So im sorta a child of a hoarder but ive also done some stuff aswell, its nothing like whats on tv, but its still a problem as we want to move. My mother keeps saying she wants me and her to get the junk out first but shes having trouble terterming whats trash compared to me, nor can we really afford some team to clean everything up.
What would be the best course of action here, because 2 people is not working.
Start small with determining a set of items to go through. Force a decision on those items beyond keeping them in their place.
Continue for each small stack of items.
Get some boxes. Mark them as trash. Start putting stuff in those boxes. After a sufficient amount of time has passed where everyone has had time to know what is in the boxes, dispose of them.
Wish I kmew, i’m slowly cleaning my room right now myself.
This guy’s channel is full of useful tips for cleaning, maybe play it in the background while you work or watch it while you take breathers during the process.
I like many of his titles like “cleaning is not intuitive” (the thumbnail looks like its about bathroom stuff but i think its a mix)
Be quite ruthless - most things made out of paper are trash and any clothes you haven’t worn in - idk, 3 weeks? 2 months? - they can be donated (or thrown away).
You can sort other objects into 3 boxes/bags/ categories:
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- “I use it regularly,” so i’m keeping this
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- "I can see myself using this in the future so i’ll decide later (seperate from the space being cleaned so you can decide at the end)
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- “toss/donate this” (trash tier)
If group 2 gets too big you will become more ruthless. If group 1 gets too big you might get a bit buddhist and move much of it to group 2.
I would go longer on the clothes but otherwise good advice. Typically I figure 1 year. For example if OP is in the northern hemisphere, it’s winter and 2 months ago would be around Christmas time… He probably hasn’t worn any shorts and maybe not any short-sleeve shirts since then. That doesn’t mean he won’t wear them in 3 months when it’s warmer.
Typically I try to make it a early December tradition, anything I haven’t worn in a year gets donated for needy families before the holidays. Everything else gets washed and hung up backwards. Next December if a piece is still backwards, it gets donated.
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I have a two rules that help me:
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I never move between rooms of the house without carrying something back where it belongs. Every trip should make my house a tiny bit tidier.
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When I pick up something random and it doesn’t obviously belong anywhere, I drop it into my “probably should give this away” bin.
When the “probably should give this away” bin fills, I’ll rescue one or two things I changed my mind about, and give the rest away to empty the bin.
And of course I create an official “place it belongs” for anything I rescue from the give-away bin. Sometimes the effort choosing a place for it is the little nudge I need to get rid of something.
There’s a lot of wisdom here. OP may appreciate it even more after they’ve dug themselves out, because this mindset will allow them to keep from letting it get so bad again…if they can teach it to their mom.
Thanks. It has helped me, at least.
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My neighbor was hoarder before he died and this is the best solution to the house he left.
Aint gonna be easy. Deciding what has to go won’t work. Maybe try reversed,: Everything has to go and (cherry) pick what to keep. But with a hoarder… It’s tough. Each and every item will be point of discussion.
Agreed, as someone married to a clearly undiagnosed horder it is tough to say the least… my only saving grace is that she really doesnt know what exists and is also semi tired of living this way so i have been clearing out rooms when she is at work (I work from home) and hope she doesn’t ask to see the garbage bags that i hide until garbage pickup. Everytime i clean when she is around she will go into the bags. I am on the side that it is all trash, but the sadder part is that a lot of it isn’t exactly junk either and did cost a lot over the years. I should be figuring out what to keep, but it’s so bad i don’t care and would rather start over from scratch than trying to figure out what can be sold to make back some of the losses. Sadly depending upon how bad OP has it he may not be able to get away with any of this, but wish him the best.
Get a box. A bunch of boxes. Walk to the first thing you see. Pick it up. Ask yourself two questions.
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Have I used this in the past 5 years?
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Will I use it in the next 5 years?
If you answered no, put it in the box.
Now repeat. Over and over and over. With every single item in the house.
When you’re done, take the boxes to goodwill.
Now do this same process every 5 years. And when you’re buying a new thing, ask yourself: "Do I really want this thing in my house, and add to the next roundup?
You may find you buy less things, just because your cleanup every 5 years takes too long.
As someone who likes stuff and struggles with mild hoarding tendencies myself, I would say that this is good advice except that
“Do I really want this thing in my house, and add to the next roundup?”
is not the best way to frame it because the answer will often be “yes”. I’ve switched to making myself decide exactly where something will be stored before I buy it.
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12 month rule. If you haven’t used it in a year or forgot it exists, get rid of it. In the end, it’s just shit made in a factory somewhere and nothing special.
I just had to deal with this. Moving two households from Alabama to Minnesota, with myself, my wife and her mother (all 3 of whom are pack rats) and more than 1 one way truck and a car hauler was not in the budget.
What I did was rent a storage unit just large enough to match the volume of the truck I was going to rent. Anything that could fit in the storage unit could be kept. Everything else had to go. Anticipating trouble, especially from my MIL, I divided the storage unit into halfs using gaffer’s tape and one half (me and my wife’s) was again divided into half with one section reserved for me and the other for my wife.
Me and my wife downsized fairly problem-free. I got down to about 10 plastic footlockers and let my wife have the rest of my section. Our half was full, but not horribly so even after the furniture we wanted to keep. My MIL however was another story.
She kept saying we were trying to force her to give away everything she owned. She calmed down and started downsizing seriously when we finally packed up her house to move it to the storage unit and we completely filled U-haul’s largest truck, Tetris Style, with not even enough room left for a rolled up poster, and my MIL still had another half truck’s worth of boxes that she had, till that point, claimed she couldn’t bear parting with. I put my foot down and told her that, while I was willing to make multiple trips (neither of them were comfortable with the idea of drive the U-Haul) she would have to pay the full cost of moving everything that wouldn’t fit into the 1st truck and estimated that it would cost an additional $4K per trip, all in. That got her.
We wound up renting a second storage unit for interim use as she decided what would go on the truck and what she would have to sell, give away or toss. I think we may have single-handedly crashed the second hand market in our old town with everything we three donated. In the end, it was noisy, stressful and there were times when my MIL didn’t want to talk to me or my wife, but we eventually got it down to a single truck, and 3 cars, but damn, were they packed.
If you’re moving, then set some firm boundaries: You will have 1 moving truck (or whatever you’re using) - if it won’t fit in the truck, you can’t keep it, full stop. If there’s something that won’t fit that you absolutely must keep, you’ve got to remove something else to make room for it.
Take it one room at a time, or even one quarter of a room at a time. Don’t cherry pick things to remove - just start at one end and remove everything. It either goes in the dumpster, or it goes in the truck, but it can’t stay in the house, and you’ve got to choose one. There’s no “We’ll decide on this later”.
If there’s things that’re valuable, you might want to sell them rather than throwing them away (or donate or whatever) but in that case you still have to make the decision when you get to it. If it goes in the ‘Donate’ pile, you can’t take it out later - otherwise, you’ll just be going back to it over and over again and making no progress.
I used to be somewhat of a hoarder and I found it helpful to ask myself things like “When have I used this past few years?” or “Would I even remember this thing if I got rid of it?” etc.
If you have stuff you never really look at or use and maybe never even think about until you find it again then why keep it?
Rent a storage locker and get everything out of the house quickly. Throw out anything that you both feel ok letting go of, but don’t put mental energy into decisions about stuff where you’re not sure. Just chuck it in storage immediately. Now you have an empty house and can move. You also have a monthly storage bill but that’s hopefully a lot less than the rent on the house, and you can take your time getting rid of stuff from storage, or even selling some of it on CL/ebay.
Source: I’ve been in conflicts with a family member about something similar.
Turn your blooming mental illness into a monthly payment?
I’d advise against. It’s a rabbithole. We did the math, buying new is often much cheaper than storage. Rent storage 2 months max. And that does not fit (by far the) most hoarders. They sooner rent more storage. Imagine the financial impact
Get a dumpster
Move. Source: me, getting ready to sell, moving in 3 months from a house we’ve been in for 17 years with 5 kids.
Full disclosure: we haven’t done it yet, but things become so much clearer along keep/toss lines once you’re up against the task of staging your home for sale.
In addition to the advice here already (some of which I agree with, some not), here are two other ideas:
- Ask yourself WHY you’re keeping it? Does the explanation hold water?
- Work through one area at a time, and do multiple cycles. It’s easier to work on a single room or area at a time, and if you can purge a modest amount easily, then you can work through the whole house like this. Then you go back for a second pass and will probably have a more critical eye for getting rid of stuff - another 15% goes from each room in turn.
