The first time I saw this, I thought, “Well, she’s probably very old. Just wait a few years, and have an estate sale right after the funeral.” But in the photo of her (last one on the page), she looks relatively young, and in great shape. So she could go on like this for decades.
I wonder if anything’s changed since this first hit the net? I remember the SA people offering advice like “Just take one box out of the house every day” and “Cancel her eBay account”. I wonder if the son has tried to do any kind of intervention, or just given up.
Well, clearly it’s not clean clean. I mean, you can see how much dust is lying on every flat surface, and you know there are floors and windows and soft furniture that haven’t been touched for years. And yet, and yet…
When I see photos of a house that’s in full-on Collyer-Brothers mode, I expect to see black mold crawling up the bathroom walls and spreading across the floor. I brace myself for dirty dishes with moldy food remnants on the kitchen counter. I just know the kitchen sink will contain things that haunt my dreams, and months worth of dirty clothes will be forming a mountain range in the bedroom. But I don’t see that here. For all the clutter, the bathroom is sparkling clean, the exposed bits of kitchen counter are shiny, and the clothes are clean and either hung on hangars or neatly folded. I see one dirty coffee mug in the kitchen - I dare say most of us reading this thread have more dirty dishes on our kitchen counters than that on any given day. Somebody is clearly trying to keep the house from becoming a total pigsty, even though it’s a losing battle. And after reading the commentary, I suspect that someone is Dear Old Mom, not the author.
She still needs help, of course. Can’t lose sight of that.
I can’t help but look at everything in that house and think of the dust… and the dust mites crawling over everything. I couldn’t bear to sleep there. I’d feel like the boxes were smothering me.
I’ve seen this before as well. She needs to be on one of those ‘Clean my Hovel’ shows. Get all that shit OUT OF THERE. Once all her crap is sold at her garage sale, she can afford therapy to get that shit under control.
Just think how much time it would take to either throw all that away (how much could you get rid of each week?) or sell it on eBay (listing it, boxing it up and mailing it out). And then she’d just start all over again.
A guy who recently moved out of our complex had a garage fully as bad as the one shown. I never saw the inside of his place, but those who did said it was worse than the garage. I know the person who bought it had to leave the garage open for a week just to air out the place; the smell in the garage made you think a mass grave or a virulent ceptic tank had just been opened. And the guy who owned it looked perfectly normal, had a good job as an engineer and drove a late model BMW.
Ugh. It’s like being inside this woman’s head. All those calendars. The thematically grouped refrigerator magnets. The precisely folded clothes. The way the cassette tapes are arranged on the roll-top. The bizarre pockets of organization amid the towers of clutter. I wonder if the house will be able to hold much more, structurally speaking.
She doesn’t, though. Not even remotely. Although there doesn’t appear to be a lot of filth, like garbage and feces and whatnot, there are immense amounts of dust. She might be able to keep clean the places she can get to easily but just look at all the dust. And there has to be rodents that just crawled in somewhere and died that they couldn’t get to.
Ok, I now feel much better about my mother’s house (which I’m already uncomfortable in) … she’s definitely heading in the same direction as this woman, though. I guess I should be glad that she doesn’t “do” eBay!
How many hours a week does she spend on eBay? How much money per month or per year supports this activity? What does she look for and why? How much does she fight to win the auctions she bids on? Does she have a job and does she do this only evenings and weekends? Does she do anything else - going out to the movies, visiting family and friends - anything? Might she ever be more than “lower middle class” if she didn’t spend so much money on eBay?
I think it’s funny that so many of those boxes say
I feel sorry for both of them. The mother for obvious reasons, and the son because he lives there (it said towards the end that he was thinking of moving in with his grandmother). I would dread coming home to a house like that.
Sadly, I can see my in-law’s house looking like that in a few more years. My SIL (who still lives at home) is an incurable packrat, and also shops all the time and just has piles of crap all over. She has tons of that collectable shit, too, that just sits around collecting dust. She and her mother used to go to yard sales all the time and just buy whatever caught their eye, something they might need, anything, just to buy it. The only “good” thing is that my MIL passed away a couple of years ago, so there’s one less packrat in the house.
My SIL’s bedroom is full of shopping bags all the time. She buys stuff and just brings it home and doesn’t go though it or put it away for weeks. She’ll have bags upon bags upon bags, just sitting around. Most of it is shit from the Dollar Store. :rolleyes:
Well, if you really wanted to get rid of it, to the point of not caring what all the crap was, you’d rent a big-ass dumpster and throw everything in it.
At least, that’s what we did when my grandpa moved out of his house. And yes, they do just start all over.
I’m glad I live in a 170 square foot dorm room (a double). It’s too small for this to happen. You can’t just throw something down and leave it there, because you’ll walk into it 5 minutes later.
But … wow.
I guess I should be glad that she doesn’t “do” eBay!