When a couple are considering combining their living quarters, be it by marriage or some other less formal arrangement, before anyone moves anything in anywhere , they should both be tested for the packrat gene. If both parties in a relationship have this gene,under no circumstances should they be permitted to cohabitate!
My mother was a packrat. When she passed away in the late '80’s, she had boxes of boxes under her bed and '70’s “hot pants” in her closet.
I am a packrat. I inherited the trait.
My husband is a packrat.
We have no human children (cats only). We live in a 4-bedroom house with an enclosed double garage.
“Hello, Snakescatlady!”
Admitting you have a problem is the first step. I’m a (mostly) ex-packrat. There are fabulous resources out there, books on decluttering from purely pragmatic angles (Try “Clutter’s Last Stand” by Don Aslett) to psychological.
Tip: take these books out of the library, that way you can’t just add them to your heaps of books in the corners of every room because you ran out of bookshelf space loooong ago. (Yes, I know about your heaps of unread books. I have psychic powers.)
An on-line resource that a bunch of my friends like is “Flylady.” Personally I find her too perky, but different strokes.
I got the gene from my dad. Fortunately, Ebay came along, and the temptation to make money overpowered the temptation to collect. Unfortunately, my son also has it. He’s already taken over the dining room table.
My husband used to keep the boxes that things came in, mostly electronics. Our attic is filled with boxes to VCRs and computers that we no longer have.
I have lots of boxes. When we moved this past summer, I think I collected about 250 ink pens of various types. I sat down one day and threw out about 150 of them because they didn’t work. I have at least 50 shirts of my favorite hockey team. I have a surfboard hanging from the ceiling of my office. I have at least 500 books and about 200 stuffed animals. I have 8 cats, who have their own suite that includes my office.
I am considering selling some stuff I have on e-bay - does anyone have any tips on doing that? I have purchased stuff (Star Fleet Academy hockey jersey - too cool!) but don’t have a clue about selling. I have some porcelain dolls that were my mothers - advertising (such as the Morton Salt girl and the Dutch Paint boy) and a beautiful floor length wool cape with beadwork on the shoulders. I need to get rid of some of my stuff so I can get more hockey gamers!!
Living in a dorm just adds an extra dimension of fun. Did you know it’s possible to have so much stuff in an 8x10 room that you still routinely lose things?
The fact that the dorm is on the other side of the country from my ‘permanant’ home just makes it more fun. My roommate and I are pitching in together to rent a storage place in town for the summer.
Speaking from experience, amiga, the hard part is throwing out another 75. Because, seriously, you do not need 100 pens.
It’s hard to throw out a pen that works, I know. But pick out a couple of dozen that are nice and work well, and get rid of the rest. Seriously. The value of 75 working pens is miniscule next to the value of the space they’re taking up. What packrats like you and me have a hard time recognizing is that empty space has tremendous value.
Looking at an uncluttered space is more rewarding to the soul than having lots of unnecessary stuff. Once you can fully embrace that, you will no longer a packrat. (I’m not there yet. I have flashes of insight from time to time, but then they get crowded out by the desire to cling to my stuff, and to have strewn about where it’s “convenient.” Bleh.)
I know a couple that has you beat. They raised a large family, now grown up and gone, and have an eight-bedroom house with a big family room and a big rec room in the basement. They have a two-car garage and recently built another, single car garage with storage area. Well, they can still park the smaller car in the new garage. Everything else is stuffed full. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Mostly former packrat here. I am on a charity list that calls me every 2 - 3 months and asks if I want to donate any household items. I leave a box outside my front door, they pick it up, take it away and sell it to benefit the Diabetes Association or Community Living. Helps them out, helps me out.
Most of the items I’m donating don’t have any real value. The few things that do, I sell (my wedding dress, my old computer).
Why would I need so many plastic containers? Why do I need bedding I no longer use? Why am I holding on to clothes that I don’t wear? Do I need 20 coffee mugs? Every time I let go of something, it becomes easier to breathe.
Start small. One cupboard in your kitchen. One area of a small closet. Ask yourself: Do I use it? Do I love it? Could someone else use these items?
No more will I hold onto something because I might need it someday. Someday rarely comes.
I am not a packrat. With mom’s hippy nomadic ways during my childhood I learned to travel light. Then in high school when I got that ‘special’ school we were only allowed to have about 10 pounds of stuff in the dorm at a time. It teaches frugality of ‘things’.
Lady Chance, however…ugh. She has stuff of hers like report cards and class drawings from Kindergarten. Hers! And I’ve moved that stuff all over the fucking world. MD to VA to IA to VA to MD to VA to OH.
Oy!
She’s regularly horrified at my non-materialistic habits.
In college my version of packing for the end of school (and leaving the dorm) was to throw almost everything out. Pack up the records and the stereo, sell the school books and climb in the car.
Mom: “Got all your stuff?”
Me: “Yep, all I care to keep.”
Lady Chance: “!!!”
And my version of going on vacation? Travel with one bag with toiletries. But clothes when you get there…throw them away when you leave.
Intense! I wish I had that kind of attitude toward my things (though I probably would not throw them away, but donate them, since after all you’ve only worn them once or twice).
I’m a former packrat who gave it up for one reason only: portability. The ability to move at will (or as needed) trumps my desire to collect more things, and since I plan to move a lot in the next ten years (I would like to live in at least three cities) all my stuff (sans furniture… and I’ll probably be rid of that eventually too) needs to be able to fit in a small car. I’m not quite there yet, my move to the city took two trips and a couple of boxes had to ride in the moving van my furniture came in, but I managed to cut my collection of crap by two thirds in a week, just because there was no way to move it all. Now thinking about the amount of stuff I used to have depresses me, and when I look around the room, I can’t help but think about what I can cut out of my life next. I’ve just traded one compulsion for another, really, but at least compulsive reduction will not cause me to have to rent out a storage space so I can throw away $300/mo on a bunch of memories.
I will never understand the packrat. My wife is a packrat, seemingly from a long line of packrats. Her mother bought things just to store them in the garage!!! I’m not kidding. After she passed, we had a garage sale. 15 coffee pots, most of them broken, were in their garage. My FIL refused to part with them, God alone knows why.
I form no attachments to items which I do not use. If I don’t use it, I get rid of it.
In my opinion, your advice should be twisted 180 degrees:
If one party in a relationship has the packrat gene, peaceful cohabitation is quite difficult to achieve.
In the more extreme cases - packrats will drive their non-Collyer partners towards the clutter-free exit. Compulsive collectors akin to alcoholics; when there’s one in a relationship, break-up rates are high - But when there are two, they’re both so drunk they’re much less likely to recognize any dysfuntion.
When I first cohabited with my 1st and only wife at the age of 29, all I brought into the deal was my university books, some clothes and a tv which fit into the back of my F250 pickup truck. We’ve moved several times since then and it takes at least two packed 5ton moving vans to haul her stuff around. If we ever break up, all I want is my clothes and my truck. Oh yes, and the computer as well.
Very frustrating, but we made fantastic love last night…
My grandmother was a bit of a packrat. She kept stuff that other people thought wasn’t really worth keeping, but none of it was really trash. It was all organized, it was kept in a spare room, and it didn’t take over the rest of her house. My father was a pathological packrat. He’s the lost Collyer brother. His crap took over the whole house, and the rest of us gave up trying to clean it. When you look at it, and you realize you could work at cleaning it all day and not get done, you feel discouraged. When you realize you could work at it all week and not get done, you say “What’s the point of even starting?”
I am not a packrat. I do keep things that I think I will find useful in the future-- like my knitting magazines, organized by magazine and date. Also, my stash of yarn (which is very, very small compared to most people who have been knitting for over 20 years-- it fits in one smallish cabinet, not even tightly packed. I used to keep all my knitting magazines, books and yarn in a large cabinet, until we moved and that cabinet became the pantry.) I don’t want to live in a museum, but I’m not a total slob, either. One thing I do really, really hate is having a dirty stove. My husband is too far on the “neat-freak” side. He once threw away a Christmas wreath I made because “We only used it once a year!” I’d rather live with a neat-freak than a packrat, though.
In his case, it’s that he grew up poor. The concept of throwing something out that might possibly still be useful is almost impossible for him to grasp. When we moved, he had vitamins with expiration dates that were sometime during the Clinton administration. And we moved last month.
I had to explain that while, yes, I agree that they might still be “good,” they’ve apparently been sitting in the medicine cabinet since 1999, and are therefore not being used. He finally adopted the “if I don’t see it. . .” policy, whereby, if I don’t tell him I’m throwing something out, it’s okay. I also put my foot down and said that I am not going to be helping him move five years of accumulated shit out of the house we shared for just over a year, when all of my stuff was packed and moved three weeks ago.
Stuff is being thrown away, now. This is a Good Thing. As for the new place. . .well, I can keep stuff from piling up, and I’m doing just fine at it. It was just the mounds and mounds of useless stuff that, to him, had intrinsic value. I felt that I had no space. It’s better now.
What packrats need is a little patience and understanding, not a pitting.
Oh, and more room … and some storage containers. And I should probably keep this stack of newspapers to wrap things up in. Those buckets there could be useful for something …
What?
Just out of curiosity. How many of you packrats grew up poor? (yes, I’m a recovering packrat too. It took a blenderized heart and moving out of state, [and then later back home], to get over the man to get me to get rid of non-essentials).
I know that that is one of the things that kept me hanging on to many things I really didn’t want or need.
As I was going through things prior to my move to Texas, I spent hundreds of dollars sending stuff I thought I “needed”. Then, on my way back to moving back home, my priorities had shifted so much. I really was able to be “ruthless” and determine what really meant something to me, and what I’d been hauling around all those years “because”. And a lot of the 'because" was the purchase price, or the great deal I’d gotten on it, or what it would supposedly cost to replace and so on. Regardless of whether the thing was being used NOW or not.
I did a lot of "but what if I need this someday? It would cost so much to get one. etc
Not really poor, but lower middle class in a neighborhood that was high-middle class (my father inherited a house he would never have been able to afford to buy, and even keeping up with maintenance and taxes and whatall on the oversized house kept finances always tight) so that it seemed to us like all of our friends had ‘everything’ to our ‘nothing.’ I guess that made us ‘psychologically poor’ though by any objective standards we were doing fine.
Like, I remember the Christmas when I was 16. I got a clock radio and a nice sweater. Both of which I really liked, and that was fine, until the next day I was invited over to my best friend’s and sat there while she did what seemed like a two hour ‘fashion show’ as she modeled outfit after outfit after outfit (with designer labels, of course) that Santa had brought her.
I think you can also ‘catch’ packrattery from a parent. My mother DEFINITELY grew up poor, the kind of poor you wore three sweaters to school all through the winter because buying a winter coat was out of the possible. As a result, even after she ended up with a lower-middle class financial situation, she was always doing that ‘hold onto ANYTHING that could possible be used for SOMETHING SOMEDAY’ thing out of fear, I guess, that if that someday came she couldn’t afford to buy a new whatever. Even things with tiny values/prices. I mean, how poor do you have to be before you’d be unable to buy/find a substitute for an empty margarine tub if the need for one arose?
Anyway, yes, our house was crammed to the rafters with all sorts of stuff. The attic and basement and garage and every closet, with piles of full storage containers stacked along hallways and in every corner of every room. Which to me looked ‘normal,’ and so when I had a house of my own I started down the same track. It honestly took a real effort to retrain my eyes to even seeing these things, clutter was so invisible to me. Now I glory in the beauty of my “space” but I had to learn to see ‘emptiness’ as space and openness.
Yes. I’m currently wondering where the hell the extra ink cartridges for my printer are. I have a paper due tomorrow, so they’d better show themselves soon.
I am learning the beauty of freecycling away stuff that I don’t want to just toss out, that isn’t worth donating to a charity because they really can’t do anything with it, but that turns out to be something someone else wants.
Our stuff has been accumulating for years, in spite of multiple moves, because there was always Papa T.'s company paying for the move so it didn’t matter if we moved a lot of extraneous crap. But we’ve got an interstate move upcoming that will be out of our pockets, so all of a sudden we both want to get rid of everything we can.
Unfortunately, my daughter also inherited my packrat gene, and so when she moved out and left me 14 boxes of books, in spite of all my piles of books everywhere (mostly read, however – I’m very good about reading what’s on hand before buying more, strangely enough), I found myself going through her books and reserving two boxes for myself. Sigh.
