Is cleaning up after a hoarder really that big a deal?

In My Humble Opinion
41

My mom is a hoarder. The problem is my older brother, who lives with her, is also a hoarder. Incredible filth and trash fills the house and pets wander in and out as they see fit. Sad, when I was a wee lad the house was spotless.

I long past let go, in my mind, of any “heirlooms” and “memories” that may be located under mountains of junk. It’s just not worth it. I have what I want and anything else is just trash. As far as I’m concerned, is it wasn’t illegal, I’d settle the whole thing with a can of gasoline and a road flare.

I’ve told her that when she goes my brother can live there until he gets the house seized for nonpayment of taxes. Then the county can deal with it. I will talk to a lawyer to make sure I’m protected.

I’ve tried to get her to move in with me so I can take care of her, but it’s a struggle. She’s so stubborn. Until she slips on the ice and breaks a hip or something awful and needs a wheelchair will that happen. You can’t fit a wheelchair in the house.

Neither of them can drive and neither have friends with cars so I am the one going to the grocery store. I no longer buy him anything past baloney and peanut butter, and I’ve told her I’m through buying her junk like boxes and bags and tupperware. I’m sure she still finds a way to get stuff but it ain’t as bad as it used to be.

It’s kind of a race to see which one goes first. They are both in bad health. I used to worry and agonize over the situation until I realized they, with wide-open eyes, painted themselves into a corner. It was their choice. They are adults. They will not let me help them.

Sad, but life goes on.

42

Is this by Daniel Miller, Randy Strong or someone else? There are too many books called “Stuff”!

43

A client told me that he kept a large variety of pens at work, not for writing, but so that when he had a visitor, he could be seen to have a competitor’s pen in plain sight. Very important psychological tool. :wink:

44

Probably the most famous (fictional) hoarder was Citizen Kane. If they spent a little more time on the cleanup they would have found out what ‘rosebud’ meant.

You slow down trying to figure out what it all means.

45

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee. The authors have doctorates in clinical psychology and and clinical research, respectively.

46

My wife’s sort of a proto-hoarder. What she does is buy more crap than we have house available to hold. She’s mildly guilty of hanging on to crap with no value whatsoever, just because it was her grandmother’s, for example. Why we need a bunch of dusty old goofy tablecloths from the 1950s, I’ll never know, but she refuses to part with it because her grandmother had them originally.

For example, she likes paper crafts, so we have an entire room full of various papers, glues, knick-knacks, punches, etc… Plus, since she already has so much, she loses track of what she does have, so she buys more. It’s spread into our dining room.

The problem we have is that even if we go through it, there’s nowhere else to put it until we actually give away/donate it- like if we did it on a Sunday, and had to get rid of it on a Monday, for example.
I tend to apply the “1 year rule” to my own stuff when cleaning up, with a few exceptions. Basically put, if I haven’t worn it or used it within a year, I get rid of it. The exceptions tend to be high-dollar items, really utilitarian ones, or ones that don’t take a lot of space- guns, dvds, some software, tools, suits, etc…

I figure that if I haven’t missed it in a year, I likely won’t miss it at all. It’s a great rule of thumb to apply for cleaning out closets and similar areas.

47

Since I moved from coast to coast several times, and never stayed long in one place, I’ve learned to easily let go of "stuff’. 25 years ago I had a friend’s garage filled with my crap in boxes. When I got it back, and moved into a new apartment, I realized I hadn’t even looked in tha boxes for more than 3 moves. I could then look through, pull out the nessesary paperwork (which, turns out, is not nessesary) and throw the rest away. From 20 boxes to 1.

Something my mom is not capable of. :frowning:

48

Oh good Og, scrapbooking…Craft rooms, like offices, are rooms I never go into unless the client specifically asks. I figure, most people need one room in their house where they can indulge themselves. Spreading into the dining room is worrisome, though.

49

I worry I’m going to turn into a hoarder.

I do have a tendency to hang onto stuff. I have discovered some tricks that make it easier to get stuff out of the house. For example, I find it much easier psychologically to give old clothes to Goodwill than to toss them in the dumpster. So now, every 3 months or so, I fill up the back of my pickup and make a donation. Of course, that only works for stuff that’s still usable.

Sometimes I’ll ask my husband to throw something out for me. I don’t want it, can’t use it, can’t be used by anyone else… but I have trouble throwing it out. So I tell him to make it disappear and never ever tell me what happened, never refer to it or mention it. It works.

I INSIST that the dishes be washed, trash taken out… the place might be cluttered or dusty but it’s not a health hazard. I’ve actually gotten to the point I can’t stand to let the dishes go or the kitchen trash pile up so I view this has definite progress. I do have this compulsion to not tie off a garbage bag until it is FULL… which I harness to find more crap to put into one and throw out.

When I’ve cleaned out places for a landlord it’s a minefield for me - I keep thinking “Oh, I could do this with that and those clothes could go to Goodwill…” It’s hard for me to trash things I perceive as potentially useful but I’ve learned to force myself to do it. I did take a pick up load of books abandoned by a former tenant down to the local library, but that saved us the cost of paying for yet another dumpster pickup if we had just tossed them.

My biggest current problem is that between my parents moving out of their house, and dad downsizing after mom’s death my front room filled up with some of their stuff. Actually, quite a bit of their stuff. There are three pieces of furniture I actively do want to keep - a cherry wood desk (which I am actually using as a desk right now), a rocking chair, and a table. The rest… I’m slowly going through it. Some to Goodwill, some I’m trying to sell on eBay and Craigslist (hey, I need money right now), some I’m finding is trash. Well, after mom died and dad was downsizing there were times he wanted rid of something but couldn’t bring himself to throw it out, so to solve his problem I threw it into my truck and it wound up my problem.

I guess I’m always looking for strategies to help me lighten my load of stuff. I really am getting to a point where I want to downsize my own collection of crap and live lighter. Also, I’d like room to do something like set up my floor loom, which has been disassembled for 12 years because I haven’t got my home organized. That’s my own fault, I admit it. It’s up to me to fix it.

But I do have issues I’m not sure I’m going to fix, or that need fixing. I do have some possessions I keep for sentimental value - some lace dresser runners my great aunt made, a cape owned by my grandmother, a few things of my deceased sister, a few things from mom… I’m not talking about practical items like jewelry or clothes that are wearable, but entirely sentimental objects. I am NOT throwing them out! For most of these people there are no graves to visit, there is no ancestral home for us to visit, these objects are my tangible connections to people otherwise entirely gone. But I keep thinking there’s gotta be a better way of keeping these safe and keeping them from overrunning the house. Maybe some sort of fancy storage box.

Other things… I have a friend who found a way of dealing with collecting t-shirts for sentimental reasons by taking pictures of the shirts to remember them, then being able to let go of them.

But I can see where people wind up in houses full of crap because I have some sense that I could have been there if my life had gone a little differently. I had a few years where I stopped being disciplined (there were reasons for that beyond laziness) and I’m paying for it now with a long and difficult clean up. And I know, from working with landlords, that I’m not anywhere near the levels of mess and squalor that people can achieve. I think for some, at a certain point, panic starts to set in, or the problem looks overwhelming. Maybe they don’t have someone to help them like I do - my spouse isn’t a paragon of order himself, but he does help me get past my own mental obstacles when I need the assistance. I know sometimes when I’m sorting through things it can be very upsetting - sometimes memories come up that are of traumatic periods in my life (this is part of what makes going through a deceased relative’s possessions difficult - memory triggers). I think for relatives cleaning up after a hoarder the mess and problems can trigger all sorts of frustration and anger which a third party with no emotional investment in the situation won’t experience.

ETA: One of my triumphs is that during my recent period of underemployment I DID set up a viable filing system for our important papers and documents, so not only did that reduce mess and stacks of paper, we can find the damn things easily when we need them. Whee! If only I could get that organized all over!

50

I put it in my car. Only do enough that it will still fit in a car, then drop it off the next day.

I think my husband was also a proto-hoarder. I didn’t realize how much stuff he had until I started trying to clean it out. I didn’t really notice because I’m cluttery, so I basically assumed a lot of it was my clutter. That ain’t necessarily so, as I’ve discovered.
ETA: Asimovian can attest that even I, as unsentimental as I am, can occasionally hit a wall where my ability to tell trash from treasure is completely fucked up. I’ll be sitting on the floor, staring at something that my rational mind should be telling me is garbage, but I just spent an hour looking at very similar items and I get overwhelmed and have to get outside assistance. I have no idea why that happens, but it does. I can just imagine how bad it would be if I were sentimental.

51

My favorite grandmother made quilts. We used them, and eventually they became to worn to use. But Mom and I could not give them away, or g-d forbid put them in a trash. My clever mother made a jacket out of one of the quilts, and made shadow boxes of the rest. We feel like we still have the connection to Grandma, but it’s under glass and takes up only a small area.
Perhaps your cape and table runners could be made into seething similar?

52

Oh, dear, yes at husbands and clutter. Sure, he complains about me having too many clothes, shoes, handbags, books, whatever… but I actually use the things that I have. He holds on to lots of pure crap for sentimental reasons. WTF am I supposed to do with a 12-inch circular ceramic wall hanging of his astrological sign, that we have on a shelf right now and CANNOT GET RID OF because his mother painted it in the 1970s? (Even his mother says it’s downright ugly, and that I should just throw it away!) And an entire four-shelf cabinet full of silver-plate, glass, and ceramic stuff from his grandmother’s? Maybe two pieces have some intrinsic value - the rest is just stuff that catches dust and has no relationship to our decorating style, but we hold onto it because his grandmother breathed on it at some point.

Honestly, I am not looking forward to the day when we are faced with his parents’ and my parents’ stuff, because he will want to keep everything…

53

My mother was a hoarder. After she died, I entered the house for the first time in two decades, as she wouldn’t have anyone visit her house. When I tried to open the front door, it took all of my strength (I’m a big guy) to push the door open enough to wriggle inside…and the entry was through an opening that started at eye level. After getting inside the house, I crawled over stuff until I came to a slit canyon that was deeper than my height. I dropped down in the maze of slits that lead throughout the house. I knew where her safety box was located, and basically stretched out on my stomach on the top layer by a wall, and tunneled down until I felt the safety box and heaved it out.

I hired a 49 cubic yard dumpster and put it in the front driveway, and the team started At any one time we had 4 adults minimum, with the number swelling to 10 at times. It took us 3 weeks to go through enough to be able to see the furniture, and we filled 4 of those dumpsters for a total of 160 cubic yards of trash. We had an equal amount of materials to donate…there were many trips to the local charities, and we overloaded the local ones to the point that they wouldn’t take any more items that actually were quite nice. So we had to drive to neighboring cities to get rid of the stuff. We did have help with the 1,000s (yes, thousands) of plastic flower bouquets - the Catholic church had lots of Latino families who could use them on their cemetary. Examples of materials included hundreds of skeins of wool yarn, hundreds of bolts of sewing fabric, 5 unopened hot plates that appeared in the layers of material on the dining room table, etc.

In amongst this medley of trash and treasures were 140 GE actual stock certificates, about 40K in cash, coin collections, etc. And they were actually scattered here and there, not in little treasure piles, along with the will, deeds, and so forth. Of course the deeds and so forth had not been put into my mother’s name, even though my father predeceased her by a number of years. So all of that required time at the county courthouse.

To think that one could just shovel the stuff out is to not understand the nature and magnitude of the problem. My mother was mentally ill, and would have never been able to be on the TV show, but in addition, a TV crew would never be able to film the event.

My wife and I very quickly put everything we have into a family trust, so that my sons will never have to go through what I experienced.

Hopefully you won’t either…

54

And you know what? If mom has 100’s of thousands of dollars and Picasso’s buried in her house, I don’t care. It is not worth my time to sort through the junk and find it. I own enough, make enough and have no sentimrntal attachment to anything she has of Grandma’s or Grandpa’s anymore. That’s one result of seeing her change over the years into what she is. I love her but I have moved on from “stuff”.

55

I remember that when I was in Miami, there was an ad in the local paper for a while: the fire department was looking for condemned houses they could burn down, for training exercises. It may be something worth considering, for those of you who find themselves in this kind of situation and the house is “standalone”.

56

We have that in my area. I know one owner who utilized the “service” to get rid of a mold-infested home so he could rebuild fresh on the site, I imagine they’d be happy to burn a hoarder’s stash, too.

57

I’m not sure about that. No cite, but I have the vague impression from “Mythbusters” and a couple of magazine articles that I can’t find anymore, that fire departments typically like to only do “practice burns” on homes that are reasonably cleared out. I think the idea is that you don’t want to set fire to a house full of junk and then find out that some of the junk was actually toxic stuff that shouldn’t be burned. Again, no cite, though.

58

You still have to clean up after a fire, even if the house burns “to the ground.” The house next to me burned a couple-three years ago. The owner of record refused to deal with it until he’d been served with papers and was looking at some legal trouble. He then sold it to a local business owner who seems to be on a quest to own the entire borough. On top of the couple grand he paid for the lot, he paid another eight to ten thousand for a demolition company to to demolish what was left of the house and garage, remove everything, and grade the lot flat.

59

I have little attachment to physical things at all. You can set my house on fire and the only thing that would bother me would be the inconvenience of getting the check from my insurance company. I like HAVING things - I like my TV, my computer, various things - but I’ll happily just buy new ones.

I have a few peices of furniture inherited from my grandfather that would be a shame to lose but in truth I wouldn’t really be very busted up about it.

But my grandfather… yikes. Their home was very livable, but the basement was a sight, I’ll tell you, and we had to go through ten million files and documents because he’d hide mnoney in them.

60

Having done it three times, yes - its a big deal and a big job. And I was lucky in that all three of mine were basically clean people without pets so there were no mass infestations of bugs or shit or anything. My BIL was manic depressive and committed suicide leaving a house literally full to head level with bonds strewn everywhere and valuable things like rings inside things like worn out and very smelly sneakers. We recovered everything we knew of with value (and a lot of things with value we didn’t know about) except for one bond. And we did it in 10 working days - just my wife and I basically ourselves. I filled a truck-sized dumpster just from his two cars (two savings bonds crumpled in the one ash tray).

The other two were depression era people. Piles and piles of piles and piles. Forgotten stashes of cash under holes in the old carpet. Important (to us) family pictures behind a closet full of empty pill bottles. We worked on them longer but as the people lived in them – so that they could indeed remain living in them safely. Emotionally that was tougher but more satisfying.