Clutter/Hoarding

[wolfie]

One thing that I know will be going, are the 30-plus years of train magazines. Even though they're carefully stored in binders, they do take up quite a bit of room. However, with the publisher recently announcing that they'll be offering DVDs containing every issue from 1934-2010, I have a feeling that their days are numbered. When they do go, they'll either go to my cousin (her husband is into trains too) up in Michigan, or they'll get recycled.

If your cousin and her husband aren't interested, before you recycle them PM me. My brother is involved with a model railroad club, which might be interested in the magazines.

[BrenDAnn]

Our entire upstairs needs gone through. It's one big room, and absolutely packed full of stuff. Problem is, part of it belonged to my mom, and my siblings have yet to get up here so we can go through it all as a group. My dad also has a nice clusterfuck of tools, etc going on in the living room. He really needs a tool shed or something though. I've been making an effort lately to keep my personal space cleaner. I'm hoping to work on the entire house bit by bit, really.

[Jetfire]

I bought my first Condo last Easter, and took the opportunity to do a purge before moving from my apartment. I had some hoarding tendencies, but nothing too out of control.

Still, I did finally break down and throw out a lot of stuff that I finally acknowledged I would never need again, and since then I've been good at not bringing them back. (Things like the boxes and blisterboards that Transformers came in, old Game boxes, old cabling, some old CRT Computer monitors and other electronics, etc....) . Some were tossed; some were given away on Kijiji.

New place is working out great, lots of room and I've been careful not to fill things up too much; though the tops of my comic boxes are starting to get a bit full; Need to do a purge there soon I think, once I can get some more comic boxes to file the newest comic additions.

[Elspeth]

I know i have hoarding problems. So does my Grandmother. We have been trying to get her to move for awhile now and going through her stuff finally got me to start getting rid of stuff.

I look at something and I keep thinking I might need that some day I should keep it. Hubby is less then pleased. He gives me the look asks me if I will really use it, I usually go no and out it goes. I wish we could take the time off from work to just work on the house instead of a couple of hours here and there. I keep suggesting a garage sale but he is nervous about it (we rent)

I wish there were more flea markets around us.

[HYHYBT]

I have too many odds and ends. Things I like because they're unusual and I couldn't get another if I threw them out. For example: in 1996, McDonald's very briefly replaced the stickers that go on special orders with oval ones with the Arch Deluxe logo on them. I have a partial roll of those. Also something called a "universal computer," otherwise known as a 70's-era fry timer. The difference between the name and what it is alone are worth hanging on to that

[jackfaire]

My mom is a hoarder, my grandmother was a hoarder.

I would be if I didn't watch myself.

I have digitized everything that could be.

If something has no use it's gone. If something is broken it's gone. If I can fix it I will but I will not hold onto things because someone else in the family tells me, "Don't toss that out next time I come by I will fix it for you"

Things with personal meaning have to actually have personal meaning. Not I keep this only cuz it belonged to Great Uncle Jack. If it doesn't actually matter to me personally then it's gone. All of my photos I digitized by scanning them in. No albums. If I want to study my family history I will pick up a history book on American History.

[Cazzi]

Reading this & similar threads I've started to realise I have hoarding tendencies... and I'm not overly brilliant in the cleaning dept, but I'm not totally squalid either, just needs a bit more work.

Since I've started realising it, I've slowly been going through things, helped by the fact we have a lovely huge new recycling bin to use at home I also have a growing pile by the door of things that are going to be offered on freecycle and some larger bits of broken things waiting for either a skip of a friendly "man with van" to take them off to the tip.

Its slow going, but its a start!

[Iseeyouthere]

Thankfully, most of my hoarding habits stay on video games. Bank's full of crap.

But I do have drawers filled with paper. Gotta throw it all out. Its old high school junk. Dunno why I still have it now.

[insertNameHere]

I tend to ramble as I sort this out for my own benefit. Summation is, How do I begin to convince my mother(and I guess my father who supports her) that it is a major issue to keep some much stuff in a house wasting space when it literally hasn't been touched in over a decade.

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Rather than Make a new post about the same thing, I will just do an update and vent. I was away since the start of November 2011 in military training. During that time my grandmother on my mom's side passed away so now we have even more stuff. I come back to find a recliner in my room, taking up literally half my open floor space of my tiny room. Garage is packed with stuff and so is the barn. My mother couldn't deal with the mental torture of having her sister throw out all of grandmas stuff so it ended up here to be sorted through to make sure the sentimental stuff wasn't missed.
Which brings me to wanting to organize some stuff to have room to move around the house and not make it look like a bunch of trashy people live here because it to the point I'm almost embarrassed to have people over. I have been staying with the gf because it is closer to my base for training but also because my queen size bed has about 2.5ft of cleared space for me to sleep. I come home on weekends to do needed household maintenance and attempt to clean my own room figure out what I don't need but also work on rest of house.
As a test we have a set of rolling drawers full of my step-grandmas knitting and sewing who has been dead for at least 8 years I suggested putting it in a plastic storage container so the drawers might be utlized for something we actually would require access too. She completely flipped out.
Later also flipped out because on advice of the Gf I took bunch of old childs puzzles and games that have been down in basement since we moved here 11 years ago and not touched put those in plastic containers I pointed it out to her and she started screaming "don't fuck with that I need to go through that to know what is there!!!" Honestly I could probably have put half of it in the trash and nobody would have ever known it was missing.
I have no idea how I am going to be able to convince her she needs to let go of useless items from 3 dead grandmothers because as someone else mentioned keep heirlooms that having meaning rather than just owned by a person.
Her big thing is she going to hold a garage sale for some of it, well that is nice in thought but when you have the same stuff for 3 years in a row and nobody buys it let it go! Also, have a lot of "valuable" VHS tapes of Disney movies, I hope to hell they shortly release a "childhood favorites" blueray with all the major titles on a single disk

[Greenday]

In my mom's attempt to slowly get rid of all the random crap my stepdad has accumulated, she took a couple boxes and some broke radio and put them in my trunk to hide until it was garbage day. As soon as he left yesterday for work (he leaves early since he works 45 minutes away), she grabbed the stuff to my car and ran it out to the garbage truck.

There's still way too much shit to get rid of. My stepdad threw some stuff out from the basement but barely a dent. I really want the garage cleared out so I can pull the car in without worrying about hitting stuff in front of me, leaving enough room behind me, and being able to open my doors enough that it's not uncomfortable to get out of the car.

[insertNameHere]

Yeah that is a tactic I think I'm about to start using because honestly I have the best memory out of my family and even I can't remember every little thing we got. If i work slowly things can disappear and nobody will have any idea as stuff always gets misplaced. Also going to try the bargaining tactic of "You have 10, lets keep 2" (even when I know all 10 are junk).

[LadyBarbossa]

I wish my sister would learn to get rid of stuff, I think she gets the hoarding from my Dad. His sheds are full of all sorts of broken mowers, tools and rusty odds and ends that he refuses to junk because "We might need it someday" or he thinks he can fix it.

Sis's basement is FULL to the gills with . . . old baby and kid stuff. Toys, strollers, cribs, etc. Her youngest is 12 and I KNOW that even if she has a late in life baby at this point, they will not use the majority of this stuff, ever. Her teenagers have no need for the baby toys and strollers, but she refuses to get rid of them because she's sentimentally attached. We've suggested going through the stuff and keeping a few favorite items from each son, maybe having a pair of shoes gold dipped or something like that, but she just can't part with any of it. Sad thing is, most of this has been in the basement for so long now, it's probably not in any condition to even donate, where I'm sure someone would have loved to be able to have some cheap or free baby supplies when this stuff was still fairly new. Now I'm not sure it won't be cracked and falling apart. Not to mention she would have all that space freed up if she got rid of this junk.

[telecom_goddess]

My house now is a clutter-free and well-oiled machine. Everything has it's place, no drawer is too full, no closet overstuffed, and I am draconian about the "one in, one out" rule. I won't live amidst a pile of stuff ever again.

I think I just fell in love

[AdminAssistant]

I wish my sister would learn to get rid of stuff, I think she gets the hoarding from my Dad. His sheds are full of all sorts of broken mowers, tools and rusty odds and ends that he refuses to junk because "We might need it someday" or he thinks he can fix it.

This is especially bad, because junkyards are paying top dollar for scrap metal these days. One of my Dad's neighbor had a shop in that condition. His son-in-law hauled a few trailer-loads away and got a few thousand dollars for it.

Dad's thinking of selling the house, shop, and land, since it's just him, and the utilities, property tax, and house/shop insurance are more than he can really afford. Which means my sister and I are faced with the task of cleaning the house out and getting what we want. We spent an entire day and cleared out her old bedroom. That still leaves - my old bedroom, the den, dining room (full of knick-knacks from Grandma's house), kitchen (whole cabinets full of depression glass), living room (tons and tons of pictures), and, worst of all, the storage room outside. And he's adamant that either we get it or it goes to the landfill, leaving me to wonder where on earth I'm going to put Great-Grandma's sewing machine.

[Aethian]

It's taken me moving to figure out that I'm been hoarding stuff. It's taking forever to go through things and a lot of it is NOT coming into my new place. Mom has been trying to move a lot of it in anyways. I got my hoarding tendency from her and boy is it hard to crack.

I joined up with the flylady and have been needing to keep restarting the baby steps of keeping my place neat but I'm getting farther each time before needing to restart again.