Check and see if there’s a freecycle group near you. You can sometimes give away stuff that you might otherwise have to toss. You could check [url=http://www.craigslist.org[craigslist as well.
If those records are so important, what are they doing at the bottom of a box full of old utility and credit card bills? Seems to me that psycho ex of your could do a lot of damage before you figured out which box of old bills and other worthless papers contained the important stuff you needed to prove she’s lying. Put the important papers in a file where you can find them when you need them, and throw the old bills away!
If the magazines are worth so much, why are they packed away in a box? Sell them, or if you’re still interested in reading them, put them where they can be read!
I’m being harsh, but I could be a lot harsher. I know way too many packrats, and I think you have unwittingly named the motto for them all: “Give me a chance to tell you why I don’t want it thrown!” There’s always a reason. The guy I know with all the decades-old newspapers stacked all over his house, really does believe he’s going to go through and find the articles he intended to save - never mind that the papers are now a fire hazard, and he hasn’t even begun on the project, in his heart of hearts he knows he’s going to do it someday. The woman who, while planning a kitchen remodel, nearly decided to drop the dishwasher because she wasn’t sure she’d have enough room for her collection of empty margarine tubs and jam jars? She’s quite sure she’s being prudent by saving them all, because she’d hate to have to throw away perfectly good leftovers for lack of a suitable container. She now has more margarine tubs than could fit in her fridge, and most of the leftovers go to waste anyway… but the collection still grows.
These are real people I’m describing. So is the woman who had a stroke in a house so crowded with stacks of cardboard boxes that the ambulance crew had a hard time getting her out of it to take her to the hospital. She at least realized things were getting out of hand, and she was going to get to it - someday. She didn’t, of course, because the stroke intervened, and she’s now in a nursing home. Her family members had to clean out of her house, and most of it ended up in the landfill anyway. Perhaps you find that disrespectful. Maybe she had some Dragon Magazines, too. But her family members saw it as the only option.
The situation you describe, with the wife throwing away her husband’s guns and other hunting equipment, is entirely different. She threw away things he was using and enjoying, because she didn’t want him to use and enjoy them anymore. If you can’t see the difference between hobby equipment in regular use and piles of assorted clutter, well, that thar’s yer problem.
For the record, I am not generally in favor of throwing other people’s property away just because you find it inconvenient - but demanding that your partner continue to live with growing inconvenience simple because It’s My Stuff! is, um, disrespectful. Grow up, take responsibility for your stuff, and realize that just because you can find a place to stack it doesn’t mean you have to keep it.
My former SO was a packrat: every receipt, from McDonald’s to long-gone appliances, was carefully saved and stacked; ditto every scrap from every event she attended (movie ticket, napkin wrapper from Red Lobster, popcorn box from movie). To her credit, the “crap drift” mostly stayed in her areas, but it bugged me not to be able to vacuum her side of the bedroom, etc. I never threw out any of her stuff, but was very tempted to do so.
I might be the opposite of a hoarder: I like my spaces rather monastic and have just four boxes of “memorabilia” from my 41.5 years on earth. I shred stuff I probably shouldn’t (receipts, medical crap), but it seems that all of this is now available electronically or via request, so why keep it?
My current partner likes stuff. Our living space is nice and neat, but she loves garage sales, dollar stores, and flea markets. Our rule is that she can fill up our (unfinished) basement, so long as there is a path for me to get to and from my workbench. When the path disappears, she must give away some of her crap.
Agreed. Maybe you’d like him to throw out some of the shoes in your closet that you haven’t worn in over a year…? Hey, if it had a years worth of dust on it, it can’t be important or valuable, right? :dubious:
chorus of ‘Not my Shoes!’ in 6 part harmony to begin in 3-2-1…
I think this is a great idea.
I also like the idea of “clutter preserves”. Each partner can have whatever they want in their closet and drawers, on their desktop, on their shelves in the bathroom, whatever. The areas don’t have to be exactly identical and they don’t even have to be evenly split, as long as everyone agrees with it - to go with a nice stereotypical example, maybe she wants more closet space for her clothes and shoes, but he wants the shelves in the garage for his tools. It’s not important to get identical square footage as long as both partners are content. The point is, whatever the other partner is likely to regard as clutter, whether it be a startling number of pairs of black shoes or several years’ worth of Comic Book Collector Weekly, stays in the preserves that you’ve negotiated together. If you fill up your clutter preserves, you need to decide what goes before more comes in… but you don’t have to explain your decision to anyone.
This is another major non-pet peeve with my girlfriend.
Everything has sentimental value, or cash value, or she is saving it for the kids when she passes.
But most of it is almost crap. Stuff she doesnt use, never looks at (in over 6 years so far), and never uses. And if it aint crap, its redundant. Honestly how many cookie sheets do you need? Or pots and pans for that matter? Sure more is often more handy, but when it gets to the point that everything must be put in the cabinets just right, I’d say its too much. Unless you live in something tiny like an RV, efficiency apartment, or submarine. When I am putting stuff away, I really don’t like to feel like I am solving yet another chinese puzzle.
She has this very large tub of old records. They WERE being stored in the attic in florida. I at least rescued those and a bunch of important papers and photographs from the very destructive attic environment. Very recently, she “sorta/maybe” decided the records must go.
I told her she could probably get on ebay and get a little cash for em. No, she said, they are worthless.
I almost said this:
So, thats your master plan? To keep a large housefull of stuff (that is impeding your lifestyle) and to hold onto the stuff until its so worthless you’ll have trouble giving it away?
Step 3 is NOT profit.
We got into a major argument over this one. She had a dozen or more quarts of homemade plum jam, in an overflowing utility closet. They were old enough to drive. I wasn’t gonna eat jelly that old. I asked her if she would. Nope, she said, she didnt even like the stuff. WTF?
I even asked if it had some kind of sentimental value, then maybe we could keep a jar or two. Nope, not even some kind of sentimental value.
It was nearly WWIII to get rid of that damn jelly still.
Ughhh…
Blll
My SO is a packrat who reverts to the adult version of tantrums if you so much as touch anything. My feeling is that he’s never forgiven the world after his parents cleaned out his old bedroom. They tossed many sentimental things of his, and, above all, a collection of short stories he was planning to submit to different contests. Ever since then, NOBODY goes near his stuff. Including me.
So…here we are with his stuff scattered in both my mom’s house and storage. During the rummaging stage of my mother’s dementia, she pulled out every single thing she’d ever saved in her entire life, scattering everything through the house (she grew up during the Depression – um, yeah).
SO goes bananas if I even consider throwing out anything of Mom’s. Um, hello, I can see his point, but you know what? It’s HER stuff, not yours. I AM HER DAUGHTER, SO FUCK OFF.
He just can’t do anything with his clutter. We’ve tried narrowing it down to a box. We’ve tried taking one stack of papers and filing them. We’ve pulled out the shredder and tried going through one paper at a time. He becomes paralyzed. There’s only so many times one can be sympathetic.
I don’t want to be living like this 1, 2, 5, or 10 years from now. And he just doesn’t get it.
No kidding. I know that hoarding is a psychological problem and there may be those tendencies in a lot of “packrat” type people, but this specific poster to whom I was responding made statements indicating that he/she was concerned with, among the junk, losing specific treasures and not just an issue with needing their junk.
Someone who has a true psychological issue with this behavior probably isn’t going to fare any better in the situation Chimera described than if someone just cleaned out the desk for them. Oh sure, there is the illusion of measured control, but in the end precious little would be thrown out without psychological counseling IMHO. That’s why I responded to the specific post, and not the broad view of hoarding.
Someone who demands respect should behave respectfully. That means taking responsibility for how your behaviors affect others by compromising like an adult, or seeking help as needed. Of course it’s hard to seek help, but if you’re going to set up relationship ending circumstances in your mind, you have to realize that living with filth and squalor may be someone else’s dealbreaker. YMMV.
No, you’re absolutely right. And, since I’m not a packrat (okay, I’m a reforming packrat), that’s not a problem for me. No hypocrisy here, thanks. There are a few “why the hell do you still need this?” things I’ve got on hand, and they stay in my drawer, as I ask his stuff to stay in his nightstand.
Neither of us is a hoarder, though, in a diagnosable sense of the term, just a lazy packrat (Reforming Division). We don’t have stacks of magazines or old newspapers; even the old paperwork was fairly neatly stuffed in an overflowing file cabinet - it just got to the point where I couldn’t file the current important stuff for lack of room in there. Our house is a mess because we’re lazy, but when we clean up for a party, everything magically finds a place. We’re just not real good at keeping things in their places for long! I think actual hoarders have a different process, so I’m not speaking for them. We both have moments of “but…but…I might need that someday!” but we’re not as emotionally knotted at the idea of pitching most of it as some of the stories I hear of actual hoarders.
Heh. Dear meat.
Sure, absolutely, and this is exactly what I told myself when we chucked the box. I was even a little bit relieved that those particular dead end tokens were gone… but I still had to mourn a little. It doesn’t have to make sense.
I picked this up yesterday. It does seem to have some pretty good advice in terms of “how to mentally approach this”. (Hopefully at the end it has some on how to KEEP stuff clean - haven’t gotten there yet.) This morning I said to Himself, “We’re supposed to ask ourselves what we want these rooms to be for, and not let stuff in that isn’t for that. This is the room we watch TV in and hang out in and play video games in. So your pants don’t belong here.” “Where do my pants go?” “In the guest bedroom, which is also your dressing room.” “So where does all that shit in the guest bedroom go?” “In the garage.” Etc, etc, etc. It seems like we need a room-shit-teleporting device.
I’m a packrat but I hope I’m on the way to reform. I try and have a mega-clearout at least once a year.
I’m convinced that there’s a genetic element: both my father and my aunt are absolute packrats. My aunt didn’t throw anything much out for 35 years.
I’m sort of a packrat, but I feel that it is entirely due to my shitty financial situation. I’m a sculptor, and prop artist. While I often do other “day job” type things as well, that’s really what I want to be doing full time. I need to do little art projects at home to keep my sanity, so I hoard up “supplies”. I do my damndest to make sure I don’t toss out anything that could be useful because I don’t have any money to buy supplies. Nashiitashii is occasionally annoyed by this, but I DO use my stuff. Just this week I used up a bunch of old guitar parts I had been carting around for 5 years on a project. If I had to go out and purchase what I needed it would have been in $50.00 range, and we don’t have money for that type of indulgence.
I DO agree to a yearly garage sale/ freecycling/and dumping event of old props and projects. I’m not certain how bad this makes me, but I’m sure that when our money situation improves, my junk collecting will cease since I can just plan out a project and purchase what I need.
Yep, my basement is filled with my wife’s hoardings that now is almost intraversible. To get to my washer/dryer, I now have to step over:
–A pile of 12 empty Christmas cookie tins that rest there because “someday” it would be nice to give cookies (for 4 years now)
–A box of mismatched old pans that she’s promised (for years now) to sort through for Goodwill
–A bag of junk mail and unopened bank statements dating back to 1995. “Any time now” she promises to shred it. But that would mean unpacking the shredder and making a big project out of it…
–Plastic storage tubs of peechees and old homework from grade school. Sentimental? Sure, I understand, but do you really need to keep 5 tubs of your arithmetic practice sheets and cursive workbooks?
To make it worse, she’s now “protected” all of her grandmothers old shit (canning supplies, old clothes, broken pans, stray lids, piles of newspaper clippings) that was left from when she moved into a nursing home. It’s “protected” in a big pile in the basement that provides a convenient psychological shield from accessing our own crap that needs throwing out.
It makes me feel better knowing others suffer from loved ones who can’t dump their shit, and the glimmers of hope help think there’s a clean basement in my future…
LOL, my brave moment today.
“NO, we’re not doing to ‘donate’ these cheap Christmas ornaments. No one will buy cheap Christmas ornaments from the church shop in August. These are in the ‘toss’ pile.”
This thread got me thinking and I did something rather big today. I have, err had, two large bookcase filled with about 1400 songbooks. I divided them into 4 piles.
[ol]
[li]Books I want to keep[/li][li]Books I can send to my parents because they’re starting to play guitar[/li][li]Books that I don’t play and can take to Half-Price Books[/li][li]Books that I don’t play but would get a lot more money on eBay[/li][/ol]
I got the trolley and filled up my Prius with about 600 books to the point where the car started to sag in the back. I got $450 for my huge pile which included gems like Celine Dion, Debbie Gibson, and Richard Marx. So, if I ever want to play “Electric Youth”, I"ll have to transcribe it myself. 
I felt a bit like a Viking, pushing a burning boat into the horizon as I said goodbye to my mound of notes that have kept me company for so long.
YaY for you. That’s quite a lot of stuff you sorted through.
For the record, I do some Debbie Gibson at karaoke from time to time but never “Electric Youth”.
My ex-husband was also a hoarder, mostly of old newspapers and magazines. Once in a while, I would throw some out and he’d never notice, but when the job’s that big, why bother throwing out anything at all? We were still living in filth. (At least, he was. By the end, he stayed in his part of the house and I stayed in mine.)
Once I got rid of him, I got in there and threw every damned bit of it away. Yes, even the newspapers under the bed which were glued to the floor from the time the toilet overflowed!
When we got married she had 14 boxes of shoes, 6 christmas trees 6 garbage bags of coats, jackets, gloves, scarves, and hats.There were garbage bags of just plain garbage, chicken bones ect. It was a fight to toss it all. I told her if she wanted it, she needed to repack it all, and put it on the truck. I won, and she is still married to me. I admit to a weakness for dragging home furniture, fixing it up, and using it. You can still walk through the house without killing yourself though. Most of my junk is my tools, glue, screws, nuts & bolts. If we had a garage, it would all be out there, but for now at least, it stays in the basement.