Throwing away your packrat SO's junk, behind their back

In My Humble Opinion
61

We’re in a mixed marriage, too - I don’t like clutter, and Jim likes all of his stuff kept all the time. Your past definitely plays into this - I moved with just my car a couple of times as a young adult, and that got rid of a lot of childhood clutter and got me comfortable with the idea of “Out it goes, and if I need it in the future, I’ll buy a new one.” Jim had a traumatic experience as a child with his parents throwing out his toys in a cross-country move without consulting him, and a couple of moves back and forth across country that upset his equilibrium, and now he likes to have his things around him. For me to throw out his stuff behind his back really would be a betrayal.

He’s not hardcore, though - he’s open to de-cluttering when we pack up and move house. The idea of me going through his desk and asking him what to keep and what to throw might work - de-cluttering is work, plain and simple, and no one really looks forward to doing that job alone. I also like the idea of making piles of his clutter for him, and let him be re-active rather than pro-active - let some light in on the old, musty piles and see how they look to him then. We also have our own clutter zones - I have a room, and he has a room, and we decorate and clutter up those rooms to our heart’s content (within limits - no bugs, fire or health hazards).

62

[QUOTE=Beware of Doug]
Beware the limits of technology - scanning eats up time and memory a LOT faster than papers eat up space. Until there’s an automatic book-and-document handling machine that doesn’t cost a megabuck or chew up fragile texts.
[/QUOTE]

?

Really?

I have around a thousand e-books and the backup file copies live on a few DVDs. That many books used to take up most of a pallet of boxes in the barn.

Personally, I would seriously prefer to have everything except for about 250 reference books as ebooks. If I won the lottery, I would pay someone to scan and OCR the shredding paperbacks in the barn and destroy the paper version [to be blunt, I bought 1 copy, and I own one copy. If I make an electronic copy, then I can destroy the crumbling piece of tree maintaining my single ‘licensed’ copy. 95% of my books do not exist as electronic texts and probably would never become electronic texts, and as time goes by the hard copies are disintegrating due to the nonarchival materials they are made of.]

I dont think we have bought a paper book in several years as mrAru and I both prefer ebooks.

63

[QUOTE=aruvqan]
I dont think we have bought a paper book in several years as mrAru and I both prefer ebooks.
[/QUOTE]

The other thing to consider is the limits of technology retrieving all that information in 20 years. I have some of my earliest writing attempts - on 5.25" Apple IIe floppies. I know of no way to get those files off of there at this point! Luckily, I also have some dot-matrix printed versions of them, some with the perforated edges still intact!

64

I would reccomend against any throwing away behind anyone back. But if someone is a really bad pckrat and won’t stop, then I’d say a divorce is something to consider.

I used to be terrified of turning into a packrat. My mom and my sister are that way, it’s really bad at their houses. Nowhere to sit, piles of stuff, awful stage 3 or 4 clutter. So I was always on guard. Luckily, moving dozens of times across country must’ve burned that right out of me. I keep my house clean and the only thing in my basement is a washer and dryer, furnace and water heater. Every room is neat and spartan and (I hope) tatsefully decorated.

65

MrWhatsit has a tendency to clear out the contents of his pockets before bed at night, and chuck it all onto the top of our dresser. I routinely go through this stuff and throw away all receipts, ticket stubs, and other junk. However, he knows I does this and tacitly approves.

The other major source of clutter is the boxes full of his crap that we have been moving around with us since I moved in with him in 1999. I am not kidding you that some of these boxes were sealed up when I moved in with him, and are still sealed up. We have moved about 6 times in the intervening years, and we just keep moving these boxes of junk around with us. As far as I can tell, they contain a mix of old school papers, receipts, bills, personal correspondence, and concert programs. When we were living in a really small place with no storage space, the box collection used to drive me insane with rage, but now that we have a little more room, we arrived at a compromise solution. MrWhatsit went through most of the boxes and managed to pare them down to a more manageable 10-15 boxes, as opposed to the 20-30 boxes he’d had previously. (I am not exaggerating these numbers.) Then we stored them in his office in our basement. I don’t have to look at them, I don’t have to vacuum around them, I don’t have to trip over them. They are in his space. If he wants to keep them until the day he dies, parked down there gathering dust, that’s his prerogative.

If he continued to accumulate more crap, then we’d have to find a new solution. I would like to think I would not have to resort to tossing out his crap without his permission behind his back, but I haven’t lived in a house that is slowly filling up with drifts of old bills and newspapers that “I’m going to use one day, no really,” so I can’t say what I’d do then.

66

Hmm… My SO doesn’t seem to have seen this thread so I’ll pre-empt the discussion.

I have a slight issue with packratting.

I’m not resistant to the idea of getting rid of stuff, I merely dislike the effort. Really dislike the effort.

I have boxes of letters and boxes of magazines. She’s working with me and being patient. I’ll go through a box of magazines and discard the JDR Microdevices circa 1997 and keep the Woodworking magazines. It does feel good to condense 5 old tattered boxes into 1 crisp new one. She’ll go through a box of letters and dispose of the electric bills from 2001, keep the bank statements, and make a small pile for me to sort myself, most of which gets tossed. She’s realized that just tossing entire boxes is a bad idea since she found the $200 money order. No idea what I got that for. But it did make for a nice celebratory supper.

The boxes were created in my previous marriage and my then-wife was as unmotivated to sort stuff out as I was. New wife-to-be is wonderful in that regard. We’ve got that whole positive feedback thing going where it’s not quite as much of a chore.

Now we’re getting down to the supplies from hobbies I’ve collected over the years that I’m going to have to store or dispose of.

We’re making progress, but there’s 20 years worth of collection. Not to mention having combined two households worth of stuff. Kitchen hardware will need to be reduced by about two thirds before we’re done.

And then there’s the matter of her shoes…

67

[QUOTE=Projammer]
Hmm.. My SO doesn’t seem to have seen this thread so I’ll pre-empt the discussion.
[/QUOTE]

SO here, thanks to Projammer’s alert

[QUOTE=Projammer]
I’m not resistant to the idea of getting rid of stuff, I merely dislike the effort. Really dislike the effort…
[/QUOTE]

Because we all have better things to do… like being here, putting our 2 cents worth on the table :smiley:

[QUOTE=Projammer]
… She’ll go through a box of letters and dispose of the electric bills from 2001, keep the bank statements, and make a small pile for me to sort myself, most of which gets tossed.
[/QUOTE]

Don’t let him fool ya - he made me spend a day feeding the little basket shredder instead of throwing it into a burn pile (that would have been seen from orbit).

[QUOTE=Projammer]
We’re making progress, but there’s 20 years worth of collection. Not to mention having combined two households worth of stuff. Kitchen hardware will need to be reduced by about two thirds before we’re done.
[/QUOTE]

I admit - that’s probably my biggest downfall is collecting all those recipe books and magazines. And other kitchen attire. I still have my mom’s set of Corelle casserole dishes from the 70’s… and I plan on keeping them and passing them down! So what if they’re “retro”!

[QUOTE=Projammer]
And then there’s the matter of her shoes…
[/QUOTE]

:mad: What about my shoes???

I already managed to downsize my collection to one box. :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyways, Projammer has come a ways but still a ways to go. Baby steps, I say!

And the thing is, he has this big workshop next door that he can move his stuff to so I dont care if he keeps it or not, as long as I dont have to look at it. He just needs to transfer it over. And then, if we have to, we can work on cleaning out his workshop when he starts to complain there’s no room in there.

btw - {{{{hugs SO}}}}} for saying such nice things

68

[QUOTE=WhyNot]
The other thing to consider is the limits of technology retrieving all that information in 20 years. I have some of my earliest writing attempts - on 5.25" Apple IIe floppies. I know of no way to get those files off of there at this point! Luckily, I also have some dot-matrix printed versions of them, some with the perforated edges still intact!
[/QUOTE]

Well, we are also pack rats, and I have a couple working amigas, so if I had anything I wanted on the amigas hard drive, I can boot her up and make a floppy, then I can boot up an ancient computer running wincrap 3.11 with an amiga emulator and get the data off the amiga floppy, then put it onto a floppy, an omega zip drive or as a txt file and email it to myself. If I really need to I can load wincrap 3.11, 95, ME, XP and Vista on anything I can build. I have all the sources, I have external floppy drives, an external omega zip drive, an external CD burner that is pretty dang old, and a fairly new external cd/dvd burner …

Never got into macs so I couldnt manage data retrieval from anything mac oriented, but I can probably grab anything off an amiga or PC based system.

I can suggest that an apple antique fanciers group can gt thee data off the old discs for you and proabbly manage to put it into a format you can use. I know that there are a few crash and burn type data recovery companies that could do it in their sleep. Come on, they arent even damaged … <tosses the discs into a drive and sucks teh data ovv them and puts it onto a cd> <flips you a jewel case…Here you go, that will be $$ please>

69

[QUOTE=MsWhatsit]
… we arrived at a compromise solution. MrWhatsit went through most of the boxes and managed to pare them down to a more manageable 10-15 boxes, as opposed to the 20-30 boxes he’d had previously. (I am not exaggerating these numbers.) Then we stored them in his office in our basement. I don’t have to look at them, I don’t have to vacuum around them, I don’t have to trip over them. They are in his space. If he wants to keep them until the day he dies, parked down there gathering dust, that’s his prerogative.
.
[/QUOTE]

Reasonable and fair compromise. :cool:

70

[QUOTE=eleanorigby]
…don’t hold on to tokens from dead ends in your life. Work to have fewer dead ends.
[/QUOTE]

This may be the most excellent expression of the sentiments I’ve been trying to convey to cwPartner for years. Thank you - I’m going to use this.

71

Update on divorcing the packrat (OCD Hoarder)

She asked me today what I would do with “all my stuff”.

I told her it would fit in a single moving van.

She started freaking out about how “no one” could fit their stuff into a “single moving van”

yesterday, I put my stuff into a single “U-Haul” rental…and took it to storage. She called me up, and wanted me to come over… She wanted me to go through each stack, each pile, and take my stuff…

I told her to put my stuff in a box (I left her a 2 cubic foot box) and call me when it was full.

She hasn’t called yet
FML

72

[QUOTE=Full Metal Lotus]
Update on divorcing the packrat (OCD Hoarder)

She asked me today what I would do with “all my stuff”.

I told her it would fit in a single moving van.

She started freaking out about how “no one” could fit their stuff into a “single moving van”

yesterday, I put my stuff into a single “U-Haul” rental…and took it to storage. She called me up, and wanted me to come over.. She wanted me to go through each stack, each pile, and take my stuff…

I told her to put my stuff in a box (I left her a 2 cubic foot box) and call me when it was full.

She hasn’t called yet
FML
[/QUOTE]

You did the right thing. Good luck. Packrats think that everything has value and they cannot concieve of why you throw anything away. I sometimes wonder why they even bother flushing the toilet.

73

He’s the collector and I’m the one who throws things out.

I don’t have too much trouble throwing things away, but sometimes have to do it when DH is out of the house. I got rid of three bags of stuff he’d piled up over the summer about two weeks ago. He didn’t notice anything missing, or if he did, he didn’t say anything about it (more likely). Of course, I cull the important stuff, like receipts, etc and file them immediately.

He keeps boxes and boxes of old electronics in the garage. They can (mostly) stay there as they are out of the way and I don’t really know much about the value of old electronics. I did make him toss out a box of old cordless phones fairly recently. He said “But what if our phone breaks?” and I told him “They make this stuff new. We can buy a new one!” But, I could see it was almost physically painful to him to put the box out.

He gets this pack ratting honestly from his family. They frequently “give” me stuff that I don’t want or need and did not ask for in any way. I usually say “Thank you” and drive it straight to the donation place or recycle center. Once they “gave” me a huge stack of “Good Housekeeping” magazines. I took them straight to the paper recycle dumpster but kept one to take to work for “Show and Tell”. It was from 1975 and had Mary Tyler Moore on the cover showing off the brown and orange afgan she had knitted- LOL. This was about 2-3 years ago.

This “his family” thing is kind of complicated, and I’m not sure how it all began: His family seems to consider that “giving” me this stuff is a “gift” to me- that’s why I “thank” them for it. I think I’m giving them a gift by letting them think the stuff is being used and appreciated, which makes them feel less anxious about getting rid of it. Of course, I don’t want this old junk, so I don’t even let it get into my driveway. I know all the drop off places in my area. And, they know this stuff is not at my house because they don’t see it here and I try to keep things pretty lean in here. But somehow it all works out.

74

**Ca3799 **, I wonder, your in-laws never ask about the stuff they “gave” you? Never fish for compliments on how those old GH-issues must have been really useful, and did you knit that orange afghan?
Because if they did, the whole scenarion would collapse. Or you would have to lie with a straight face.

75

I would have a bit of a problem with other people giving me their old crap to throw away for them. I have enough of my own crap, thank you very much.

76

Well, today is crunch day as we move on Friday morning. Here’s how I’m trying to handle it. Anything that I can say is ‘ours’, I can make the decision to toss.

I’m really seeing the packrat mentality in SO as more of a growing up poor mentality than some a hoarding mentality. In fact, I had a thread a couple years ago about when it is acceptable to throw out food. I toss out the week old bread that is getting stale and buy a new loaf. He will eat the stale bread until it is gone or mold starts to form. I think that is a lot of the mentality behind the reluctance to throw something out. I know the vast majority of the items we donated will be thrown out by the charity we donated them to. But there is still that ‘somebody, somewhere might be able to use that’ thinking that prevented him from just putting it in the dumpster.

77

Huh you’ll regret it.

For decades I stored fashionable clothes from when I was a young bloke in a mates loft.

O.K. so most of it if I’d ever worn it would have been a little tight but it was all in very good condition.

His missus kept nagging me to throw it all away and bowing to the pressure I did …and it hurt,boy did it hurt.

So a couple of weeks later a mate comes up to me and saidL4L we’re going on a 70s themed stag night pissup can you lend me some flared trousers with turnups and maybe one of those shirts with the pointy collars that reach halfway down your torso?
And if our feet are the same size a pair of thoses shoes with the three inch block soles?

And I had to tell him what had happened.

My mates missus pretended to be unconcerned when I told her but I knew that really deep down she was racked with guilt.

Personally I was so upset myself that I was still fuming about it a couple of weeks later and it totally ruined the New Millenium night celebrations for me…what a waste!

78

I wish I could go buy new stuff when I need it.
Got to keep the old stuff running & working because that is all we’ll ever have.
Ruined stuff I take apart for the nuts & bolts and parts that I know how to make into something else.
I use old thrown away computer stuff to make systems for the poor kids and folks who can’t even afford a $60 system. And they get something that can actually get online if they so chose. Kids in school now days really need a computer at home too.

We have a clothes problem but we gradually clean it out. Need to sell the leather jackets that no longer fit. Just have to pick the right time of year, like now… ::: sigh :::

My real problem is that I want to save most anything I think will be useful or I want to save nothing and live out of a backpack and saddle bags without even having a home. Yeah, I’m locked on the horns of an enema…