Compulsive Hoarding

[The Knife's Husbando]

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?"

 

[Cosmos]

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.

 

[AnOminous]

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.

 

[Rabbit Bones]

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.

 

[The Knife's Husbando]

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.

 

[wheat pasta]

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.

 

[Rabbit Bones]

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

 

[I-chi]

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.

 

[Trilby]

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.

 

[Doc Cassidy]

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.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

...

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

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.

 

[The Knife's Husbando]

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.

 

[dunbrine47]

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.

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

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.

 

[fuehrer_dessler]

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.

 

[Bluebird]

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....

 

[Innocuous]

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.

 

[Elijah]

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.

 

[wheat pasta]

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...