Some people see a hoarder's house.
I see Ebay and Craig's List heaven.

I see this from time to time and I WILL ticket them for lack of visibility.

My condolences.  Why not have a family member take them for lunch, dinner, or an extended period away from home...then start loading up the truck and donate it to Goodwill or local thrift stores?

Sometimes.

But some of them just keep garbage, literally.

There's an episode of Hoarders where this lady's house is so bad it is in danger of being condemned. The city offered her counseling. She went, and she stole the trash out of the shrink's trash can on her way out and took it home.

I brought this up many months ago and the general answer from the list was to charge the family members with theft. Welcome to the road to hell.



You sound like my younger brother who walks in and the first word he says is "Ebay".

Well, you better hurry because I'm trying to get control of this mountain and turn it into a molehill!

Books are mine but know, we may be programmed like that.

I remember my Mom and I going to Library sales. Well, why not? We both enjoyed it........and I didn't see what was dwelling ahead.

But it may go back earlier than that; in the 60's, there were mail order book services in the school where one could order at reduced prices. In the 70's, book services of clearing houses, similar to the massive book sales of today. Being overseas at times, the arrivals of these packages was a Godsend, the library at whatever level, from a massive building to a room in the command building or maybe just being open one day a week for a few hours was sought for. I fondly remember the shelf of paperbacks at the vacation house or the one in the rec room at the marine research institute.

So it may be that we (or me) are programmed to respond to book sales.

That said, I probably should get rid of at least some. I'm not likely to read any more Robin Cook because his books, while different subjects, tend to follow the same path. Have a lot of Cold War, post Cold War action books, but between the reality of it and researching aspects of it at times, it's not compelling to read for fun. I don't know about Crichton. Then, there were those books who had a great cover illustrator and a not so great writer.

It may end up being only a drop in the bucket, but it could be a start.

Of course.....there is always the other side of the coin. Seeing how we appear to be on the verge of the book disappearing, my place may be one of the vestiges to this horror!
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("Books! That's how we will do this heist! With books!"––Chester after demonstrating that he can't shoot, (w,stte), "11 Harrowhouse")

Im half hoarder.



For some reason I always take people junk thinking I can do something with it.  sometimes I fix or find uses for a few things but it starts to pile up.



FORTUNATELY Im only half hoarder so I only pile this stuff up in the storage room behind the garage and when it gets full I get sick of looking at it all and about once a year I haul every damned bit of it to goodwill.  I have fixed and profited and used a lot of the stuff I gathered over the years but I don't have a problem letting go of the stuff I don't use. It all goes to charity once it starts piling up in that room.  

we have cars like that in the shop sometimes. Im always afraid Ill get sick just getting in them to drive.  all the shit in there stinks.



 

My mom is a partial hoarder.  She hoards things like antique furniture.  We have 3-4 old wardrobes, a few huge desks, several big dressers and tables, half-dozen coffee tables, and some old furniture of her grandmothers, etc...but the worst part is, NONE of it matches!  
And all kinds of little trinkits to set on top of them.  Dust-collectors is what I call them.  I can't wait until I move so I can get away from all this clutter....


Now I do "hoard" things...but they are just truck parts and steel 'scrap'.  I save the truck parts because I own and am restoring a couple trucks from the '70's.
The steel 'scrap' is used for fabrication of all types...and if it doesn't get used, I send it off to the scrap yard once a year.

I just want to stop the junk mail......got piles of it.......and my shredder just died..........

I'm ready to kill this computer........damn double post........

looks like my mother in laws house...

their minds on owning trash are interesting but damn aggrevating.
My mother in law will not throw away anything.
Old news papers everywhere.  "I am gonna take those to the animal shelter"
No way in Hell she ever will.  We catch her gone and bag tons of shit.
She never even notices...

Technically, Hoarding is a form of OCD.

 

Agreed about the junk mail.....who do they get all the paper from?

Items on the list to get rid of when I get home:

wrapping paper: sure, it's nice but the simple point of the matter is that in the past few years, gifting giving that required mailing never got done. We've either sent checks, ordered from somewhere and let them deliver it, or have skipped wrapping and gone for gift bags.

Cardboard: there's a stack in the same corner with the wrapping paper.

Other things:

Eventually, old school notes but they have to be photographed first. Odds of going back to check something on them, overall (AI I might), is poor but since I tend to remember everything these days, I have about a 10X better chance of doing it than most people. Still, we are talking about 21 years of college and approx 132 courses.....so there is a lot there.

Binders, same note as above, once I determine that what is in them is not needed......although some of them are destined to stay.

The second copies of Nat'l Geo. This was one of the parent contributing items. Mom would give, tell me to take her copies of Nat'l Geo....and she knew I already had a subscription. Probably should dump the monthly adventure magazines as well....but, you know, somethings are just not on the list............like my OMNI's.
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("The cards just keep coming by the truckload, Colonel. You'd think they'd be out of paper by now."––Nurse trying to convince astronaut Stryker that he is home, (w,stte), "The Stranger")

Sorry. Prayers sent.
Get to know your local adult protective services laws, regulations, and code enforcememt persons.
Tough love...

must...not...post....eharmony video bio....

Oh, you mean like herding cats?
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("If it were easy, anyone could do it!"––(w,stte), one of those motivational sayings when things get tough)

I have seen a collection of 37 1L urine bottles under a guys bed in Iraq. He was too damn lazy to go outside and piss.

Either that or he watched Apollo 13 just a little too often.
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(After a cross dresser offers Dan use of the john in the holding cell, "I'd rather explode.", (w,stte), Night Court, "The Night Off")

Snow:  You would NOT BELIEVE all the books the wife and I had accumulated over the years.

We FINALLY donated them to the libraries near us this last winter.........it took about 1 guzillion trips and I actually bulked up in the arms and shoulders carrying all those boxes around.

But we are in our late fifties..........so it took a LONG TIME to get over this "habit".

I did keep about 100 books.........mainly GUN BOOKS!!

Wait........make that 200 books.

Burn the house down, or just come in with a dumpster/dump truck, and start chucking shit. Tell her tough shit, and then burn everything. See if the local FD would be willing to use the house as a training burn.

A friend of mine's mother makes that look tame. She's such a hoarder everything useable in the house is nestled in the middle of the garbage with what can only be described as game trails going to the bed, stove and toilet. She's such an animal lover she FEEDS the rats leftover food. WHen she's not home my son sneaks into the house with a .22 and CCI shotshells. He offered me the result once to feeed my snakes, and some of those fucking rats were 4 pounds!-Keep in mind this is after they were dead and had bled out.

Pics or bullshit.

And I really hope you can produce the pics, because I gotta see this.

Pictures of other people's squallor fascinate me.   Seeing my nieces and nephew living in it depresses me.  

You didn't mention culling the stuffed animal herd...





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("It's just a few hundred stuffed animals... and they are all confined to the bedroom... OBTW why can't I seem to get any dates?" ––Snowleopard trying to convince herself that there is nothing wrong with her, (w,stte), "ARFCOM - 2010")





 

Either take them to a collectors corner type shop, and trade them for cash, or silver or gold

OR take the hotwheels to the nearest scrapyard, and sell them as dirty steel, and use the baseball cards as 100 yard targets.

Rent a Semi sized dump trailer. With the Garage, a Bobcat is QUITE useful. If you happen to see stuff that would have value at a scrap metal yard, set it aside, and then scrap it.

My MIL is a hoarder albeit not as bad as some others have posted.  I could go into the diatribe of psychological reasons she does it but it is too long of a story(ies).



Last year I was redoing her roof and brought a 30 yard roll-off onto her property.  The roof I redid filled up some of it but the rest of it was for stuff that I was throwing out.



My wife and I invaded her home and it was a battle but we made a dent in the collection of worthless junk.  There were things we probably threw away that were worth something but selling them takes discipline and we know the MIL doesn't have it and having her junk at our house was not appealing...plus the MIL would just come over here and take it back while we're at work.



Another relative had a similar lifestyle but it was far worse.   I did end up with an M1 Carbine out of it because it was buried under piles of stuff in the kitchen.

I laughed. Don't forget to describe yourself as comparable to a model and provide pictures of that person but not yourself

The amount of work you wind up putting into it is never worth the return.

Hoarders do not keep really valuable things in good condition.  Anything that's valuable winds up being rusted, dirty, moldy, etc.  And everything else is just plain old junk.

Is this you?

So true.



The other factor is unless the hoarder is dead, getting the stuff away from them and then moving it somewhere else to take pictures, find out what it is, etc. means that the hoarder can find it and take it back.



 

Same here.  My roommate, at any given time, had about five bottles of urine on the floor at the foot of his bed.  Instead of throwing them away he'd chuck them across the fence that was next to our CHU, where there was a huge, mostly empty motor pool.  No one ever noticed them, and several dozen collected, turning a nasty shade of brown after a week or so.  To use a porta-john one would have to put on flip-flops, walk about 150 feet in 115-120 degree weather and walk back.  Obviously too much.

I even wrote a poem about it, sung to the tune of the national anthem.

Oh say, can you see,
It is really a blight.
All those bottles out there,
It is really retarded.
When one looks 'cross the fence
with adequate light,
One wonders aloud,
"Will they ever be discarded?"

And the bottles turn brown
After they've been around
For weeks upon weeks
With the sun beating down.

Oh, say, will those nasty brown bottles disappear
'Ere the next unit arrives and we pack up our gear?

I knew a guy and his wife who had only narrow walking paths through their house to get to the kitchen, shitter, and one bedroom out of 3.  Crap was stacked to the ceiling on either side of the path.

OP, don't waste your time cleaning out anything before your parents pass away, as they'll quickly fill up the empty space again.  Just accept that when the time comes to clean out the house, you'll need to rent one of those large trash dumpsters for a while.

Yours too, eh?

One of my four was waxing eloquent on accessories for the AK this morning!

I'm glad this subject is seeing the light of day so to speak.

My Mother has to be the supreme hoarder.  I grew up with the "trails"..  one could not walk 3 steps without knocking over piles of laundry or stuff.  The garage was piled to the ceiling
with stuff.  We would haul 2 truckloads of stuff to the dump in the F-150 every weekend.  Never made a dent.

Fast forward to now.  My father left and has a nice life now.  My mother lives in Casa Grande, AZ. in her parents old house where she was psychologically abused by her schizophrenic mother.
The house is one gigantic pile of shit... complete with dog feces and who knows what else.  The air conditioning broke years ago, the electricity is shut off at the breaker due to electrical problems.
The plumbing is a mess too.  

My mother lives in the former pool room which does have a trail to the shitter and bed.  Her Gigantic GMC Yukon is piled up with shit up to the door sills on a good day, and all the way up to the roof
other times.   Many times my sister and I have tried to intervene to no avail.   It was a major cause of the divorce.

I dread the day she passes and I will be tasked with the finding of photos and valuables.   The house is an irreparable disaster.

On a side note:  my gf of many years has 4 cats.. I hate the smell of the litter boxes..  I like the critters but cant stand the cat hair everywhere on everything...  
I also have a bunch of 1:18th stuff I would like to sell off for cash that I could stand to get rid of.  (tons of Muscle cars and I have airplanes too.)

My mom got rid of my bed while I was in Boot camp.  I spent 3 months dreaming of sleeping in my own bed after racking out on shitty cots and I come home to my fucking bed being gone.  
its been 14 years
I miss that fucking bed man.

Spot on BeS! Toxo messes up the mind.

This.  It's a sickness, it can't be cured by a cleanup crew.  The parents of my brother's girlfriend are long-time hoarders.  GF's mom had to be moved to an assisted living place last year... and she started hoarding junk in her room there too  The family home in Toronto would be worth far more if it hadn't been damaged by years of hoarding and neglect.

If you know any teachers, have them ask around and see if anyone wants them.   My Dad just got rid of 30+ years of Natl Geo.  My teacher sister sent an email out at work and immediately had several people want them.

My parents have been on a cleaning bing over the past few years - "less for the kids to clean out when we go".  Rough to hear, but it's realistic.    Now, I'm going before my Aunt and Uncle no matter what.  Their basement scares me and it's been many years since I've been in it!

I am really surprised that anyone on AR-15 would suggest that..............how many thousands of rounds might be in there? Further, once a local FD learned that the person in questioned was associated with AR-15 by blood or marriage......I think they'd drop that suggestion like a hot potato.

The stuffed animals are not on the table. Getting rid of them would be like suggesting to get rid of one's 1/35 Afrika Korps......and, by the by, I have several of those, built and not, waiting for a place to go on display.

Aside from the junk, the papers produced by our information age where every bill comes in with multiple sheets, where enevelopes come in saying do not discard without opening first, etc..................the only thing really up on the sorting list right now are the books/magazines. The VHS is the other numerous thing, numbering in the thousands, and a slow effort is under way to convert it to digital....but that is complex. Further, that is one of those things that to the viewer outside, it's a tape of a cartoon that was on 25 years ago: worthless and probably acquirable in modern format. To me, it's a 25 year cultural database that can be viewed in eras, such as Cold War, pre Internet, pre cell phone, etc....................or if only to look at it in the way that censorship varies over the years.

Is there anyone, any charity who will take a well clawed, previously expensive, leather office chair?
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("Congratulations, Sir! You just became the proud owner of 25 pieces of slightly clawed inflatable furniture!"––salesman to Jon, (w,stte), "Garfield")

 Sure.  They come by every week. Just put it on the curb.

Pics of the rats or the house? Also I forgot to mention all the cats-there must be 30 of them outside, with 30-40 more in cages in the basement(she cages mothers with kittens until they're weaned). If you want pics of the house, come shooting with us sometime.I'm not going inside that house again. That's the sole virtue of the place, being outside city limits. After that first time, I make excuses NOT to go indoors when I'm over there. It doesn't take much, because he doesn't like going inside. As for pics of the rats I'll see when his next hunting trip is and try to arrange sonething.

This is the situation I was describing.

Well, that was disappointing....but encouraging.

Went through some of my paperback shelves, thinking how many books I might get rid of, those that were bought on a whim that I really have no interest in reading. So far, maybe only a dozen or so.

Disappointing but encouraging because it sort of shows that I bought them more on my interest than on a whim.

Further, there are a lot of books on the save list because of their collection status. All the Battlestar Galactica (classic) paperbacks. John Carter of Mars, Tarzan, Venus; Dr. Who; The Phantom, Ballatine war history, and so forth.

Some are split to what will happen to them. The Ballatine ST books which were done essentially before the 1st movie, stay; most of those afterward GO......because most of those afterward struck me as fan fiction fantasy that someone decided to publish.

Clusser, Crichton (for now), books stay. Lots of sci fi books, especially those written the mid 70's and before....such was what I grew up on.

So what's in the box to go? Band of Brothers, The Med, a few Star Treks. intrique novels (ie, Arthur Hailey type stories). On the last, I rather grew up on those, too! Then, they were something of one of my first introductions to sex, but now, knowing more, they just aren't as exciting.

But all told, I suppose that could mark a difference between hoar5ding and collecting.

If you can still tell what it is, what it represents, it's a collection.

If you can't, it's junk.
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("How very disappointing. I was expecting at least one head of state."––Blofield about 007's arrival, (w,stte), "Diamonds are Forever")

Start looking for things of value and start an ebay business.