My father is one of those hoarders. Our house was always a total mess because of all of his junk, especially once my mother got sick and couldn’t keep on top of it. When I moved in with my current husband, it was a revalation. I could start cleaning things and actually finish in my lifetime! I could have people over to my house without it being a total embarrasment!
But my husband had a very large and expensive house that he had struggled to hold onto during his divorce. His nasty, rich ex-wife and ex-mother-in-law pulled some kind of nasty legal trick during the divorce and managed to put a $72K second mortgage on the house. (The multi-millionaire mother-in-law had put a big down payment the house, but said the money was a gift and never had to be repaid… oh, but of course she wanted to make it look like a loan to the IRS, just for tax purposes, they were NEVER going to have to pay it back… well, guess what. Ex-wife sluts around on him, he can’t take it anymore and files for divorce, and so ex-wife and millionaire monster-in-law use it to ruin him financially. Which leads me to the opinion that the majority of rich people really fucking suck and are actively, purposefully, evil.)
My husband had gotten a very high interest mortgage in order to get the house and had very high payments. He had planned to scrimp and save and bite the bullet for a year or so and then refinance to something more reasonable. But of course, with that second mortgage thing on there, there was no way he was going to get refinanced. When my father retired (after my mother died), he asked him to move into our empty basment because he thought that maybe with the extra rent we could manage to hold on to the house. I thought it was a bad idea. My aunt (my father’s sister) thought it was a bad idea. He did it anyway, and brought along my shiftless brother.
My brother sponged off of us for a year until my husband got him a job. We lost the house anyway. We all moved to a rental house on the other side of the city, which wasn’t too bad, until the asshole landlord, who had assured us we were his favorite tenants ever, and he would love to rent to us for years, suddenly decided he had to sell the house and split it with his wife in his divorce.
My husband tried to convince my father and brother to move on their own, so that my husband and I and the kids could get an apartment. My father said there was no way he could manage to get a place on his own. We moved again, and a wealthy friend and co-worker of my husband’s helped us with a lease-purchase on a house. So we took the old crazy man, his five U-hauls full of useless junk (and I mean REALLY useless–old issues of Computer Shopper from 1985, empty beer bottles, paperback books that had gotten wet and then gotten moldy), and my shiftless brother.
They were giving us rent, and because we had to get a five bedroom house to be able to fit them, we couldn’t afford it without that rent. We also spent a whole lot of money we didn’t have on U-hauling several truckloads of his shit over here. My husband did not want all of my father’s crap to take over our house like it did my house growing up, so he tried to convince him to throw it away. My father completely refused. We had the mess confined to his room at this point, but we didn’t want it expanding to the rest of the house, and we were worried that it was a fire and health hazard, so my husband would try to surreptitiously throw away the garbage. And this wasn’t anything that had any type of use, nothing that would reasonably have sentimental value like pictures.
My father would go through the garbage and take things out that my husband had thrown away. My father apparently got mad that we were throwing away his precious empty beer bottles, and sneakily made plans for him and my brother to move to a trailer park. We wouldn’t have known about it beforehand at all, except my father left the lease out on top of the refrigerator in the garage, and it was right at my eye level when I went out into the garage to go to the car. I looked at it and discovered that they had put money down on this trailer. The plan, apparently, was that we wouldn’t know until the day they moved out.
This was a few weeks ago, and they are moving out today. If we had had a few months to get things in order, we might have been fine. But as it is, we are screwed. He screwed over me, my husband and his grandsons just to assure that no one throws away his useless garbage. There is no way to get him help for this-- he refuses to discuss it, and apparently thinks this is perfectly normal behavior. I’m just sick of him at this point. I don’t really want to see him once him and his truckloads of shit are out of here. He screwed us over, now he is on his own. Any troubles he might have in the future, I don’t want to hear about it. You made it not my problem anymore. Get out of my life, you crazy old asshole.
