papers? I would feel very, very strange throwing them away, and I don’t really have any desire to sell them or anything… but is it “hoardy” of me to keep them?
Too true. Saddest and worst I ever saw was an old woman who had no running water or power so she used diapers which she kept stacked all over the place. Horrific.
Depending on which papers they are they could be worth a little, although my understanding is that event newspapers are the most valuable if they are from the town in which the event occurred. I heard this from an ephemera dealer so I trust it, but it still seems odd to me.
I do think that more of the recent hoarders on the shows are suffering from more serious mental illnesses than the earlier episodes. The episodes with piles of diapers, etc., are more severe than the episodes than I remember from earlier seasons. Whereas most of the people in the earlier seasons seemed relatively straightforward in terms of manifesting anxiety, the later episodes have seemed to include more people with serious depression, bipolar disorder, or maybe schizophrenia.
As always in these threads, I cannot recommend this bookenough.
I just finished listening to this on audiobook! Not because of any recommendation, but because it was on the $4 book sale at audible.com a few months back. I agree, it’s a good book.
A friend of mine is a hoarder and as on one of these shows - well, she had her own special episode because of who she is. I think her motivation to go on the show was to finally make herself clean up and be seen to be making an effort; it had got bad enough that her teenage son had had to move into his adult sister’s tiny (but tidy) flat, and she was basically afraid of social services taking him away permanently.
She was right to be worried - the house was a fire trap, and the stairs were almost impassable; the toilet is upstairs so they had to be used a lot. Nothing dirty, though; no used nappies or anything like that. Just “stuff which might come in useful one day.”
They did manage to get it tidy enough that his bedroom was clear, the living room was usable - just - and the kitchen accessible, and the stairs are mostly clear. (It’s a big house). But that’s it. In fact, since the show, the other rooms have got worse and the garden’s like something from Sleeping Beauty if she’d fallen asleep in a junk shop instead of a castle.
My friend does know this is a problem. The cause was losing everything in a big way when she was a kid (she was a political refugee). And, if you’d never been there, you’d never guess the state of the house - she’s a nice person and a good parent. All her kids have ended up really, really tidy.
Haha, sounds good! I have occasionally toyed with the idea of pursuing being an organizer/organization consultant as a career path. Might be a good fit for me. I don’t think I’d like to do the hoarding clean-up stuff though, not because I am even remotely squeamish, but because I would only want to help people who want my help and are ready to work with me.
I cleaned an apartment that clearly belonged to hoarders before “hoarding” became well-known. I was 21 and when all my neighbours moved out I made myself the superintendent and told my landlord to knock $100 off my rent. So I’d clean out apartments after someone moved. Anyways, suddenly our hallways started smelling like ammonia…more specifically “cat pee”…and we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Turned out this couple downstairs had so many cats that nobody could get a definite count. They also had FLEAS. They eventually got kicked out, but not until after their hydro had been turned off for a while. So time came for me to clean out that apartment. I knew there were fleas and I didn’t want to track them home to my cats, so I went in there with bare feet, shorts and a sports bra. I walked into the apartment…up the hallway…and just stood in their living room going “OH…MY…GOD.” There was one tiny spot to stand and the rest of the room was JUNK PILED ABOVE MY HEAD. In those few seconds I had fleas up to my thighs. It took me 4 days to clean out this apartment. I found litterboxes that didn’t have litter, just shredded paper that had been stolen from banks on garbage day. They had no children but their bedroom was filled with doll cribs, stuffed animals, and broken toys. Their fridge was full of rotting food. There was a second-hand store near our place and people would leave garbage bags of used things out front - these people stole those bags, ripped them open, and left them in their bathtub. Absolutely nothing could be salvaged due to the fleas. I took out about 100 garbage bags and I can’t remember how many broken pieces of furniture. And every single piece of furniture was broken. It was the worst mess I’d ever seen in my life. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me to take photographs until after I’d cleaned up the worst part so I didn’t bother. So yeah, I’ve actually been the one to clean up after hoarders. I still have scars on my ankles from the flea bites.
A friend of mine grew up with a hoarder mom. I’d estimate that based on the Squalor scale, she was about a 2.5. My friend, since getting married a couple years ago and purchasing a house, is having symptoms of hoarding behavior that bugs her friends and her husband. She absolutely refuses to admit she’s a hoarder but bans her husband from watching that show. So far, they don’t have enough stuff to create a problem, but as stuff piles up I’m nervous what her house will look like in 5 or 10 years.
She’s a Batman villain and ally in the same person!
I was also exposed to it early, about 30 years ago a neighbor was removed to a nursing home and it took weeks for them to clean up his house. They had a garage sale about halfway through and they let us go inside. They had already cleared the top layers but what I saw blew me away. Most memorable were the huge piles/puddles of rat shit everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE. The man had been living with rats. Huge numbers of them.
One of my sisters-in-law was sat down and made to watch some episodes by her husband. She’s almost impossible to make throw out anything that might have any remote connection to family history, like she had an absolute hissy fit when she found out her parents wanted to throw out a huge, broken, wooden sled, and she just about had to be restrained from trying to salvage it. One small saving grace is that she doesn’t have a car, and so was physically unable to take it with her to their apartment.
It kind of backfired - my brother-in-law was forced to admit that really, their situation wasn’t anywhere near any of the cases on the show. However, she did see enough of the “hoarding family ‘heirlooms’” episodes to admit that she might in fact have a problem and that she should moderate what she keeps.
I used to have really bad OCD. I suppose I still do, but you can train yourself to work around the impulses in various ways. You will never overcome them through shear will power, however by combining a certain amount of steadfastness with some cunning, I think it’s possible to prevent those impulses from taking over your life and becoming truly pathological.
The idea of saving things that remind you of family members resonates with me since the people who raised me, parents and grand parents, are all dead. My irrational impulse is to hang on to anything that could remind me of them or the security I felt when they were still around. However that simply isn’t an option - or at least I have resolved that it WILL NOT be an option.
But my resoluteness alone would not be enough. So I find ways to compromise. For this particular example, I try to find a way to preserve the essence of the objects while disposing of the objects themselves. I do this by using a digital camera to take photographs of the things I rationally know I SHOULD throw out but don’t want to. This assuages the impulse enough for my rational mind to get the upper hand.
Trying to earn a living and rebuild a business by learning and doing the jobs of 5 different people by myself (graphic artist, web designer, linux system administrator, bookkeeper, business manager, affilaite program administrator, marketing and promotions - 100% me) with raging ADD, (still!) dealing with legal issues without a lawyer, preparing to file bankruptcy without a lawyer, trying to sell my car and sell off a houseful of stuff on Ebay or otherwise prepare for a garage sale, stop foreclosure… yeah, the spiders don’t seem all that pressing. (And don’t ask how I have time to be here. I don’t. This is me demonstrating my lack of impulse control, the impulse being to avoid confronting all that stuff by hanging out here, among other things.)
I am genuinely impressed. Bravo to you! I wish I could come up with ways to manage my issues so neatly…
With my recently diagnosed mental condition as the background, I have been mercilous! I am throwing stuff away left and right. If I do not actually use it, or it was a craft supply that I thought “maybe someday I’ll make something with this” gone! I am not in any way a hoarder myself, but damn, I still find things to throw away.
I have occasionally toyed with the idea of pursuing being an organizer/organization consultant as a career path. Might be a good fit for me. I don’t think I’d like to do the hoarding clean-up stuff though, not because I am even remotely squeamish, but because I would only want to help people who want my help and are ready to work with me.