We never saw the armoires. The doctor and the cleaning expert wouldn’t let her bring them in – and rightfully so. There still was heaps of junk everywhere. And there was both a tower of shit and a tour of shit. The cats pooped everywhere, literally. Appliances, couch, everywhere.
Yeah, all we could see of the armoires was the short end of one of them, wedged behind another wall of stuff inside the storage shed. I don’t know what that $2 wig woman was thinking, it would have been a day-long project just to get the armoires out of the shed, much less make space for them inside the house.
And yeah, “tour of shit” is a good name for it. I don’t remember any other hoard where they removed all of the appliances and threw them out rather then at least cleaning a couple of them. There were a couple of replaced refrigerators here and there, but I don’t remember seeing an “after” picture with all the appliances gone before.
Decided it made more sense for these threads to be One. Merging.
What is the title of the episode?
Hoarders Season 5 Episode 8 – Dee/Jan, viva.
Well I think we have now seen the pinnacle…the nadir. The ultimate.
I had though the ultimate was reached with the woman who was living in a single spot, a hole created in the mounds of used diapers around her. Of course I now know that the used diapers kept around is common, although she still represents the worst because she was living directly in the pile of them.
I suppose some people would still consider her the worst, due to proximity. But to me, the fact that her excrement was still being deposited in some kind of closable receptacle, no matter how close she kept it, was something.
Maintaining an open pit of ever-growing feces that one must squat directly over to add to? Revisiting that mound daily, in the dark or not, to contribute to it with one’s nether bits balanced above it?? I mean, given the height of that thing, how was she actually managing to add to it at that point in time?
And why exactly are these people having their water turned off? If it’s a money issue, shouldn’t lots of other things have gone away as well, like food, electricity, etc? (If I were in her position, I would fetch buckets of water from public sources just to keep the toilet going… because if her toilet works like all the toilets I’ve ever had, water added to the bowl in sufficient quantity will trigger a flush, it doesn’t require running water in the pipes. Don’t ask me to explain, I only know I’ve seen it more than once. I believe when we were having plumbing work and the water had been turned off…)
I’m also wondering about the definition of “hoarder” - this woman didn’t actually hoard, to my eye. She was just living in complete filth. She didn’t appear to be adding anything to her environment, apart from the detritis of her and her animals’ existence. That seems a little different than “hoarding”…that’s more like simple life-threatening depression immobilizing you.
My guess would be that she was standing on the seat and letting fly.
As for the water, I think what often happens is that something in the plumbing catastrophically breaks, but the hoard prevents them from having a plumber come in and fix it, so the only alternative is to shut off the water. You’re right that she could flush with a bucket of outside water, but maybe this person just wasn’t that organized in her thinking.
I became a Hoarder, by accident many years ago. I suffered a back injury which, somewhat bizarrely, left me able to walk, but not use my arms properly.
Living alone and having inconsiderate friends and family meant I ended up living in a hovel. I was able to wash, dress and feed myself but everything else became too much of a struggle as it involved bending, or lifting beyond the limits of my injury.
Then, when I was better, it just became a case of “too much, can’t clean” I became frightened to throw anything out in case it was toxic and caused some sort of major problem, and frightened to move anything incase I caught some dreadful disease from it.
I can only liken it to OCD. You know you’re being ridiculous and should clear out the crap and tidy, but you can’t bring yourself to do it and invent more and more outlandish reasons not to.
Somewhere along the line I bought goggles, masks and rubber gloves and started clearing things out. Thankfully I’d never left food anywhere. It took me a long time I get through the mess.
Unfortunately I relapse every time my back goes “out” and the cycle starts again.
I do know screaming abuse doesn’t help.
I have mentioned somewhere that I consider those types of situations not hoarding, but squalor. Someone pointed out (rightly so) that people can be a combination of both. I haven’t seen the show but it sounds more like squalor to me.
I have relatives that come very close to, but just shy of both hoarding and squalor. One went forever with a broken fridge because they wouldn’t call someone to fix it, who would have to come inside and see. She slept on the couch because the bed was full of clothes 4 feet high. The other one’s phone stopped working, but rather than have someone come out, just switched to her cell phone permanently. Neither of them are anything like on the TV show, they seem to realize on some level how far they can take it before it’s gone too far.
The “hoarding/squalor” combo pinnacle/nadir was reached in an episode from Season 2 (I’m working my way through, maybe this will be topped) with a family where Mom was an insulin-dependent diabetic who also supposedly had a long list of other ailments that led to her living on disability.
Her husband and two children lived with her in a house that was hip-deep not only in the usual trash and needles, which was plenty bio-hazard enough, but it was alive with roaches and my own favorite, black widows. But the roaches…well, there wasn’t anywhere you could look that wasn’t alive with movement of roaches. The refrigerator was, as the exterminators called it, an incubator. It was brimming with them.
If you know the math of roaches, the visible hoards numbered in the tens of thousands. Probably hundreds of thousands. Meaning the house had millions.
Watching the daughter cook she was constantly brushing them away to keep them off the food…although how she thought they hadn’t already been all over the food before she started cooking it I don’t know.
I could live among piles of shit easier than I could live in that. Even one roach makes me scream and gives me heart palpitations. I could never have crossed the threshold of that place. It was an honest to god nightmare.
Dr. Green is very black, isn’t she? With plenty of sparkly golden eye-shadow. It should be green, you know, to keep with the theme. By the way, I’m not a stalker or anything but she has a Facebook page where she gives out life affirming-- I’ll say advice and not platitudes.
I have to say, however, that she was not very helpful to Arm-War lady.
Sounds similar to the friend I may have mentioned upthread. Her fridge is wonky, the answering machine quit working almost two years ago, and the microwave is unpredictable. She has plenty of money but won’t spend a dime to fix or replace anything. Her TV is ancient and she has never had a working DVD player or a computer in the home. God forbid a delivery person should show up inside the house and see the mess in there. I suspect she won’t get rid of her decrepit cell phone because she is attached to the text messages and voice mails in it.
I was amazed that anyone wanted to keep helping Arm-War lady after her reaction to the kitchen refurbishment.
I missed her reaction, sadly – what was it?
It was very meh. It was the reaction you would give someone if they wiped off the counter with a damp paper towel. “Oh, yeah, that looks a little better. Thanks.”
She complained that there weren’t any curtains. I wanted to snatch that wig right off her crazy, entitled head.
Yeah, she was terrible. Ridiculous.
I honestly wish they’d stick with the people who are at the point where they are overwhelmed with the job of cleaning up. Those are the people who most need things cleaned. Most of these other people need therapy for a while to get to the point where cleaning their house is a good idea.
It’s akin to forcing someone to quit drinking without addressing the fundamental problem that caused it in the first place. You’re going to relapse, and the relapse is going to be worse. And people are going to be reticent to help you a second time.
Plus, I just don’t like how they show these people–hoarding is caused by a mental disorder, and these people are being shown to the entire world to be hateful. Of course, when you attack a belief as deep seated as this, people are going to be hateful. This stuff hurts. But the show is shot in such a way that you don’t think about that. No, it’s set up so you feel horribly angry at these people. And that’s really what a hoarder needs–more people to be mad at them for their actions. That’s surely not going to cause them emotional issues and trigger a relapse.
I’m not trying to hate on anyone who likes the show, seriously. I’m sure that you guys, even in your recreational anger, realize that these are people who need help, and not people you should be mean to. It just bugs me, that’s all.
I think the hoarders elicit such a reaction because many of them appear to be otherwise normal, decent, nice people.
It’s easy to watch a show like Intervention where the subjects are so obviously fucked up, and be judgmental due to the often blatant belligerence of their behavior, but the hoarders are hiding their “addiction” behind closed doors, and only really get “caught” when their hoard spills out into the yard or someone “outs” them to authorities. The drug use, like the hoarding, is clearly a symptom of a much deeper psychological problem, but the hoarders can seem perfectly normal when away from their homes, and that makes them seem so much crazier.
I don’t think that’s true, and that’s not what I feel. I feel very sad, as well as “there but for the grace of the fates…” If people feel angry, that’s on the people who feel that way.