Hoarding

caseydog said:
One of the mindsets of even mild hoarders that needs to change is this. Instead of thinking, "I may need this some day," to "What is the worst thing that can happen if I throw this away." That is what I had to get into my hard head.

CD
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Yes, I have to spend moolah to re-purchase said item again. And such and such magazine is now out of print... But yeah, I've discarded MOST but not ALL.

However... I have indeed gotten rid of a LOT of stuff.

I did get to the point where I sent my brother some important memorabilia since he has offspring and I do not. I didn't want to part with Mom's Kentucky Derby programs, but I sent them on to my brother last year. (Okay, who cares about that? But actually Mom crawled past Secret Service to get signatures from President Nixon (at that time), his wife, and several high ranking Senators of the 80s who were lodged into Kentucky Derby box seats.) There's some lesser important stuff I've passed on to him. Which if he wants could be profitable to sell.
 
morning glory

Thanks for the new thread.

It has been 5 or 6 years since I have been able to get G to do even a minor purge in his office. It looks like those extreme cases on Hoarding - Buried Alive. There is a small strip of floor from the door to his chair that is not covered with debris. Of course it is also nasty. Everything is caked with dust. Fortunately he does not eat in his office so there is no rotting food hidden in there. I keep that door closed.

I am a voracious reader. I like books. They pile up quickly. When the pile of read books next to my bed or chair in the den begin to topple over it is time to box them up and donate to the Library for their annual book sale. Usually twice each year. It is time now. I always have more books at the end of winter because I hibernate and read.

Yes, yes yes - e-books. I just like a book in my hand. I had a Kindle years ago and drowned it. I usually shower but occasionally take a tub bath. When I do I read in the tub. My Kindle went for a swim. :cry: Good thing it was not a device that had to be plugged in to an electrical outlet. I would have been very soggy:toast:.
 
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My wife had a lot of memorabilia from her youth. She was very much into comics and movies, sci-fi stuff, so she had boxes of TV Guide magazines from the 1970's and 1980's, lots of magazines, film posters, etc. After storing and moving them nine times over the years, I finally convinced her to sell them, which she did.

Nowadays, she's bad about financial statements, because she does have this (what I think is an) irrational fear of something money-related coming up out of our distant past and somehow causing us to lose everything and end up homeless. So she's got the payment receipts for every car she/we have owned, every canceled check for insurance payments, every tax return, going back 30 and even 40 years. They're all boxed up and stored neatly away, but we have them.

My mom is huge on just not wanting to waste anything. She's a Depression child and for her, you just don't throw things away if they have any possible use left in them. That, and she loves books and magazines, and I can go out there right now and I have no doubt I can lay my hands on a 1959 Women's Day in less than 20 minutes.

She's also bad with food, but now that it's just her and dad and they eat out most of the time, that kind of fixed itself. She got used to cooking for 10-12 people, and after everyone moved out on their own, she had a hard time adjusting to that for years. She'd shop for a dozen people, and it was just the two of them.

Her house is cluttered, but not as bad as a proper hoarder, and about once a year, she'll make an effort, but she won't throw anything away. Instead, she'll bad up old magazines and books and she'll sneak into public places, like the local laundromat, and leave them there. "Someone might want to look at these while they're washing their clothes..."

Her dad could probably have been counted as a hoarder, but his wife kept his stuff confined to the barn, which he did manage to fill by his death. When we were kids, we used to climb over all the junk, through the little holes and paths, because in the back was an old piano we liked to bang around on.

He was a jumble/boot/yard/garage seller. He loved other people's junk. When he died, we cleaned out the barn and found buried at the center...a 1960-something Dodge Dart or Plymouth Valiant - dirty and dusty, tires rotted, but otherwise not in bad shape. We'd been climbing over/around it for decades without knowing.

I hate clutter, and I'm constantly throwing crap out. Every trash day, as I'm putting out the garbage, I do a quick last-minute walkthrough, just trying to find anything that's been lying around unused for more than a few months. This week, it was a Gandalf-style walking stick I bought about 15 years ago on a whim, leaning up in the garage. Out it went.
 
I am a dabbler in crafting - paper beads made into jewelry, bowls and containers made from paper, basket weaving with paper. Making journals from junk. I go in fits and starts. I do keep my supplies and raw material neatly boxed. I have been eyeing my bins of material and have set myself a time line. Today is March 6th. I either get to work and use my stored material in 60 days or it gets tossed. For many years I used candles - real ones. I stored the spent wax in a bin with the idea that I could melt it down and make new candles. In the process of cleaning closets I encountered this bin of spent candles. Question to self - Will you actually do something with this? Answer - Yes. Question #2 Will you do something with this in 30 days? Answer - Probably not. Out it went.
 
My thing is if something is packed up and it's been packed up for over a year, I think it should be tossed. Haven't needed to unpack it so far, do I really need it?
 
We have wheelie bins here, green for garden greens and food waste, yellow for recycle and red for rubbish, that goes to land fill. If the red one is half full the day before pickup, I do a garage inspection, if it is not needed in next few months, it goes in the bin. I'm not a hoarder, never have been, but I do have like caseydog says some memoriabillia, like horses I've bred and their winning pics. Some go back 20 years but to me they are great memories. They are stored in the garage loft. Unseen for about 10 years. My son will get them as he raced and even drove some of my horses at the races. He was a junior driver in harness racing.

Russ
 
We keep a food and prep stash because we're conspiracy nuts. Well a little anyway 😄

But I check our stash frequently and also use it, I replace used items when used and I check expiry dates frequently so nothing we keep is out of date.

One of my stepsons is a hoarder though, he's autistic and bonds more with stuff than people. He frequently comes home with trash he found near the road, like a wet tv two months ago that he wanted to use. My husband was a little peeved, to say the least. No matter how many times we forbid him foraging trash, he keeps doing it because he believes there really is interest in a museum for used phone pieces fromthe 60's and 70's. Well sure for the rare pieces, but stepson thinks everything he picks up is rare. We worry what he will be like when he lives on his own.
 
TastyReuben said:
This week, it was a Gandalf-style walking stick I bought about 15 years ago on a whim, leaning up in the garage. Out it went.
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The one thing I wouldn't ever do is put useable items in the general rubbish. Here they would just go in to land fill which in itself, is a serious environmental issue. I always donate to charity shops or sometimes leave items outside at the front of my house (its a busy street), with a notice attached 'Please take me for free'. I've successfully passed on a toaster oven, a dog crate, a hand blender and a lot of other items using the latter method.

There are also neighbourhood on-line forums for selling or giving stuff away.
 
morning glory said:
The one thing I wouldn't ever do is put useable items in the general rubbish.
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It's hard to explain, except that with me, it's become an important ritual. Every Wednesday night, as I'm putting the trash out, that's what I do - a quick walk through the premises to find one thing...a big thing, a little thing...anything that we're not using anymore that I can put in the trash, knowing that before I wake up in the morning, it'll be gone and that we'll have one item less than we did the night before. That's very important to me.

I keep a pile of things that get donated, and as soon as that box fills up, into the car it goes and off to Goodwill. That can take a few weeks to fill up, and then I know it'll sit for a few days more, then it'll ride around in the back of the car for a few more days before I remember to stop at Goodwill, so it can take a few weeks to complete that cycle. Putting something out in the trash is immediate gratification.
 
I will never forget when i was about 3 or 4, my mother went out into my father's workroom/storage space looking for something, which I don't remember what exactly, but it was something she rarely, if ever, did. She would usually have my dad go get whatever she wanted since he would know exactly where it was, but he wasn't home that day. She came back in the main part of the house stomping, red faced, with steam practically coming out of her ears. Daddy, for some reason, had been collecting empty containers of cooking oil for who knows how long as they were piled high in a corner in the storage room, higher than i was tall at the time (of course I had to go see after her reaction when I was able to sneak away since I wasn't allowed in there by myself). Boy oh boy did he catch it when he got home, though i never learned why he was keeping them since I got sent to my room for the vast majority of their "discussion." Whatever she said to him must have worked though because his hoarding tendency got nipped in the bud then and there. I found out as an adult after my grandmother died that his father was a hoarder, as the basement of the family home was literally packed full of junk my grandfather had collected, which my dad and his brothers had to get rid of.
 
My parents lived in their house for 61 years before moving in with us. My Dad was an outdoorsman and salt of the earth type guy. Garage and shed full of tools, basement full of hunting, trapping and fishing gear. He had a bar in his basement that had the ambiance of small town beer joints from the 1950s and 1960s including lots of lighted beer signs. In fact Tasty, one of them is of the Cincinnati Skyline / Schoenling Beer- anyway, I digress. The point is they both had sudden dramatic declines in health and literally left their house one day never to return and left my sisters and I with 61 years of stuff. Alot of stuff! Took my Us over a year to clear the contents. My sister did most of the clearing work with her best friend as I had the parents with me. I still tear up when I think about getting rid of his hunting jackets and hip waders - that hung in the garage since I was a kid. The marsh /outdoor smell associated with them always brings my Dad to mind. , its funny how inanimate objects can affect us and our emotions.
 
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