Compulsive Hoarding

[AnOminous]

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.

 

[KatsuKitty]

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 Two closets full of neatly-organised boxes stacked on top of boxes full of old, outdated junk.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.

 

[Jack Haywood]

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

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

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.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

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

 

[AnOminous]

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.

 

[Super Collie]

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."

 

[pickleniggo]

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.

 

[BZ 679]

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.

 

[Shadow Fox]

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.

 

[ObsoleteMediaFormat]

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

 

[Homo neanderthalensis]

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

 

[ZeCommissar]

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.