# Compulsive Hoarding



## AlephOne2Many (Feb 21, 2016)

I don't know if this deserves its own thread but I'll shoot: is anyone here familiar with hoarders? Have any of you known one or had been one? If so, to what extent had anyone or yourself experienced hoarding?


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## Quijibo69 (Feb 21, 2016)

It has a tv show, this episode is the grossest one:



Spoiler: DO NOT WANT!


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## AlephOne2Many (Feb 21, 2016)

This is going to probably make my night _much_ more fun sharing...

I live in an average not-too-nice but not-actually-bad neighborhood street nearby an intersection, most of the people keep their yards nice and neat and do their part in picking up garbage kids throw on the street when they go to School and I've been sweeping the sidewalk beside my house. Everything is fine and dandy except for the house across from me (which is now renovated and a family moved in) was subject to years of rot. Story goes this destitute man and his battered wife nicknamed "Piggies" lived in filth with their child there after his grandma passed away. Apparently she hoarded newspapers and aluminum cans, which her son (the father) also piled up in the back yard. He inherited the compulsive disorder from her, which lead to the situation getting even worse as the kid had to stay over there every other month. What pisses me off about it all, the landlord doesn't give two flying fucks about his land so he let it rot even after a terrible storm nearly destroyed half the residential block. Thankfully after *five years* it's in livable conditions and I hope Mr. and Mrs. piggy were put into rehabilitation.


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## Magique (Feb 21, 2016)

I wish I had the horrifying rating now. This is awful.


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## TowinKarz (Feb 22, 2016)

The Collyer Brothers are a well known case of hoarding, mostly due to the sheer excess it reached, even by hoarding standards, and the fact it ended up killing them both.....


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## XYZpdq (Feb 22, 2016)

The best thing about living here in the cyberonline future is that with massive external drives I can download alllllllllllllllllllllllllll day to keep on hoarding and it barely takes up any irl room.


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## vertexwindi (Feb 23, 2016)

I live with a hoarder.


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## Vitriol (Feb 23, 2016)

After my great grandfather died, my father and grandfather found boxes of lead soldiers he'd made stored with his old service pistol, sword and trophies from the great war. My grandfather believed they must have been made shortly after his father returned from the trenches and in secret. I counted them a few years ago and there are >20 000.

Poor fellow was clearly quite damaged.


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## Lefty's Revenge (Feb 23, 2016)

One of my closest friend's mother is a hoarder. Its basically ruined their relationship and caused him to cut ties with the whole family.

Shit is dark.


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## Vorhtbame (Feb 23, 2016)

We've just moved into a house that's been in the family since at least 1870.  How do I know it's 1870?  Because there are boxes upon boxes of books, journals, and photographs from that year and thereabout.  We could open a museum based just on what we found in one bedroom.

On the other hand, there were also dozens of boxes of unused seeds, broken and rusted cookware, mail-order catalogs, and bottles of cough syrup that expired twenty years ago, courtesy of the eccentric uncle who lived here until a few years ago.  And don't get me started on the cans of food that date back to the seventies!  I loved that old man, but he really couldn't understand why he didn't need two refrigerators in the back room.


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## QE 757 (Feb 23, 2016)

I had a compulsive hoarder in the neighborhood, an elderly man who had a collection of rusted car wrecks and old refrigerators.
He died a couple of years ago and they are cleaning up his yard and planning to demolish his house which was something straight out of a horror movie. Way worse than 14 BLC.


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## unclestryker (Feb 23, 2016)

Quijibo69 said:


> It has a tv show, this episode is the grossest one:



Ah yes hoarders, that hoader in the episode, had stuff is that episode that was so bad they couldn't air segments of what they found. Robin Zasio spent time in-between filming segments crying in her car. Matt had to drive home in his underwear because the cat juice manage to seep through hazmat suit and on to his clothing. Oh what's cat juice, you say? Well check out the episode down below.






Also here is the opie and Anthony segment.


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## AnOminous (Feb 23, 2016)

I have an uncle with hoarding tendencies for very large machines and giant engines for very large machines and appliances and machine parts, but he has a lot of land, so he has kept these things stored on the land itself, and in a basement and a few relatively small outside storage places.  He actually has used many of these things from time to time, so his somewhat implausible arguments for having all of this insane crap around sort of passes muster. 

And he has a very good grasp of the law so somehow, this mammoth bunch of crap doesn't break the law.

(He also built a house where somehow, because of how he built the foundation, he has to pay practically no taxes on it.  Seriously.  The state tax guys challenged it and lost.  Beat that, sovcits.)

But he's married to a woman who insisted none of that shit ever gets into the actual house, because she's exactly the opposite and a bit of a neat freak.  And in fact, none of that shit is in the actual house.

This has somehow worked out.

ETA:  Oh, the point.  I forgot that.

Hoarders who aren't alone only get to do that shit because nobody challenges it.  A hoarder is someone whose tendencies to do that are not countered by a working social support structure.


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## fuehrer_dessler (Feb 23, 2016)

Shit man, I need a horrifying rating for all this shit.


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## chimpburgers (Feb 23, 2016)

Never met a hoarder before but the TV shows I saw on it were enough for me. Matt Paxton has to have big balls to do what he does and cleaning up all that shit.


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## waffle (Feb 23, 2016)

AnOminous said:


> (He also built a house where somehow, because of how he built the foundation, he has to pay practically no taxes on it.  Seriously.  The state tax guys challenged it and lost.  Beat that, sovcits.)
> 
> .



That just sounds like the King of the Hill episode where Dale builds a watchtower with no foundation, 49' tall and a 9'x9' base just to get around county building codes. Then it falls over.

One of my real good friend's dad's has filled the entire family home with Nintendo and Godzilla shit, he's a fucking doctor too. He always clears out the garage and talks about how it's going to be his super cool staging area to clear the house out. Then he fills the garage with shit again.


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## TowinKarz (Feb 23, 2016)

There was an old, old motel on the side of the road here in town.  Old enough that it looked right out of Hitchcock's _Psycho_, the lone proprietor's house on the back of the lot, and the actual Motel rooms in your typical roadside setup up front.  Well, this place had ceased being an actual for-business motel in the 70's, partially because it couldn't compete with chain hotels, since it had no amenities, and partially because the road it was on was bypassed by a freeway and that literally killed traffic driving by.  Anyway, it had lain unused and getting a bit shabbier each year until about 2010 when the proprietor/owner died and a new person bought the lot, hotel and all.  I had a chance to talk to him, and apparently, it was a hoarder's nightmare.  Every single one of the hotel rooms was filled to the ceiling with usual hoarding junk, newspapers, old appliances, furniture, knick-knacks, stuffed until the floors under the rooms collapsed, and then they piled stuff on top of that new space at the top....  the main house was just as bad, and the property was strewn with dead ranges, fridges, and the rusted hulks of 12 cars.  The guy said he had 10 industrial-sized roll off dumpster loads taken out to get rid of it all, and then called in a bulldozer to flatten the motel part.  The place actually looks like a nice spot to live in now, he's working on making it into an event center where you can have a nice picnic or family reunion, else I think he wouldn't have bothered with the de-hoarding effort.


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## AlephOne2Many (Feb 23, 2016)

Jesus Christ, the types of garbage you can fit in what is supposed to be a residential structure. Holy shit.


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## Cosmos (Feb 24, 2016)

Sometimes I feel like I'm walking the thin line between "packrat" and "hoarder." I have a very difficult time getting rid of things because I can always think of an excuse to keep something around, be it because I "might need it again someday" or because I'm convinced it has sentimental value. Thankfully though, it only extends to actual functional items and not trash.

I feel like I have the potential to become a hoarder if I'm not careful, which is why I'm, you know, careful. But at the same time I've binge watched and read a ton of stuff about hoarders so I feel like I've sufficiently traumatized myself into not drifting down that path.

Also, animal hoarders make my soul ache. I know that the majority of animal hoarders aren't evil animal abusers; most of the time they genuinely love their animals but just cannot take care of them and refuse to accept it. But I cannot deal with seeing living, feeling creatures living in overcrowded filth and waste because they're being hoarded away like inanimate objects.


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## Watermelon1337 (Feb 24, 2016)

Cosmos said:


> Also, animal hoarders make my soul ache. I know that the majority of animal hoarders aren't evil animal abusers; most of the time they genuinely love their animals but just cannot take care of them and refuse to accept it. But I cannot deal with seeing living, feeling creatures living in overcrowded filth and waste because they're being hoarded away like inanimate objects.



I somewhat agree with you, I think it depends on the hoarder, but most of the time I feel no sympathy for them because anyone can look at a cat covered in mange and diseases and know it's not right for the cat to look that way. I get something's already wrong with a hoarder's mind to where they just literally don't 'notice' any of the garbage around them but when I used to watch the shows, normal people would be devastated and angry that there's litters of dead or dying kittens hidden in layers of filth and the hoarders almost never twitch a single muscle. They only show emotion when anyone says they're taking the animals way to help them or give them humane deaths and they scream and rant and rave because their possessions are being taken away. I rarely ever see them actually care and love for an animal in such conditions and ever want to do what's best for them. I have only seen one hoarder who kept one room for his birds completely clean and empty so that they wouldn't have to live in a crowded bunker of trash like he did.

The hoarders that force their children or someone unable to leave the house to live in the same conditions are the fucking worst. The kids usually end up with horrible health issues and even go to the ER for breathing problems and the hoarder relative doesn't bat an eye. It's crazy just so see a normal person screaming at a hoarder trying to get it through their head how awful or abusive they are and the hoarder just looks blank. Or, if they DO feel defensive, they become nasty horrible people screaming back at them and the cleaning process comes to a halt. 

As for knowing any hoarders in my personal life, I had some neighbors who moved into a nice 2 story house near the park. They left their halloween, christmas, and easter decorations all piled and rotting in the front porch, plus a kiddie pool, plus some bikes and a slide in the back yard. They never even touched any of them for the entire year and a half they lived there. The parents were overweight white trash and their kids looked anemic. The entire family would stop whatever they were doing in the front or back yard to literally stare at you until you went back inside or were out of sight. My neighbor said they reminded him of some backwoods feral family from a horror movie. Our little group of houses closest to them noticed a smell like garbage constantly coming from the house. I guess reports came in because the family was evicted, but not before 3 storage pods filled with garbage and broken furniture were piled and heaved off.


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## The Knife's Husbando (Feb 24, 2016)

_Hoarders_ is one of our fave shows. We usually put it on for background noise while cleaning house. It's inspirational, but it also has the side effect of you pausing while doing dishes & saying to yourself "There are only _two_ of us. Do we really _need_ twelve spoons?"


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## Cosmos (Feb 24, 2016)

McRascal said:


> I somewhat agree with you, I think it depends on the hoarder, but most of the time I feel no sympathy for them because anyone can look at a cat covered in mange and diseases and know it's not right for the cat to look that way. I get something's already wrong with a hoarder's mind to where they just literally don't 'notice' any of the garbage around them but when I used to watch the shows, normal people would be devastated and angry that there's litters of dead or dying kittens hidden in layers of filth and the hoarders almost never twitch a single muscle. They only show emotion when anyone says they're taking the animals way to help them or give them humane deaths and they scream and rant and rave because their possessions are being taken away. I rarely ever see them actually care and love for an animal in such conditions and ever want to do what's best for them. I have only seen one hoarder who kept one room for his birds completely clean and empty so that they wouldn't have to live in a crowded bunker of trash like he did.
> 
> The hoarders that force their children or someone unable to leave the house to live in the same conditions are the fucking worst. The kids usually end up with horrible health issues and even go to the ER for breathing problems and the hoarder relative doesn't bat an eye. It's crazy just so see a normal person screaming at a hoarder trying to get it through their head how awful or abusive they are and the hoarder just looks blank. Or, if they DO feel defensive, they become nasty horrible people screaming back at them and the cleaning process comes to a halt.



Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm still disgusted by them. I'm fine with people who want to live in piles of waste; it's their life, if they want to hoard themselves to death, so be it. But involving other, often very vulnerable lives into their mess *really *sets me off. I can't watch or read about hoarders who hoard animals or have children living with them. Like you said, it depends on the hoarder, but there definitely comes a point when hoarders cease to see living creatures as what they are and instead view them as objects to be collected. 

It really makes you wonder when that disconnect happens and how someone can become so delusional that they don't see a problem with keeping 50 cats confined in a closed area that's already stuffed with trash. I can't even fathom it.


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## AnOminous (Feb 24, 2016)

McRascal said:


> The hoarders that force their children or someone unable to leave the house to live in the same conditions are the fucking worst. The kids usually end up with horrible health issues and even go to the ER for breathing problems and the hoarder relative doesn't bat an eye.



I blame Reagan for making it virtually impossible to intervene in mental health situations even when it is blindingly obvious someone is fucking nuts and needs help.


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## Rabbit Bones (Feb 24, 2016)

My mom is a hoarder. It's a clean hoard, though. When my sister and I lived with her, she managed to keep it all in the spare room. Once my sister moved out, it spread to her old room. Once I moved out, it took over my room, the sun room and the dining room. She kept the kitchen and the living room more or less tidy. It was all books, fabric, and yarn. And weird shit she'd find at estate sales, like mason jars and plant pots and weird paintings. She bought tons of plate sets, and kitchen things. When I moved out, I pretty much stocked my kitchen just by picking through my sisters old room. She's kept pretty much everything my deceased stepdad owned. She has multiple packages coming in every day from eBay. She's moved into her new husbands house and he keeps it under control... except she still owns her house, and uses it as a warehouse for the shit she still buys. She's a normal woman, she's just obsessed with buying crap.


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## The Knife's Husbando (Feb 24, 2016)

Okay, powerlevel time. 

My father was a mechanical hoarder. In hindsight, it was painfully obvious, but like they say- hindsight is always 20/20.

My dad used to run a blacksmith/custom fabrication/repair 'most anything shop. Nothing formal & above the table, but everyone in the town I grew up in knew that "Ol' Man (name retracted)" could fix or make almost anything you wanted. I started helping him in his shop when I was about twelve years old, fetching tools and parts, holding this down, lifting that, pulling the other end, pumping the bellows on the forge, etc. And as I grew older, I started learning his trade. How to make stuff- in the infinite sense. I moved out of my parent's place eventually, and after I met The Knife, I moved both me & my toolboxes in with her & started up my own shop at her place. No biggie. Sharpening lawn-mower blades helps pay the rent. 

Then my father got into an auto accident, and everything somehow changed.  Including my primal mindset. I won't belabor ya'll with the details of my daddy's passing. I will only say it was the deepest spiritual and emotional wound I've ever suffered. Then we had to deal with the physical details of his passing from this moral coil. His shop. 

Where to fucking begin? Every blacksmith/machinist has a scrap pile he draws parts from, but my Daddy's scrap heap occupied about _two acres, _not even counting the crap he had stashed all over his land & in his house.  In the end, my Mom & I just hired a scrap-metal dealer to come out and deal with the mess. And Lord what a mess it was: ten broken down autos, most of a scrapped grain silo, lengths of railroad track, broken-down home appliances of all kinds, and about forty lawn mowers in various states of disrepair.

Looking back, the justifications seemed so plausible:
"It's good for parts!", "I'll fix it up later and sell it!", "I'll just sell it for scrap iron!" Not even counting that scrap iron only sells for 0.03$ a hundred pounds. That won't even cover your gas money to the foundry/recycler. 

I also, in hindsight,  saw the same justification patterns forming in my psyche as I went down the road in my shop. "I'll need this bit of stock, sooner or later. I'll save it."

Thank God I was able to get out of that mindset, mostly thanks to my lovely wife.


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## wheat pasta (Feb 24, 2016)

I currently live with my parents and my mom's a hoarder.

She likes rubbermaid bins and plastic shoeboxes. She's been hanging on to such things as action figures from my brother's childhood, odds and ends from her grandparents' house (in _my_ room, no less...), countless sets of winter and summer clothing which she makes my dad haul to and from the shed in the backyard (which ended up being another place for her to hoard, long story short my dad built a shed and then my mom crammed her useless crap into it) depending on the season, scrapbooking supplies she'll never use and art supplies.

The spare bedroom in our house has a little walkway to the desk in the corner that loops back around to the closet where she keeps her dozens upon dozens of tie-dye shirts, most of them blue and blue-green. Everywhere else, there's junk in the way. On every feasible surface.

We also have entirely too many pots and pans as well as three different incomplete sets of measuring cups/measuring spoons and more tupperware containers than one family could possibly need. All of our cupboards have things stuffed way in the back that haven't seen daylight in at least ten years.

Everything has to be stacked and arranged just so, or else I face her wrath. If I touch an object or move something around, she decides that's her cue to yell at me and get belligerent.  Her closet's been inaccessible for years, filled to the ceiling with random crap and blocked in by yet more random crap.
My parents also have a metric shit-ton of clothes. The clothing simultaneously takes up space in the laundry room, their bedroom and the spare room, to the point where I can't hang up clothes in the laundry room without being bitched at.

I think she'd be worse if my dad didn't live with us, because he doesn't tolerate it as much and while she doesn't give two shits about my opinion, she values his.
I have some hoarding tendencies, I think most children of hoarders do. Only recently have I been able to reconcile with myself that I like to buy stuff, as well as to recognize the differences between when something is worth having and when I'm just feeling an urge to hoard.

I love the hoarders TV show. I'm like, addicted to it. But the animal hoarders make my stomach turn.


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## Rabbit Bones (Feb 25, 2016)

About animal hoarders - I have a story.

I used to be a vet tech. Like the first week I worked there, this clearly mentally impaired woman came in with a shoe box, and handed it to the vet. Turns out there is a very dead, very freezer burnt cat in it, that has been thawed out. This woman was an animal hoarder that had been working with the vet and animal control services to get her hoard under control. By the time I started, almost all of her cats had been spayed and neutered. But she still had a freezer full of dead cats. Whenever she had enough money, she'd pick out a cat, thaw it, and bring it in for the vet to do a necropsy on it because she didn't understand why they had died. Most of them were so fucked up from being in the freezer for so long the vet couldn't _do_ anything with the body, so he usually just told her it had been cancer, and she let us dispose of the body. The really horrible ones were during summer, where she tended to leave the cats outside to thaw. They'd always come in with maggots in/on them. Once she brought in a cat to be spayed. It was super fucked up... it just looked inbred as hell (all of her cats did, as I found out over the next few years). We cut her open, and she was already pregnant. One of the kittens was clearly deformed... we just euthanized the kittens and finished the spay and didn't say anything.

It was hard to be mad at her though. She clearly wasn't all there, and she was trying to work with the city. The necropsy and dead cat freezer was weird as hell, but apparently she was maintaining the health of her cats, after the city intervened. She always sent us a card after every visit thanking the vet for helping her kitties and saying she prayed for us


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## I-chi (Feb 25, 2016)

My grandparents on my father's side had, as I'm to understand it, fairly modest hoarding tendencies; their house was always kind of run down when I used to spend some days of the summer over there while my folks were at work, but it never really struck me as particularly dire around the bulk of their home except for the basement; which was like this cavern of dust and things I could hardly distinguish the shapes between from the shelves they sat on; and the attic, which I have never been in but heard from my parents on some occasion. I think it was primarily my grandmother's habit, as my grandfather was always fairly passive and kept mainly to himself; tons of books stuffing the shelves, so many dishes and plates sitting in the sink and on some of the table compared to the very very few they actually used and washed; and clothing that loaded the dresser row in their room.

I don't go over there anymore, it's just my grandfather now because my grandmother has been confined to a home some short bit away from us due to medical needs and the whole thing has become fairly depressing to consider; but we've been unable to go over and really clear anything out, especially since he (my grandfather) is against assisted living. Sometimes I kind of worry about my own parents, my dad especially, because he gives me some indication that these traits will have passed onto him by the time he reaches that age.


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## Trilby (Feb 25, 2016)

I suppose my mom was one, though the things she kept were typically of kitsch value (figurines, gadgets, records, etc.) and I hate to admit, it rubbed of on me too.  I'm doing fine regulating it.  Every once in a while I take out a giant trash bag and simply throw things in and throw it in a bin and never look back.  It can be hard.


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## Doc Cassidy (Feb 25, 2016)

Aw shit.

So my grandma died about eight years ago and left me her house. Unfortunately it was a piece of shit. It was a really old house and the foundation had been ruined by termites. I didn't want to live in it and I couldn't sell it without selling the land, so I figured I'd rent it out. I found 3 people that wanted to rent, it was two brothers and their sister, all around 50-60 years old. I have a feeling they were all fucking each other, but they paid rent so I honestly didn't care what incestuous shenanigans they were up to. I have plenty of stories about them, but to keep it brief, they were fucking nuts. Over time the sister one of the brothers and died because god knows why.

About a year ago I wanted the house back for various reasons so I gave the guy 3 months to find somewhere else. The first warning sign that something was wrong was when I drove by and saw he had rented one of those industrial dumpsters like you'd see outside a McDonald's. He had the entire thing full of trash. I was thinking "Holy shit, this guy had an entire dumpster full of trash in my house."

After he left I went inside and it was garbage. Literally garbage, everywhere. He had trash piled up in the entire house with a path that lead through the kitchen and living room to the couch. Everything else was garbage including the two bedrooms. It wasn't even stuff that you'd usually hoard. It was milk jugs and cat food bags and tuna cans and mac & cheese boxes. Literally just piled and stacked up with a small path through it. He had literally not thrown a single thing away in the six years him and his family lived there. And the fleas!

Have you ever seen human fleas? I wouldn't recommend looking them up if you want to sleep but they're fucking huge. You could see them jumping around. Giant ass fleas just _moving_ all over the house. Anytime I went in to clean shit out I'd wear old clothes so I could burn them, not wanting to bring any of the fleas home. I remember talking to him a few times and him mentioning that Obama had killed his brother and sister. Not in a conspiracy way, Obama himself traveled to the middle of nowhere and personally murdered them for lulz, and he said that Obama was now coming for him too. I didn't think much of it at the time because he paid rent, but when I went in the house he had mirrors set up so he could lay on the couch and see anyone that was approaching from outside through the windows, just waiting for Obama to make his homicidal move.

A few years before he told me that the water pump had gone out so he was going to skip rent that month and buy a new water pump, which was fine. He never bought the water pump. For three years he lived in that house with no water. No shower, no toilet, no laundry, no teeth brushing, nothing. He collected rain water and used paper plates and cups (which he added to the trash pile) so he didn't have to do dishes. Just try and imagine living three years with no running water. It caused the pipes to burst and everything.

The house is trashed and I'm probably just going to burn it.


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## AlephOne2Many (Feb 25, 2016)

...


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## Jewelsmakerguy (Feb 25, 2016)

Ah yes, hoarders. I'm quite familiar with them. It runs in the family (unfortunately).

Probably the worst case I've seen is with my cousin and his family. They moved into the house my (now-deceased) grandmother grew up in over a decade ago. And the whole thing is a fucking mess. Especially the downstairs area. There's trash literally strewn every which way you can imagine, the bedrooms are full of stuff I'm not even sure they still know about. And I've actually gotten physically ill from that place on multiple occasions because of the repugnant smell coming from their cat's litter box. Oh, and speaking of my grandmother, she too had this issue. My mother told me a little while back that when they were cleaning up her room (long story, but just before she was dying, she was staying with those guys), she had like bags and bags of clothing. I forget the exact amount, but I think four of them had nothing but sweaters. My other relatives aren't much better either. As my other other aunt, someone who's creepily religious, even for our family, has two entire rooms full of shit they haven't gotten rid of.

And then we come to me, having inherited these habits myself. And the sad part is that I can barely do jack. Because of our fucked up garbage schedules (bi-weekly in my area), and uncertainty about what to do with some of the things I have. I've amassed an _entire_ closet that needs cleaning out. *Full* of old stuff I've been meaning to get rid of, yet can't. And it's not like this is instantaneous either. Some of the stuff in there I've had since the 90s and_ still_ haven't parted with for reasons even I'm uncertain about.


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## The Knife's Husbando (Feb 27, 2016)

Story time.

I have a close friend who does reselling stuff as her main job. She cruises yard sales, estate sales and sundry, looking for stuff to flip. She'll buy a box of junk jewelry for $25, fish out the one 14-karat gold ring & set of silver earrings, then post them up on Ebay and make $100. That sort of thing. Over the years she's found a lot of cool stuff. One time I was with her at an estate sale where a really well off gun collector had died, and his wife- who didn't like or know anything about firearms- was letting his entire collection go _at $100 a pop_. And he had some badass stuff too: Old-school blackpowder big game rifles, antique single-action cowboy revolvers, and literally hundreds of of the latest in mil-spec assault gear. 100$ per, out the door. As you can imagine, my friend has run across a few hoarders.

I was hanging out with her one day & she decided to go out on a "run" as she called it, and grabbing a copy of the local want ads, I went with her. The third place we pulled up to was a ranch style home with a kinda shell-shocked looking dude sitting in a lawn chair in the front yard with a sign in front of him reading "10$ a cart full, $50 a truck load."

He had moved out of his mom's place, and moved to NYC. The reason he'd moved out was some deep family drama & after a few years of trying to keep up he'd basically said "fuck it" due to the estrangement & bruised feelings. Well, he got a letter a few days back, saying his mom had passed away, and she left the house, it's contents, and the land to him. So he bought an airplane ticket from NYC international & headed South.

Not having _any idea_ _his mother_ _had been a hoarder for the last 50+ years._

Because I'm the sturdier & more curious of the two, I went in. The house was a _complete_ disaster. Some of the rooms were literally chest deep in old clothes and garbage. Two of them were neck deep- to my 6' 3" frame- and I had to pull myself through less than an 18" gap between the ceiling and all the pilled  bullshit to make it to the next room. _The bathroom was an abomination_. We jokingly talk about CWC's "dirty, crapped briefs"? You ever see a 12' x 10' bathroom pilled chest high with _thirty years_ worth of used "Depends" after the water was shut off? I did. God help me. 

I'm not going to talk about the kitchen. It still haunts my nightmares. Eris wept.

Well, long story short, we gave the poor bastard trying to sort this mess out the local numbers for rent-a-dumpster & some dependable cleaning/demolitions crews.

Then I went home & took like ten thousand showers.


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## dunbrine47 (Feb 27, 2016)

I've got hoarders in the family. Not as bad as some of the posts but still shitty items like a backyard full junk and kayaks, a front walk strewn with objects (glass jug full of cig buts anybody), a (I don't know how nice it is) piano covered in junk, a couch with junk separating the kitchen and decades worth of clutter in every room. If they were not so resistant, I'm sure a dumpster and a few yard sales would get that house in order.
At least it is empty in my dreams, no really it is.


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## LazarusOwenhart (Feb 28, 2016)

Used to know a guy who hoarded animales, specifically Hares and a few rabbits. He had a massive barn that was STUFFED with cages. If you made a loud noise nearby the whole place went fucking crazy. He looked after them well enough and kept them clean but even so they STANK. Eventually got into debt through the food/vet bills and the RSPCA took them all away from him and he got banned from having any more than five rabbits or hares at any one time. Sad story really.


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## fuehrer_dessler (Feb 28, 2016)

LazarusOwenhart said:


> Used to know a guy who hoarded animales, specifically Hares and a few rabbits. He had a massive barn that was STUFFED with cages. If you made a loud noise nearby the whole place went fucking crazy. He looked after them well enough and kept them clean but even so they STANK. Eventually got into debt through the food/vet bills and the RSPCA took them all away from him and he got banned from having any more than five rabbits or hares at any one time. Sad story really.


Probably better for the critters, they didn't get out much in these conditions.


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## Bluebird (Mar 5, 2016)

My aunt is an honest to god hoarder. She's always buying stuff that's on sale, or deals on ebay and she defends this habit with the excuse that she can resell it for more than she paid for, but of course that never happens and it just keeps filling her house. She has hampers full of unwashed socks because she decided that its easier to buy new packages of them when she runs out, rather than clearing away the junk around the washing machine. Her most resent obsession has been antique Christmas ornaments bought from ebay. She literally has a hundred unopened packages scattered around her house filled with christmas ornaments....


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## Innocuous (Mar 6, 2016)

Spoiler



My uncle hoards books and CD's. I heard from my dad that he doesn't even open or read half of them. I also heard that he stacks them and has them in boxes everywhere. There's like a single path from the door to the other rooms of the house. My dad visited him once in the last few years and he couldn't even sit anywhere.


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## Elijah (Mar 6, 2016)

Yup. Recently had to move in with my grandfather, a hoarder. There's nothing like having over 20 boxes of tissues stuffed with dog shit in the kitchen. It's just pure apathy about your environment. I can't wait to get this mess of a house cleaned up, it's going to be so satisfying hauling all of that shit out.


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## wheat pasta (Mar 6, 2016)

Elijah said:


> Yup. Recently had to move in with my grandfather, a hoarder. There's nothing like having over 20 boxes of tissues stuffed with dog shit in the kitchen. It's just pure apathy about your environment. I can't wait to get this mess of a house cleaned up, it's going to be so satisfying hauling all of that shit out.


Pretty sure living outside would be healthier and more safe...


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## AnOminous (Mar 6, 2016)

Elijah said:


> Yup. Recently had to move in with my grandfather, a hoarder. There's nothing like having over 20 boxes of tissues stuffed with dog shit in the kitchen. It's just pure apathy about your environment.



It's worse than apathy.  Someone apathetic wouldn't care if you hauled off their junk or tried to clean up before it got that bad.

Hoarders will go utterly apeshit or even get violent if you try to throw away their precious garbage and literal shit.


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## KatsuKitty (Mar 6, 2016)

There seems to be two different kind of hoarders. There's the gross kind, which would fit the description of environmental apathy, and then there's like the sentimental "can't-throw-it-out-because-my-life-didn't-suck-then" hoarding. The gross kind has a giant shit pile in the kitchen; the sentimental kind is like the old man with a garage full of old magazines and radio parts.

I have tendencies toward the latter. Two closets full of neatly-organised boxes stacked on top of boxes full of old, outdated _junk_. And yet it's really not that easy to get rid of.


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## Jack Haywood (Mar 6, 2016)

I don't think I've ever given this many "Feels" ratings in all my life... O.o


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## AlephOne2Many (Mar 6, 2016)

I think if I were to classify as a hoarder, but not in the sense of littering my bedroom floor, it'd be electronics and books. I have a shit ton of wire-based electronics in plastic containers, making sure all of them are closed tight and filled enough to occupy their respective container dimensions. Then there's using boxes from previous orders to store my gaming consoles. I don't want to flaunt my collection beyond one or two gaming devices at a time that aren't hooked up to my TV. As for books the ones I don't have room for are in tightly closed cardboard boxes.


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## MerriedxReldnahc (Mar 6, 2016)

I classify the difference between a hoard and a collection based off of two things: 1)Do you know where everything is more or less, and 2) Are there dead feces encrusted rats lying in the collection when you do not actually collect dead feces encrusted rats


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## AnOminous (Mar 7, 2016)

MerriedxReldnahc said:


> I classify the difference between a hoard and a collection based off of two things: 1)Do you know where everything is more or less, and 2) Are there dead feces encrusted rats lying in the collection when you do not actually collect dead feces encrusted rats



Real hoarders actually do collect dead feces encrusted rats, though.  And used toilet paper.  And spoiled food.


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## Super Collie (Mar 7, 2016)

A small-time comedian at a convention I once attended had a bit focused around hoarding. There were several minor jokes, but the biggie (and the one I mostly remember) was at the expense of people who piss in jars and save them.

"I don't care how badly you think your life is going right now. Maybe you failed a class. Maybe you lost a job. Maybe you just got dumped. You can at least take these things and say to yourself 'well at least I don't piss in bottles and then leave them on the floor in the kitchen'. Cheer up."


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## pickleniggo (Mar 7, 2016)

I've been exposed to a lot of strange people in my life, and the ones I'll never understand are the hoarders. I remember going into this one family's house when I was very young and feeling really uncomfortable because if my house looked like that in the _slightest_ there would be hell to pay. I didn't understand it was a problem, I just thought this family was _really_ into magazines and video tapes and random junk. No one ever talked about it, and I'm pretty sure everyone just thought they were lazy slobs. But it's really apparent now that this was a dysfunctional household.
One of my relatives was a low-key hoarder and I remember when they went into the hospital and I was tasked with cleaning their kitchen.... Let's just say there was a reason this person was in the hospital with intestinal issues and the contents of their cupboards and fridge confirmed it. I'm actually surprised they didn't end up with botulism, but I'm going to assume the really nasty things were always buried under the newer items. When we went to clean out their bathroom (thank GOD it wasn't the kind of bathroom with pee-jugs and used adult diapers everywhere) we found medications whose brands didn't even _exist_ anymore. When we confronted this person about the problems we'd uncovered, it was the typical "Oh I've been using these things/eating this stuff for years and I'm fine." While laying in a hospital bed. Because the way they were living was killing them.


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## BZ 679 (Mar 7, 2016)

I once participated in a clean-up project for a hoarder's house. Everything was fairly well sectioned off; two deep freezers of moldy bread here, a room you couldn't even walk into full of dirty laundry there, bags of rotten eggs on the back porch (???), etc. I probably would've bowed out if it had been any worse than that.

The kicker was how everything was coated in a very thick layer of nicotine that was built up over two decades of heavy smoking. I probably risked cancer scrubbing all that shit down and I didn't even get paid.


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## Shadow Fox (Mar 7, 2016)

My brother-in-law's dad was a hoarder of objects and cats.  



Spoiler



When he became too decrepit to care for himself any longer, and went to live with my sister and BIL, we went over to clean up the house he'd been living in.  The living room, kitchen, garage and one bedroom had been left to the cats so everything was covered in piss and shit and hair.  The carpets had to be pulled up sections at a time and thrown out, as did all the furniture.  The bathtub was full of cat shit.  There were dead cats all over the property - we must have discovered at least a dozen flattened, dessicated cat carcasses in the garage and backyard.  

The other two bedrooms were mostly just full of random junk, like bowling balls, medical equipment (walkers, prosthetic legs, wheelchairs, etc.), old furniture, books, photographs, porn, that kind of stuff.  The kitchen cupboards were stuffed full of more cooking implements than one old man could ever possibly need.



I think my BIL is kind of a hoarder too. 



Spoiler



For one thing, he kept all of the furniture and stuff that wasn't completely ruined by catpiss, even though he had no use for it.  It's all in a tent in the backyard, although a storm about a year ago destroyed the tent so everything is probably soaked with rainwater.  Nothing has been done about that, to my knowledge.  He also just compulsively buys nerd shit like action figures, plush toys, figurines, Living Dead dolls, fake prop weapons from video games, anything with fucking zombies on it because he's obsessed with them.  There's huge dust-covered piles of magazines on each arm of the sofa in the living room, and the ledge in front of the fireplace is stacked with DVDs and Blu-rays.  The stacks are probably three or four feet high; they span the entire six-foot length of the hearth (minus maybe a two-foot space where the opening for the fireplace itself is located) and in some places are two or three stacks deep.  This is in addition to the four video racks of movies and vidya taking up space along the walls of the living room. 

I don't know why he never just borrows things from Redbox but insists on buying every movie he wants to watch, or has already watched in the theatre.  I suggested Netflix to him a few years ago and he made this unhappy face like it would be the worst thing _ever_ to just watch a movie once and not have a physical copy of it.

I can't judge him too much because I like to buy plastic crap too, it's just that there's no more room in their house for new acquisitions and he just...keeps buying more.  My sister packed up a bunch of his shit into a box to clear off the mantle and within a few months, he'd bought a bunch of new stuff to take its place.  The DVD obsession also makes no sense to me, especially considering most of his hoard of movies have probably been watched once, if at all, and then forgotten about.


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## ObsoleteMediaFormat (Mar 17, 2019)

Really is a lack of hoarder stuff on here, thought it would be a good idea to bump the thread with some stuff


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## Homo neanderthalensis (Mar 21, 2019)

I am a digital hoarder. It is not as bad as actual hoarding, but it is close.


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## ZeCommissar (Mar 22, 2019)

Long read ahead, but it's pretty fucked up.

I have family members that were/are hoarders. We are actually still cleaning up their house at this moment since these are all recent events. We could have probably tried out for the TV show if we wanted to. (it's already embarrassing enough sharing a drop of blood with these people nevermind showing them to national TV)

I'm talking a wall of junk like 7' high that closed off a entire room, dead cats in the closets, they also had like almost 20 cats that they never spayed or neutered. Well a couple of them were until after they had kittens. They started inbreeding with each other or bred with stray cats in the neighborhood. They started with 2 cats male and female and ended up with 20..... Most of the cats are dead, given away, or just gone. There are a few still around that we take care of now while we find more people to give away to.

They had two different species of roaches in their house, German and American, and they also didn't clean at all in the 5 years they lived there. There was only 2 rooms "livable" in the entire house of 12 rooms. One of them was the bathroom. The fucking bathroom was the cleanest room in the whole house.

They also had a bunch of useless junk that they were never going to need/use, and useful items they still never used. They got a new fridge from a appliance store that was wheeled to the outside of their house when they were there.......it sat there for a year next to the other massive pile of junk in their FRONT YARD IN A LARGE NEIGHBORHOOD until it got wheeled off when they moved out. Not to mention all the other things they bought, used once, and then it just sat there forever. They had cameras set up because people realized they had new shit just sitting in their yard and this is meth town. So obviously some of it got stolen. 

You want to know the worst part guys? Well they have a 7 year old daughter. Yep remember when I said they were there for 5 years? They raised a child in that place. Her mother died of a heart attack last year and her father (my kin unfortunately) moved out a few months back. The little girl is so sweet, I feel so bad that I didn't know about the conditions she lived in sooner because I would have called CPS on his dumbass but I never really visited them at all even though they live close by. I always hated her parents since they were shitty people that stabbed you in the back (different story) and so I never associated or even visited them. She got lice one day and her father didn't take action immediately and waited almost a MONTH before doing something about it. Too bad that shit was fucking infested and she had to get all of her hair cut off.

When I learned about all of this I flew off the handle, but I couldn't call CPS because they had already moved out, and i'm not sure if CPS cares about past living conditions compared to current. As far as I know they are living outside of squalor now, but I don't even know what CPS would have done anyway.

Why are we cleaning it? Well they had a lot of money so they already almost payed off the entire mortgage. Me, my GF, and my parents figured we might as well inherit the place and clean it up. We could either fix it to the point of selling it and I could make a profit, or fix it up and rent it out. I have no landlord experience though so I don't know about that just yet.....Hell it's a really nice place and could be better than mine once done. I might even move in once we are finished. It's a lot of work though and if you EVER clean a hoarders house....just know what you are getting into.


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