Heh, good point. I think she must have said that exact phrase every day of her life, though. She’s been gone 14 years and that’s one of the few phrases I can still “call up” to remember what her voice sounded like.
don’t forget the alt. motto:
it’s still good!
My husband’s a pack rat, which probably stems from growing up obscenely poor in East LA. He’ll keep wearing socks long after they become quitters, then insist on using holey ones as “rags”. Every year I have to throw out all of his socks on trash day and buy new. And that day would be…Thursday. I actually had to ninja-cull his side of the closet when he started his new job. The man had 4 Army jackets. And was never in the Army.
My late Grandfather was a bona fide pack rat though. I helped my father clean the place out when he moved; the pantry was filled with baby food jars with packets of Taco Bell hot sauce, the garage was filled with the same ubiquitous Gerber jars but filled with odd screws, nuts and washers.
Sorry that should have been bona fide hoarder. Grandpa’s behavior far exceeded that of the mere packrat.
Don’t forget that he moved all that crap from California to Colorado and back again in less than a year.
As I stated in the OP, Mom is not at the level of others who have been mentioned in this thread. She is somewhat organized…all those instruction manuals are together in a folder in the filing cabinet. All her bills are paid on time and neatly filed away. She never buys frivolous things…but will save the broken piece off a cheap stained glass ornament that used to hang on the door. There are jars of screws and nails in the basement from my Dad’s shop…he died in 1980…but they are all labelled. Newspapers are recycled every two weeks…but she has folders full of clippings for how to remove stains and recipes and the new requirements on holding on to tax paperwork…new in 1970, that is. Nothing she has bought aside from furniture is of any interest at a yard sale…and she doesn’t go to yard sales. Junk mail gets shredded…but I just threw away three month’s worth of Sunday paper coupon inserts she was saving for me to go through. She had never knowingly hung on to an expired coupon, though. The map of the Cleveland Museum of Art from a trip we took there in 1973…yes, she has one of those. But no AARP magazines from last year. And she throws out (recycles) all the old Consumer Reports when they send out the annual summary.
She definitely has that “poor through the depression” mindset. Today I put away a dress pattern (already cut out of the fabric and ready to sew) that I’m sure she cut out shortly after my birth in 1957. That might be of interest on ebay, but the bags of scraps from all the clothes we’ve sewn over the years…not so much interest in those. When she buys a new pair of pants, she has to hem them up. When she rips out the existing hem, she saves the thread to reuse so that she doesn’t have to buy thread to match. She saves the lace hembinding from her old clothes before she tosses them, and of course she saves every button.
Laundry detergent bottles can no longer be recycled in our town. She saves some to use for garden fertilizers and icemelter…very useful spout and lighter for her to carry, but we didn’t need to save twenty of them. I take the trash to the curb, so every few months I bag up the excess, leaving her four emptys so that she feels good. She has probably the world’s largest collection of Reader’s Digest cassettes and CD’s, as well as coffee table nature books and books of 1001 Ways to Use Vinegar, and every household hints book and fix-it yourself book ever published. But no piles of outright trash. Just things that might be useful someday.
She’s a depression-era pack rat, but not a hoarder. She doesn’t have tons of money, and gets her pleasure from the “use it up, make it do, make it last or do without” ethic.
I’m not really a pack rat, though at times I am just cheap and sometimes hate shopping. Why buy new jeans (even though I’ve almost managed to lose enough weight to make it worthwhile) until these finally have a hole in the crotch? I tend to hang onto documents longer than I should (I’ve got my W-2s, do I really need all my paychecks from 2002, for instance) and I do have a closet full of cardboard boxes. In my defense on the boxes, at some point in the next year or so I’ll move again and some of them are item-specific (the DVR box, the air conditioner box, and so on) and until then they’re not in the way sitting in the closet. The stuff I tend to collect tends to be old electronics and computer parts, and they do come in handy from time to time. Plus, one box isn’t too bad.
My mother used to save margarine tubs and the like and reuse them. I guess I understand it better now, since I guess in the late 80s and early 90s there were fewer choices for storing leftovers and the like (none of this really cheap plastic stuff.) But it got ugly one day when I went looking for the butter (margarine, whatever) and opened three other tubs full of leftovers before I finally found the freaking butter. I don’t think she does that anymore.
Twenty-four.
Twenty-four boxes of “Robin Hood, Best for Bread, Bread Machine Mix”.
Twenty-four boxes of bread machine mix. That’s only some of the items that I removed from my mother’s bedroom when she was sick enough to be in the hospital full-time.
Hoarder?
Are you KIDDING me? She wouldn’t let anyone go in her room for years. Depression, mild alcoholism, shopaholic-ism, The Depression (as opposed to being depressed), all probably contributed.
I thought it was just my family, my mother, who was like this. Thanks to the web, I know better. It took weeks to clear out her bedroom alone. It was a huge project. Huge.
Don’t get me started on the rest of the house.
I still keep this in my favorites. Maybe somebody here recognizes this person. It’s compelling, yet revulsing.
My mother would never complain about clutter. She loves clutter! Especially kitchy clutter.
That being said, she holds on to things that are absolutely mystifying to me.
For example, she has extra cabinets built into her bathroom to accomodate all the “lady” stuff she accumulates. I think she could get by with a bachelor’s medicine cabinet if she just pitched all the stuff she never uses.
It’s bad. She still has many, many Avon products that date from before I left home.
I left home in 1986.
I wonder what would happen to you if you spread twenty-five-year-old “Cucumber Cooler” peeling mask on your face? What terrifying alchemy has taken place in those PVC tubes? I know they’ve gotten much, much lighter. Are they just more concentrated? Are they breaking down into phenyl-nitro-diglyceride-75? Is their proximity to Skin-So-Soft of the same vintage the circumstance that will finally level her housing Co-Op?
Time will tell.
Oddly enough, my mom’s parents (born in 1915/1916) weren’t packrats at all, yet my mom (born in 1948) is. I know of packrats where the Great Depression definitely was a factor, but it just happens to not be one in my family.
**The Barracuda ** and I are in the process of packing for a move to another state, and I am doing most of the packing and discarding. The other day I found a bunch of cassettes of classical music which she bought years ago. We have similar tastes in music, so I pointed out that since we have all these pieces of music on CDs we can dump the cassettes.
No, we cannot, because what if we both want to listen to the same symphony in different places at the same time? I can use the CD and she can use the tape cassette. I pointed out the unlikelihood of this situation ever occurring, but she was adamant.
She also clips food coupons and had a giant envelope of them, all organized into categories. The problem is most of them were expired, some over two years ago. Her answer was that some supermarkets honor out-of-date coupons (but none of our local markets do).
So, after a certain amount of negotiating, she agreed to separate the “dead” coupons out, but NOT to discard them. They are now in their own huge envelope, which resides in a niche in our pantry.
If I can think of a means of sneaking them out and destroying them secretly, I will, but she has caught me at similar ploys in the past.
It’s stolen from Something Awful, isn’t it? I remember reading it on the Awful Forums.
I just happened upon this:
*As a packrat, Edmund Trebus took the cake. He also took washing machines, rotting clothes, wood, motorcycles, windowpanes, and old refrigerators. Before the Polish emigre died in 2002, at age 83, he had filled his four-story London house with mountains of garbage collected at local junk shops and building sites. One room was full of vacuum cleaners, another with cameras. He collected Elvis Presley recordings maniacally.
In their garden, his wife used to sit in a deck chair among towers of crap. When she left in 1981, he filled in the hole. In the end Trebus was living in one corner of the kitchen, with only a Jack Russell terrier for company. He needed ladders to get in and out of the house, which had no running water, working bathroom or electricity.
In 1997, after being buried under one of his own “litter traps,” designed to catch burglars, he was hospitalized for gangrene. When he got out, he found that the town council had finally got a court order declaring the house unfit for human habitation. Six men and five trucks took 30 days to remove 515 cubic yards of waste.
He’d filled it up again by 2001.*
–Futility Closet - Page 199 of 1266 - An idler's miscellany of compendious amusements
First of all, some of those things sound like mementos. It’d be neat to have a map of a museum you visited 30 years ago, museums change, with the map you could better recall it as it was when you went there. Secondly, cloth scraps could go into a patchwork quilt, couldn’t they? I recently read an article about a woman who made folk art quilts from rags, and now they are famous, hailed as “folk art”. Ah, here it is, the Gee’s Bend quilts.
Sound suspiciously like my Grandma. She saves everything. Her garage is filled with mounds of crap, and there are old piles of magazines and other assorted junk all over the house. She has old clothes she hasn’t been able to wear in years and years. She also loves to go to the dollar store- she’ll see something cheap and, despite the fact that she doesn’t even need one, she’ll buy 30, just because it’s such a good deal.
She has so much old food in that house that I won’t eat anything that I haven’t physically brought into the house myself.
At one point, thanks to my husband, we rented a house that had a three car garage - that we couldn’t fit a car into because of all his stuff.
Thankfully, he got over it. Don’t get me wrong, he still brings stuff and stuff and stuff home from jobs (I have more chandeliers and outside lights and fixtures than I can EVER use) but it has gotten better - we can at least fit my son’s bike in the garage now. (We had to move - downsized the garage to a one car - but there’s attic space he can use!!) 
You just gotta nip paperwork in the bud. First of all, the instant you bring the mail in, toss anything that you know you don’t need. Any fliers, coupons that you’re even slightly in doubt about go right into the trash. (As time goes on, you’ll have a better sense of what you need and don’t need. For now, though, if you’re not planning to order a pizza today, you don’t need the coupon.) Then open the envelopes. All of them. The outside envelopes get tossed. The inserts get tossed. The This Page Intentionally Blanks get tossed.
Now comes the slightly-difficult-now-but-worth-it-in-the-long-run part: Get a file cabinet and folders. The electric bills go in their own folder. The insurance bills go in theirs. And so forth. You said your bills are paid online, so you don’t need tangible copies at your fingertips. Paperwork does not need to be anywhere except in its own folder. You don’t need it on the desk. When you do need it, you’ll know where it is. Other than that, if it’s junk, it should have been shredded already.
And here endeth my decluttering advice. I don’t know how everyone should manage their kitchen, bathroom, living room or bedroom. But everyone’s paperwork (excluding work-from-home paperwork) is the same. 95% of it, you don’t need, and the 5% that you do will do just fine in a folder in a file cabinet.
Dude, that’s so not helping, that’s precisely the thought that leads to bags and bags of old clothing scraps. At this point, her mom needs to let go of the “maybe one day” ideas and just accept that if you haven’t done anything with them in 30 years, you’re not gonna.
One book that really helped me with decluttering is Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. Personally, I think Feng Shui is a load of hooey but the author’s arguments against clutter are really convincing. She mentions both the mental and fiscal costs of keeping clutter and how to let it go to benefit others.
One side effect I’ve noticed since finally getting my clutter under control: ever notice how in really cluttered houses, you’ll see bags and bags of unopened stuff. A lot of clutters also compulsively shop. I wasn’t a compulsive shopper but I did tend to overbuy, always thinking about how what I would buy would fit into my perfect, future life. Now that I have my house reasonably organized, I’m a lot more satisfied with what I already own.
This may well happen when we move into the new house next month, and have more room for things like file cabinets. We don’t have the space for one in our current apartment, and our office/computer room is one of the places where we feel the space pinch the most. In our new house- no more computer room doubling as guest room with sleeper sofa 
We have actually needed old credit-card statements, though, because Mr. Neville often travels for work and pays for it himself, then gets reimbursed later.
Actually, I’ve found a solution that works pretty well for me. When I get the mail in, I pick out the bills and put them on my desk, and early in each month go online and pay them. Mr. Neville handles the rest of the mail, because he hates doing that less than I do. One of the great things about being married is that there’s someone else around, who might be willing to do some of the stuff you really hate to do.
That “some day” idea is a killer. Like tremorviolet says, if you ain’t done it yet, you ain’t gonna. While de-cluttering, take out all your “some day” projects, and either get busy on them and finish them, or toss 'em. It really lightens your psychological load to not have all these things on the back of your mind; “I really should get to that some day.” If you really wanted to do them, you would have by now.
ETA: Forgot my own paperwork solution - only touch paper once (twice for bills). When you open the mail, it goes straight into its own file, or onto a current desk/fridge magnet for payment. When paid, off to its folder it goes. You don’t need a filing cabinet to have folders - I have a couple of milk crates with my current paperwork in them. A couple of milk crates of file folders is a heck of a lot neater than piles of paper everywhere. And the envelopes they came in go into the recycling bin RIGHT AWAY.