broomstick, i was thinking shadow box as well when i read your post. one for each person, they would look wonderful on the walls and you will enjoy seeing them and hopefully remember good times.
My wife hoards. I fight it. I am surprised when I toss something to find she has an emotional attachment to it. She had a bike she had not ridden in 15 years. The tires rotted away and it was rusted apart. She did not want me to toss it. It was a battle but I was determined to get a car into the garage.Everything I dumped had to be inspected.
After reading this, my main question is, how did she get in and out of the house??
I’m trying to decide whether it’s comforting or scary to know that some hoarders make my MIL look like an amateur.
And that’s the real problem with trying to help a true hoarder. They will NOT entrust anyone else with the decision of whether to throw something away, no matter how apparently useless and devoid of sentimental value it may appear to saner minds.
And of course when they look at the stuff you’re ready to toss in the trash on their behalf, it will take them substantial amounts of time lingering over every little thing they are ultimately willing to approve of discarding, and they will veto an unhealthy fraction of even the most obvious discards.
You really can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help him/herself.
When my aunt’s mother passed away, this is the reason it took 8 people 23 days to clear out the place. EVERY book had to go through a 2 step search, because she liked to put cash in paperbacks and important docs in hardcovers. And bills in shoeboxes.
And jewelry mixed in with costume stuff.
And actualy SILVER cutlery put into an old Xmas ornament box.
And the mink she had, kept in a box for a crockpot.
Plus, 2 cats and heavy smoking. And never cleaned.
That’s a great idea, although not everything is suited to that.
I had been thinking about miniature coffin-shaped storage boxes… I have a husband who would probably think that amusing.
Watching the show, I was struck with how often the hoarder would have a story to describe each random piece of junk they were holding on to. It was like they were using physical things as an extension of their memories and emotions.
Not everyone on the show was like this, but a substantial number were.
Yeah, I do that - for me physical objects can be very strong memory triggers. That’s one reason I fear becoming a hoarder. It’s very tempting to hold onto something with strong emotional associations. It can also make cleaning up difficult because for you it’s “just junk” but when I’m sorting through things I’m bombarded the whole time with all these sagas of my past life. It becomes mentally exhausting more than physically. And we all know how tired you can get physically from cleaning a house!
Yeah, I don’t think I would ever fall prey to that sort of hoarding simply because for me physical objects are generally just physical objects.
But I could see the clutter taking over kind.
The book recommended earlier in the thread, “Stuff,” contains interviews with a number of hoarders who can tell incredibly vivid and detailed stories about pretty much everything in their houses. Even the smallest scrap of paper had a story to go with it.
Many of them also seemed to notice aspects of the sensory world that the researchers did not. The subjects would often remark upon how beautiful or soft or melodic some tiny, tiny aspect of a piece of trash was. It was almost as if they were dialing into sensory stimuli that the rest of us filter out automatically.
I guess the poetic beauty of the dead cat and the innate harmony of the fecal matter escapes me. What a clod I must be. 
Hey, Georgia O’Keeffe made tons of fantastic art using the poetic beauty of bones! 
Yea, those parts never really gotten commented on, or were glossed over as indications of minor periods of being overwhelmed. I’m talking more about the “piles and piles and piles of paper and stuff everywhere” people rather than “rotting food and piles of leaking festering garbage and dead animal bodies everywhere” people.
One leads to the other, in my experience.
Well, not always. There are different types of hoarders, and some can keep their hoard “clean” (that is, they’ll actually organize the piles, sometimes dust them) without incorporating garbage. They’ll take trash out and not leave food or dirty dishes lying around, but will have mountains of stuff. If they don’t have animals themselves, they may (and probably do) end up with a rodent problem due to the paper, but won’t have the 3 feet of cat feces that you saw in the one episode of Hoarders.
I have an acquaintance who is this type. Approximately 2500 sq ft. of her 3500 sq. ft. house is packed to the rafters with stuff, but every so often in a misguided attempt to pare down, she’ll move everything out into the yard and “clean” (dust, mop, vacuum, laundry, etc.), and then, because she’s exhausted and “can’t take anymore,” she’ll just move all the piles back into the original rooms, sometimes in the original configurations. Now, it’s still a hoard, but it’s a clean hoard.
Others, of course, are going to be much more severe in their hoarding, like the people in the book and on the show who DO hoard rotten food and garbage as well as other things.
Can it be assumed that these hoarders, and the people who seem unable to clean up after them in an efficient way are unable to hold down real jobs either? Cleaning a house is just another task, and I would think it would be easy to disconnect yourself from it. Like anyone else, I can find an emotional attachment to an object, but those objects are very few and far between.
So am I to understand that the real problem is that you are cleaning out your dead mother’s house o’ crap with the best of intentions, but only manage to get half a garbage bag filled before you find an old photo album and stop to look at it for five hours? I guess that would explain why a one month job turns into six months. These must be like the people I see at art galleries where I enter and see a guy staring at a painting, see the whole museum, and come back four hours later to find the same guy staring at the same painting. I have never understood what that behavior is about.
Sorry, this logic just doesn’t jive with me. The mountains of trash that would need to be moved staring me in the face would always take priority over the sentimentality. I would put the photo album aside if I thought it had anything worthwhile in it, then haul armloads of junk to the dumpster until my back and arms could take no more. Then when I needed a break, I might sit down and look at the album for a few minutes, but then I’d go right back to hauling shit away. Even then, my approach in taking a break and looking at the album would be “are there a handful of pictures worth saving in here that I can take out so I can throw the rest of this album away?” A pile of junk is a pile of junk in my opinion. Perhaps I’m lucky, because both sets of my wife’s grandparents, nor her parents are rich, so one day when I throw away all their stuff I can be confident I won’t find anything worth saving beyond a few photos here and there, and perhaps some obvious functional items like TVs, DVD players, etc. If there’s any jewelry, I will assume it will be stuffed in a desk drawer or dresser. If it’s stuffed inside the pages of a book, then someone at the library is going to get a nice surprise when I donate it there without opening it. It sucks to know you might be throwing away cash. But it sucks even more to lose your job because you wasted six months flipping every page of 50,000 magazines to find $1,500 in small bills.
Yarster, I think you are missing the point that hoarding is a disorder, similar in a lot of ways to OCD and other anxiety disorders.
For you, it’s easy. Because it’s easy for you, you think it is, or should be, easy for others.
But the brains of people who hoard are not experiencing the same thought process as the brains of people who do not hoard. They literally do not see a pile of 10-year-old magazines as “junk” - to them, those are incredibly valuable items that must be cared for, or sorted in meaningful ways, or the information in them must be indexed (one of the subjects in the book “Stuff” referred to herself as a caretaker of information).
And cleaning up after them is going to be just as individual for the survivors as the hoarding reasons are for the hoarders. For you, it’s “get a shovel and let’s get cracking.” For others, it may be “Mom always threw important paperwork, like the deed to the house and her will, in with her magazines. We need to find those if we can.”
Or knowing that there are sentimental items that one would like to keep.
Or just the simple grief process of losing a loved one.
Some people, like yourself, can easily discard the items of other people. Other people in this thread have expressed why it’s not as easy for them.
And sometimes, the survivors themselves have hoarding tendencies, since there does seem to be a genetic component, as well as a learned/environmental component, to the disorder. That makes it more likely that those people would have the same difficulties.
The hoarders I know all do manage to hold down jobs, which on some level actually exacerbates their behavior, because they can justify not purging themselves of things by saying they’re too tired or don’t have time.
Nope. You can’t assume that.
As I’ve said, I’ve done clean-outs for landlords. I’ve seen horrific messes from people who, once they step out the door, are highly paid, highly skilled, highly polished, highly organized professionals you’d never in a million years would guess are hoarders. I once encountered a nurse who was as neat and organized as anyone you’d want to meet in that position while she was at work… and her back porch eventually collapsed from all the neatly stacked garbage backs stored on it. Her home was up to the roof with junk. The odd thing? It was all neatly organized and carefully stacked junk that entirely filled her home. It was like a city dump run by someone compelled to categorize and sort everything by type, color, size, etc.
True hoarding is NOT a lack of willpower or laziness… it really is a mental dysfunction that is not fully understood.
I am not sentimental about my crap. I have gotten rid of childhood handicrafts, yearbooks, and picture albums without shedding a tear. But I have issues motivating myself to clean up my current clutter until it is time to move again (in which case I throw out most things that aren’t nailed down–7 very full, very large trash bags from the last room I rented). Everything I own fits into a single small room and my car (I never finished moving in to my current place). I like to live minimalistically, as long as I have a bed and my computer I am happy.
But! I have issues getting rid of clutter and garbage. In the past I accumulated about 3 bags worth of trash in a small room. I just couldn’t make myself deal with it because cleaning felt so much like work and I already work full time, though I was quite happy to see it go. And where I live now we have to tag our garbage bags, so I can’t just throw out small bags of garbage whenever I want to. I can’t clean out my car because the homeowner I rent from would be angry at having to pay for a bag of trash coming out of nowhere (which psychologically is a huge demotivator for me to clean it). I don’t generate trash in my room currently, so my clutter is limited to clothing on the floor and a bunch of mail on the desk. But I think if I were to live in one space for more than a year, it would accumulate and I would feel increasingly hopeless about the situation.
So I don’t think I am a psychological hoarder. I love to get rid of shit. I just have trouble actually DOING it. I like the sight and the smell of a clean room. But cleaning is fucking hard for me to do until forced. 5 days out of 7, I’m so tired when I get home that all I want to do is grab a burger and play on the computer. The other 2, I have more important things to do than clean… and it just never gets done.
One of my tenants is a hoarder. She is also a psychiatrist with a job with the State and a private practice. I figure we’ll have to gut the place, including taking out the drywall to the studs, and grinding the concrete floors.
And I have a friend on the verge. She buys things, lots of things, furniture esp. and never moves it into where it is intended to be, because she can’t get rid of her old stuff. I think she has 3 computer desks in her spare room, and an entertainment center in a box.
To answer RTFireflie’s question about how I got into the house that required me to climb over junk to get into the front door…
“After reading this, my main question is, how did she get in and out of the house??”
When I had worked my way through the house, it became clear that she had basically become restricted to a smaller and smaller part of the house, with the bathroom and kitchen being the last parts of the house she occupied. She had moved out of the house and was sleeping under a tarp covered lattice house in the back yard (Southern California). She hadn’t answered the phone during my weekly call, and so I asked a neighbor to check on her. The neighbor took her to a local home run by her church; when I arrived from N California I checked her into a rest home.
To answer those who said that they would have burned it all down - I watched my father work hard all his life. He hated waste (in a normal way), and to destroy what he had won would have dishonored him in my mind. He wanted to pass an inheritance on to his sons, and I was the instrument for doing that.
Hopefully this will add to the bare bones of my first post.