First of a 3 part series: Compulsive Hoarding

By badbadivy

Sometimes I'll pick up a cleaning gig to make a bit of money. My friends and family know this and will use my fabulous cleaning abilities to their advantage. Normally I don't mind, I'll come over to a friend's house for some organizing goodness, this is the sort of stuff I live for.

Enter some people I know who are moving. They are prime examples of people who both live in squalor and are compulsive hoarders. When people who live like this move, it turns into a completely monumental task.

My friend was to have met me at 2:30 but he showed up 15 minutes late. I had shown up 15 minutes early, so after a half hour of waiting in the 90 degree Tennessee sun, I was ready to go into the nice, air condidioned house.

Except when I did go into the house, I was hit with a smell that made me want to run back out and sit in the heat for another couple of hours. This person has dogs, and has let the dogs make messes in the place. Apparently it was not cleaned up, or not cleaned up well. The smell had apparently sunk into the subflooring, which made the smell of dog urine overwhelming. Add to that, the owner had apparently turned the temp in the house up to save energy, so instead of nice, cool air conditioning, it was 85 degrees.

But I'm getting ahead of myself- I will talk about squalor tomorrow. Today's story is about compulsive hoarding. The woman of the house was a child of the Great Depression, and has some serious hoarding issues to this day. I remember when I helped her move a different time, I threw away over a thousand peanut butter lids, and she screamed at me for throwing them away.

This time, I had to take items from the room pictured above (that's the room about half cleaned out, it was WAY worse at the beginning, but I had to sneak around and take pics from my cell phone) and ask her one by one which items she wanted to get rid of and which items she was going to sell in the yard sale.

When I got started, I asked for a trash bag. They told me they were going to sell everything in the yard sale and were not going to throw anything away. When I told them I saw some items that were obviously trash, they grudgingly gave me a trash bag. After cleaning out half a room, I managed to gill half of that trash bag. They just did not want to throw anything away.

Odd items we kept: broken paper clips (because she might want to pick a lock someday. seriously), a calendar from 1999 (there are pretty pictures in there!), and broken rubber bands (don't worry! we can tie them together). Some things I managed to talk her into throwing away: used kleenex, a piece of shredded cardboard, some price tags. That's about it. Wow.

The experience made me want to immediately go home and throw everything I own away. I understand it's a mental illness, and is an obsessive compulsive thing, but wow, man. The things we kept. Oy.

Okay, Curbliers, talk back: Tell me about hoarders you have known. I bet y'all have got some good stories.

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compulsive-hoarding

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June 13, 2007

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badbadivy

June 14, 2007

Oh, man, a *spare* house?! LOL, how cool is that? But to fill it up with junk, oy!

Surly

June 14, 2007

My Dad's Aunt had a spare house that was filled floor to ceiling. Some rooms you could not get into. They filled a 30yard dumpster under great protest from Aunt Dot.

badbadivy

June 14, 2007

Hee hee, I've known old ladies with annoyed mouse voices like that. It's cute, in a strange way. The cool thing about cleaning out houses of people like that is you can find some neat stuff. That's about the only redeeming thing about cleaning up hoarders houses.

malleron

June 14, 2007

As far stories about compulsive hoarders, here's one:

My ex husband's best friend's grandmother was a Depression baby. And some years before she died, he (the friend) wanted to help her move into a smaller place that she could more easily manage (she was pushing 90). Of course before she could go anywhere, she had to go through and get rid of stuff. Raised to save everything, she cried and screamed whenever anyone touched or tried to move her stuff. Turns out, she had a 4 bedroom house and each room was literally packed from floor to the ceiling with old magazines, newspapers, books, clothes, antique furniture, you name it. Her kitchen was a lot like your picture above because she was too old to clean it well and she never threw anything out. Now, combine this mayhem with 100-degree Texas summers over decades and it's a wonder she didn't go up in flames. Indeed, I'm quite surprised she wasn't buried beneath all that stuff -- she was a teeny tiny woman with a very small voice. Even screaming she sounded like an annoyed mouse.

malleron

June 14, 2007

I'd have to say that most of the people in my family, on my mother's side specifically, are hoarders to varying degrees. My grandmother, also a Depression baby, wasn't as bad as the people in your story, but as she became more and more ill she got worse about not giving up obvious trash.

Personally, I'm dying to get my hands on my parents' house so I can help them get rid of all the papers, useless found objects, old files, etc. that they've collected over their 20+ years of marriage. Of course, I'm also dreading it -- once I start I won't be able to stop and only the gods know what my mother's managed to squirrel away where over the years.