I often see estate sales in my neighborhood. The people died. The family hires a company and the estate sale offers everything in the house. Furniture, clothing, dishes, appliances etc. They practically give some of the stuff away.
I have wondered what happens with a hoarder.
Does the family have to clean up the house before an estate sale?
Heh. Until Rilchiam comes back, try reading this thread: Ask the housecleaner who specializes in squalor recovery. Keep in mind she’s mostly dealing with living clients, and people she’s not emotionally invested in.
There’s also this great thread: Ask the Adult Child of a Hoarder/Clutterer for personal information.
I’ve been gradually going through my mom’s things for 2 1/2 years now. She was a moderate hoarder, as is my dad (but he lives elsewhere), and I am a recovering hoarder.
If I didn’t go through every little thing, I wouldn’t find things like rare photos of my parents when they were dating. While going through a dresser drawer, I found my grandmother’s gold watch in a pantyhose package under some old bingo flyers. You just never know.
I get caught up in looking at pictures and reading silly things we kids wrote when we were little. Sometimes I don’t feel like dealing with any of it for a couple of months. I’m probably the worst person for getting the job done, but the house isn’t going anywhere. I plan to be done, including having the house fixed up, this year.
"For some children of hoarders, however, walking away is not an option. In San Diego, Greg’s progress has slowed in recent weeks because he, like many children of hoarders, also feels the pull of random items found amid his mother’s hoard. "
On the second page of the article theres this and bit more to explain why its taking so long.
Otara
I’ve dealt with this one and a half times.
When my mother died I was the oldest and closest so I got the fun of doing it. I cleaned for a month and didn’t even get through everything. I know that I lost some things that I would have wanted. For instance we never found any of my mother’s jewelry. It could be that someone got to it, but everyone claims they didn’t. There were letters that my father claimed were written by people like George Washington and a few other people. Never found them either.
My mother’s yearbooks were accidentally sold as I never got a chance to look through everything. I’m sure there were photos that I never found and a ton of other things that were just lost or thrown away.
It was horrible and made me start to just throw things away.
The half that I’m dealing with now is my great aunt. She’s in a nursing home. While she doesn’t hoard as bad as I’ve seen, she does keep a lot things. I’ve been going through it trying to find letters, photos and things like that. I’m also taking anything that may be donated to the historical society since she’s lived here for 90 years.
Unfortunately a few months ago my aunt and uncle decided to go through the basement and throw everything away. And I do mean everything. I didn’t get a chance to go through the basement at all and I know I lost so good stuff.
My aunt took to putting letters, money, photos and other things in all sorts of odd places. I’ve found a ton of photos dating back 100 years in first aid kits. My aunt and uncle would have thrown them away. I’ve found letters from my great grandmother in odd places. This is the great grandmother that no one in the family knew and everyone claimed no one kept in touch with so the loss of the letters would really suck. I’ve found 4-5 at most and there must be more as they talk about the other ones.
I’ve spent hours getting boxes full of stuff and throwing away most of it, but I have to go through every envelope, book, box, and anything else you can stash something in.
I really don’t care about the ‘stuff’, there’s lots of silverware and coins around. But the letters and photos are what I’m really looking for and those I don’t want to lose but I’m sure I will.
Being a hoarder has to suck, but going through it all, if you really care about getting something out of it is even worse. I’ve been going through my stuff and getting rid of it. I’m also keeping the family items and making sure that other people know what it is. I hope no one in my family has to go through what I’ve gone through.
Like most home improvement jobs, the fantasy of “getting in there, grabbing stuff, hauling it to the garbage” is a lot easier than the reality of 500 back-breaking trips to the dumpster. People can fit a LOT of stuff into a house.
Is it really that big a deal? Yes it is, and not only that, there’s no one way to deal with it.
Because there’s no one way to be a “hoarder,” which is fast becoming a very loose term. There are as many ways a house can become uninhabitable as there are ways a person can become overweight. And we all know what a loaded subject that is, especially when you get into definitions and degrees of being overweight. Similarly, there are degrees of squalor, and that page doesn’t really get into how squalor escalates. Some people just never throw anything away, no matter how gross it is. And some of those people lead a sedentary lifestyle, but some don’t. Some people used to have a nice house, but stopped caring; others still care, but are unable to do much for themselves. Hoarding can mean loose, sloppy piles, or it can mean boxes stacked to the ceiling, or it can be both in the same house. Animals may or may not be involved. And so on.
You can’t lose weight for someone. You can only show them how. And with house recovery, so much of it is about making decisions, and I cannot make clients’ decisions for them. However, it often happens that eating right starts to feel right, and becomes a habit. Likewise, I’ve had plenty of clients get in the groove after they’ve been watching me for a couple hours. The best is when I leave in late afternoon and come back in the morning to find that big chunks have disappeared overnight. They’re taking initiative, and I don’t have to prod them into making decisions about their own stuff.
There have been some lost causes, though. There was the OCD woman I described in another thread, who seemed to think I was there to help her maintain her hoard, and another middle-aged woman who I strongly suspect only engaged me so she could say “All right, I hired somebody; you happy now? Fucko off!” to whoever had been nagging her. And the woman who spent eight hours just staring at the TV while I (almost literally) shoveled out her kitchen and two bathrooms. I was supposed to come back; she postponed, then canceled and never rescheduled. All three of them were just. not. into it, is the point, and that’s why nothing got done in the first two instances. The third one, I think she was depressed, perhaps clinically. I’d like to think I helped a bit, but who knows.
And I doubt I could have done much for this homeowner when she was alive. I’ve been reading that blog for some time now. If I did the link correctly, you can go to the entry titled “Randomness,” about halfway down the page. The homeowner not only saved burnt-out light bulbs. but labeled them with the date they burned out. She would not have been my client, or at most, she would have been one of those I-gave-it-a-shot clients. At any rate, we would never have gotten to the light bulbs, because she would have been too far gone to let anyone that deep into the house, if she let them in at all. She was a compulsive hoarder, and that’s a whole different animal from “I’m depressed” or “I’m disabled” or “I work long hours.” Those are physical/practical issues, but people with mental issues need a therapist, not a housecleaner. Nothing the cleaner does will take without the help of a therapist.
For me, compulsive hoarding is when the following does not apply: Everything* in the kitchen belongs in a kitchen, and everything that belongs in a kitchen is in the kitchen. And the same for other rooms. It’s okay if every available surface in the kitchen is clogged with dirty dishes, and even if a few bowls and tumblers have wandered into other rooms. All I have to do is wash them and find a place for them. OTOH, I know I’m dealing with a compulsive hoarder when I go into the bedroom and find boxes of dishes, or even just loose (and precariously stacked) dishes. That no one is ever going to use, that there’s not enough room for unless you want to use display cabinets, and there might not even be room for those. That’s someone who is not going to change without psychiatric help. The client in the first scenario might end up jettisoning 75% of their kitchenware, once they see it all together. The second client will not let go of so much as a teaspoon. And if they’re alive and have any veto power, that’s how it will stay.
*Allowing for some flexibility in the use of the term “everything,” of course. It’s okay to have a book or two in the kitchen. It’s quite another to have a whole collection of books in the kitchen because you ran out of space in the living room. Or the garage.
Rilchiam, I can see you’re doing the Lord’s work since you’re actually helping hoarders who still live in the house. Personally, I’m surprised you have ANY success stories because if someone has that habit, I’d be surprised if they’d ever let anyone ‘mess with their stuff’. I’ll admit I’m going off a sample size of one, where the junk is stacked to the ceiling, mostly in boxes, with virtually no squalor. It was just an instance of “Mom and Dad died, I can’t bear to deal with their stuff, so I’ll just fill my garage with it as neatly as possible (sometime around 1987) and leave it there never to be touched again”. As I mentioned, I can’t deal with it now because the in-laws object that I am going to throw out some cherished thing among the junk. To me, however, it looks like a simple weekend job, albeit one with a lot of manual labor that would require some help. It looks to be 99% junk. Even possible photo albums of interest are falling apart and wrecked, so I’d chuck those too with one or two exceptions. The likelihood I would save any of it would be inversely proportional to its size. So yes, I might set aside a cheap watch for later examination and throw out a broken Tiffany floor lamp that was worth a whole lot more. Guess what? I don’t care because the real prize is a clean house that can now be fixed up and sold. I’ll never know about the $100,000 in stock certificates stuffed between the pages of a 1953 Reader’s Digest, and not knowing, I’ll never miss it either.
I get the impression that the problem is that the people cleaning up after the hoarders are themselves either also hoarders of sorts or approach it like it’s a treasure hunt. I’d approach it like I’m cleaning up all the discarded plates and half eaten food after a huge party. That is, a whole lot of garbage with a few real utensils scattered about that you will try to save, but not stress about if a nice metal spoon gets chucked along the way.
If the guy taking six months to clean is the next of kin, then there is a chance that he never learned how to clean. “What’s the big deal?” you ask. Same big deal that keeps people morbidly obese when everyone knows they “just” need to eat less. It is not the physical act of cleaning they can’t manage, it is the mental discipline needed to keep at for more than 10 minutes at a time without giving in to either panic or hopelessness.
Heh…Yarster, thank you. You’re actually the second person this month to say that. But I was trying to say that I’m not helping true hoarders; they’re beyond my help. The people I’m helping are people who have let their houses pig up out of intertia or external problems like physical disability. And when they call me, it’s usually because something inspired them to change. Often it’s kid-related: pregnant, youngest kid walking, youngest kid out of the house. Or it’s “I got sober recently, and now I can see my place is a disaster.” Or “SO moved out; now I want to pitch all the other extraneous junk!” They have it in them to change; they just need someone to guide them through it. But the ones who freak when you try to throw away an empty box – no. As I said, they need to change mentally before they can make tangible changes.
My best friend is a hoarder. His trailor is as clean as he can manage without dealing with all the stuff. He dusts his piles of empty dog food bags. Which he keeps to use to take the trash out, but he never takes the trash out. He’s got 2 dogs and about 6 cats now.
He’s also got other issues, so while he’s in jail, I’ll go clean up the obvious trash. Its hard, because after I get through the hundreds of empty but clean plastic bowls and the empty bags, I get to his workshop. The boxes overwhelm me. I’ve found reciepts from before he moved in.
It ticks him off. There are times that I’m afraid for my life when he comes home and finds that he can walk through his home. I’m also very careful about opening containers, that rattlesnake in the in the cat litter tub wasn’t a good surprise.
I have the title to his home, I need it to bail him out of jail. When he dies, I’m planning to take all of his pets and then leave a lit cigarette on his couch.
Shrug, my father died in February of 2000. I finally convinced Mom to toss away his law school books last Spring: 10 years after he’d died, more than 30 since those books had last been opened. I expect that when Mom dies, it will be Littlebro and me vs Middlebro and his wife: we’ll be wanting to toss most of whatever she has (I’ll be taking away boxes and boxes of books, some of which have been earmarked for me since my age was in single digits); they’ll be saying “but it’s a heirloom!” OK, listen: would you have bought it? No. Would I have bought it? No. Ok, so if an antiquarian wants it great and if not, it’s so much wood for the midsummer bonfires.
Simple solution: If Middle Brother and Wife think it’s so valuable, then send it to their home. Let them (and their descendants) deal with it. They’ll either discover that Mom’s Dad’s Uncle’s mass produced table from the 1920s is a piece of cheap crap, or they’ll amass a nice start for a bonfire for their own children.
Oh, I plan on doing that. Anything they insist can not be tossed must be taken by the person who says it’s untossable: a date is set by me, and if that date has arrived and that person hasn’t taken whatever (s)he wants, a moving company will take it to their house (the one nearest to Mom’s, Middlebro’s wife has one in the ass-end-of-nowhere: transfer there is their problem). The bill for the movers is paid by me and split three ways according to the volume delivered in each house.
Otherwise, Middlebro will still be swearing up and down that he’s taking his part “any day now!” three years later… (I co-parented the bros; I know their buttons and inner workings almost as if I’d installed them). Littlebro will be perfectly happy to pay the movers, anything that involves less sweat for him is good in his book.
Found a link - via Rilchiam’s link for Greg’s wife’s (Sidney) blog about her MIL’s house and their progress - her recent update on the “progress” and how tough it’s been. 
I read that great book, Stuff, about hoarding and simple collecting. The author made the point that if you have two dozen pens and you use them, plan to use them let other used them, you are fine. If you have two dozen pens and some do not work, and some are too special to use, then you have a problem.
As for myself, I live a nomadic life, ejecting nouns out every time I move.
This is dead on. I had to sort out my aunt’s house. She wasn’t a hoarder as much as incredibly messy. It took a very long time to sort things out. I found documents in the oddest of places.
And after you’ve found them all, you have to sort them out and winnow them.
I highly recommend this book for a bit of insight into the thinking process of hoarders. I think the authors did a very good job interviewing the subjects they used, and I think the subjects were fascinating.
Well, duh! You don’t throw away an empty box. You fill it full of crap, THEN you throw it out!