I assume you consulted your son. Otherwise, I could see him turning into a pack rat - “I save stuff because my mother used to randomly throw stuff away!”
I did. He didn’t want it, and I started to put it in my Big Box o’ Memorabilia…then I realized that I was never going to fixate on this crappy little mass-produced statuette and sigh, “Remember how Paul graduated from kindergarten that time?”
That’s my problem. I finally got most of the clutter under control (mostly by moving and being ruthless with myself) but I still have boxes and boxes of unsorted mail and papers that I know I need to go through 'cause there’s important stuff in there but I really don’t want to. So I keep making new boxes of mail/papers and adding them to the stack. Sigh. I should really sort that stuff…
whistles and carefully shuts door on bedroom, where piles of paper, old books, worn-out clothes, CDs without cases, and really weird paperweights / bookends / dish-things are being sorted out
We’ve got about fifteen million boxes already down in the basement–someday I’ll actually go through all that stuff (there’s my old teddy bear down there, and bits of my old Hallowe’en costumes, and some of my trophies…)
Hey…what’s in that room?
That’s definitely my problem. Then, if I do start going through a pile, I find stuff that I don’t know what to do with, or don’t want to deal with right now… And then there’s the stuff that I really ought to look at (privacy policies and the like) but I really don’t want to look at because reading those things sucks, so it’s easy to put off doing it…
I try to keep important stuff on the computer. I get my paychecks direct deposited, for example, so there’s no question of losing one. Bills are set up to autopay if that’s reasonably convenient- that way, if I miss a bill, it’s not such a big deal.
There are designated places for important things, away from the general pile of mail. Bills go on my desk, and other mail does not go there, for example. There’s another designated place for checks that we have to cash. That way, I make sure the unopened mail is mostly junk that should be shredded or torn up rather than just tossed. I’m never 100% sure that’s what it is, though… And I curse credit card companies that don’t write “Your statement is enclosed” on the outside of statements- I’m a lot more likely to not recognize those as bills and lose them. I do this because I know that I won’t stick to a plan of going through everything every so often, so at least this way the really important stuff is covered. Sometimes you have to work with what you’ve got and set reasonable goals for yourself, rather than trying to make yourself do things “right” and as a result they never get done. Half a loaf is better than none and all that.
I definitely don’t like anyone else going through my piles of stuff, especially things like bills, and that goes ten times as much for family members like my parents (I imagine I might feel similarly about adult children, if I had any). If you gave me the choice between posting my credit card number here and letting my parents see my credit card bills, I’d go ahead and post the number. Changing my card would be a lot more pleasant than having them scrutinize my spending habits. Maybe that’s part of the problem for some packrats- they don’t want other people, especially well-meaning family members, seeing stuff like bills and bank statements that are in among their junk and getting on their case about something like spending. If you deal with a packrat, you could try saying you’ll help with going through their junk, and promise not to read anything you find beyond what you need to do to identify it. They might be more willing to accept help if they know it isn’t going to touch off a lecture about other issues. Yes, it might be better if you did have a talk with them about spending, but better to clean up the clutter without discussing spending than the status quo, in which neither one happens.
Missed this the first time around:
Confession: I’m 35, and kept the little plastic trophy that everyone got in 2nd grade for participating in gymnastics (which everyone did) until my most recent move last summer. :o For many, many years it was used to prop up a U.S. Navy “dixie cup” that a family friend gave me, but I kept the stupid trophy even after I finally discarded the hat. I think I started off keeping it because I knew it would be my only athletics-related tropy ever, and then kept on keeping it because it became one of my oldest possessions. But in August I moved to a smaller townhouse and had to purge a bunch of stuff, and I decided that it was time for plastic handstand woman to finally go. 
Hoarding is a disorder commonly associated with, or related to Obsessive-Compulsive disorder. It can also be a symptom of trauma to the brain or simply depression.
Whatever the causes, it is a highly disruptive behavior, but good news: therapy, while not completely effective, can be helpful
I’m a ruthless tosser (heh), and my husband is a pack-rat. He got a good dose of reality, however, when my father (who was also a pack-rat; no, let’s call a spade a spade - he was a hoarder) died, and we got to see what a hoarder leaves behind. We wore decontamination suits to clean a few paths through his house to try to make some sense of the chaos. It was a three storey plus basement house - thank the good lord in the heavens above that his legs were so bad that he couldn’t climb stairs any more, so the mess was confined to one storey and yard.
You ever wonder what a house would look like if you didn’t clean it or throw anything out for five years or so? I don’t any more. I’m planning a big purge for our house this summer. I’m not going to force my husband to throw any of his precioussses out, but he has his own office, and what won’t fit in there doesn’t stay. His office can be packed solid with junk like a cube, but it doesn’t get to infect the rest of the house. I will not live that way.
Those are the same reasons I kept the little trophy that I won one Halloween for biting an apple hanging from a string. I had that freakin’ thing for over twenty years!
Good luck, featherlou. My last husband was a packrat, too. The last couple of years we were married, he mostly stayed in one half of the house and I stayed in the other. When he was finally gone and I went to clean…the horror! The horror!
My mother was like this. When she died it took me two weeks of cleaning to really clean out the house, even then it wasn’t great.
Unfortunately I think it has given me problems. I try not to keep too much stuff, and I really only have a few boxes of my old Star Wars stuff around. However, now it seems that I’ve gotten rid of things that I shouldn’t have. I bought a new suit two years ago, only worn it a couple of times, but now I can’t seem to find the pants any where. I think that what happened was I got rid of the suit pants instead of the slacks I wanted to get rid of. Now I’m going to have to either buy a new suit or see if I can find just the pants. I’ve thrown a couple of things away like that. Luckly it’s only been cheaper stuff.
We do OK with purging around here, but before marriage I did have to lay down the law about margarine tubs. I was hardcore about them not being safe to store or microwave food (other food is more acidic than margarine). I’m posting here in case that argument works for anyone else.
Another thing you might try is finding an organization that has annual yard sales for a good cause. This could be a church or other charity the pack rat likes. Then rather than a purge it could be like a hunt for things that could do some good. I think some hoarding comes from the idea that someone might get some use of out of the item someday, and throwing the item away is the death of that dream.
I she an organised pack-rat?
I’ve been sorting out my aunt’s flat for 3 months - 3 days a week, with breaks - and a big problem has been that I can’t just chuck stuff. There was paperwork everywhere, all jumbled up, all in need of sifting and seperating - never mind sorting! And I’ve jus been advised that there’s a whole load more I’ve missed :(. And photographs - unlabelled, of course, but many date from the 1800s. And then there are the books. Most are crap, of course, but there are quite a few first editions and some that have been signed. So I’ve got to check everything.
My mother was a packrat. Her motto was, “keep that - it might come in handy someday.” Get a new pair of shoes? Don’t throw away the old ones without saving the laces. Someone give you a birthday card and the envelope wasn’t written on? Save it! Hey, before you throw away that old <whatever>, take out the nails/screws in case we need them someday. And so on. Every margarine container. Every bread wrapper. Every twist tie. Every rubber band. When she died we discovered mail going back decades. And coupons in her purse from 1980(she died in '93). Hundreds of flimsy coathangers. An entire closet devoted to storing empty cardboard boxes. Shoeboxes, garment boxes, appliance boxes… About a month ago, my brother and I finally got around to one of the other closets(he still lives in my parent’s old house). Imagine our delight at getting to unpack wedding gifts from 1970!
ETA: I personally am sometimes too HASTY in throwing stuff out, as a result of this. I think I’m packrat-phobic.
Fun, unless you fun across the more candid gifts, like “Ye Olde Marital Aide”.
They talked like that back then, you know.
Has anyone seen a connection between being a packrat, and people affected by the Great Depression?
My grandmother saved marginally useful stuff. Bread bags, margarine tubs, buttons off old shirts, childrens toys, old cloths. She didn’t do the garage sale/random/craft stuff thing though. She started raising a family in the early '30s, in a rather poor rural part of the upper penninsula of Michigan.
I’ve often wondered if her saving/reusing was a leftover of trying to make ends meet during hard times. The house was alway clean and neat, but all the closets and cupboards were full of things that might be usefull some day.
My female birth giver doesn’t throw much away. She’s not so much a packrat as she is allergic to any cleaning.
I identify with this thread a lot.
I think there’s something to this. It can also be a reaction to having to scrimp and save for a long time. I know a woman who is financially quite well off now but had to scrape by on one teacher’s salary early in her marriage. She is ruthless about getting rid of some things and their house isn’t at all cluttered, but she never buys anything like trash bags or food storage things that can be improvised from something else and she still dries all her laundry on a line. She’s also a fanatical regifter.
I think my husband was somewhat scarred by his mother making a bad financial deal and losing a couple of houses she owned, incuding the one they lived in. She had to sell a lot of their possessions, too, so now he’s become something of a hoarder.
Isn’t that every pack-rat’s motto?
ETA: I think your life experiences definitely influence you in this area. My husband’s family moved across country four times when he was young, and he lost a LOT of his cherished toys each time (sometimes without even consulting him on what could go or stay). As a result, he hangs on to everything like glue now. I made a couple of big moves when I was a young adult and had to purge a lot of my baggage, and I liked the feeling of freedom from clutter so much that I went the opposite direction.
My Darling Marcie is a pat rack (I like that description). She won’t throw away anything*, nor will she donate it to charity. And she buys more stuff and keeps it forever. She has complete wardrobes in at least three different sizes (I’m gonna lose weight; It’s gonna be in style again, and so forth).
*I will sometimes miss something of mine; when I ask her about it, she says she had to throw it out because she needed the closet space. Lucky for her that I love her.