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This thread inspired me to go clean out my garage. It wasn't that bad and I ended up finishing a scooter project that I was supposed to finish for a friend (months ago) and am going to list a fairly rare motorcycle that I was planning to fix "one day" so all in all not bad. Fire hazard reduced and hopefully a few grand in the pocket. To add, I will say that if I didn't move so much from my late teens to my early 30's I'd probably be a hoarder. I grew up in an alcoholic, totally dysfunctional family and the only things that didn't disappear over time were the little trinkets I'd keep hold of. Add to that pretty severe depression and you've got a recipe for disaster. You find yourself trying to build stability by surrounding yourself with stuff and the stuff ends up consuming you. Even now in my late 30's I still have to do the purge every once in a while. My only saving grace is that I will not buy junk and that when it does get passed on it's usually to an owner who is super excited to be buying it. Once the garage is done I will have to start reducing my collection of poo poo that is stacked up in my bedroom closet. Who the hell has a mint Threshold S/300 among the carefully cleaned and cataloged high end Yamaha audio gear in their closet? I do, that's who. They're all 80's vintage and need to be gone through so I'll either "get to them one day" or more than likely just sell them to some other crazy person when I move.
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Aug 9, 2015 22:01
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corpuscollossus posted:Watching this on hoarders, its good: From a bit back but this cracked me up. This Jeff guy actually seems a bit adorable, like oh twiddles it really is a bit unmanageable now that you mention it *pawing distractedly to regain control of wispy escapist locks* how would one go about sorting all this now I wonder... "The bath is temporarily full of shoes!"
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Aug 9, 2015 22:09
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I just got done shredding old papers and bank statements - ended up with two huge garbage bags filled with confetti. Thanks for the impetus, hoarding thread!
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Aug 10, 2015 00:50
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Tip: if this thread has inspired you to clean you were probably in no real danger of becoming a real hoarder
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Aug 10, 2015 04:49
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Otacon posted:I just got done shredding old papers and bank statements - ended up with two huge garbage bags filled with confetti. Thanks for the impetus, hoarding thread! And then you kept the bags of confetti, because it might be useful some day if you want to send a parcel. Think of the money you'll save not having to buy bubble wrap and packing peanuts!
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Aug 10, 2015 05:27
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Well duh, of course I kept them, I need them to keep the other 16 bags of confetti company
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Aug 10, 2015 05:34
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My stash of gift bags and bubble wrap is a valuable resource tyvm (it does not fill an entire garage)
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Aug 10, 2015 05:35
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cash crab posted:Tip: if this thread has inspired you to clean you were probably in no real danger of becoming a real hoarder well yeah but it doesn't hurt you know? I'd rather stay as far as I can from that, so I say sticky this thread forever
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Aug 10, 2015 06:53
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cash crab posted:Tip: if this thread has inspired you to clean you were probably in no real danger of becoming a real hoarder My former roommate was a fuckin in-training proto hoarder. The fact that our moth infestation ended like 3 weeks after she moved out was enough to make me stay on top of my poo poo v  v
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Aug 10, 2015 13:22
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Code Jockey posted:well yeah but it doesn't hurt you know? No, I'm not saying it doesn't help. But if you see someone who hoards, for example, dead cats and you're like "CHRISTFUCK WHYYY" you're probably in better mental territory then someone who sees that as goes, "Absolutely, those little fuckers need to be cremated. Shame she didn't get to them in time."
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Aug 10, 2015 16:46
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So its not normal to colour coordinate the bags of poo poo and semen I keep in rows along the back of my desk?
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Aug 10, 2015 17:57
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CannedMacabre posted:This thread has geared me up to go clean my basement. Bahaha. I thought you were using the phrase "holds up the Earth" figuratively. Then I saw the globe.
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Aug 10, 2015 18:38
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Karate Bastard posted:From a bit back but this cracked me up. This Jeff guy actually seems a bit adorable, like oh twiddles it really is a bit unmanageable now that you mention it *pawing distractedly to regain control of wispy escapist locks* how would one go about sorting all this now I wonder... The first comment on YouTube: "Is Jeff single?"
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Aug 10, 2015 19:44
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Curse this thread for reminding me of my weakness for the Hoarders show. Part of me hates how it's paced, the pantomiming bullshit they encourage to spice things up for the camera, and so on and so forth, but I just find it engrossing to see these broken husks confront whatever demon(s) caused them to start hoarding Barbie dolls, diapers, rat urine-soaked boxes of cereal from 1990, or whatever the gently caress it is that has filled their house. Some of the comments in here about people being able to control the fate of inanimate objects and how it would never leave them, question them, or talk back, unlike humans, explained a lot of the hoarder mentality to me. What I don't get are the hoarders' partners who put up with it. Are they that desperate for love and to not be alone? Misguided pride in thinking "I may have issues but at least I don't poo poo in a bucket and empty it in the yard?" Something else I'm missing? And now back to watching the flaming wreckage of Hoarders.
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Aug 11, 2015 00:33
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Would a person on Hoarders know if someone had thrown their Burger King Kid's Club sack away if the cleaner guy didn't wave it in front of their face and say "Hey do you want to throw this awaaay?." It seems more common sense to me to toss something when the hoarder isn't looking but then again I guess that's why I'm not making the show.
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Aug 11, 2015 04:36
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My stepmom's a hoarder and yes, they do know when things have been rearranged or thrown out. It's incredibly aggravating. She won't always know that we threw away exactly 11 reams of cat-pissed stained paper and a handful of old stamps that were covering the floor heating grate, for example, but she knows when stuff's been moved. Hoarders have huge fits when you throw their garbage away when they're out of the house, and my stepmom will actually go back into the trash and dig out things that we've tried to get rid of. I had a fight with her once about throwing out moldy English muffins. These people really need to be living in nursing homes.
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Aug 11, 2015 04:53
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I really want them to mix the show with a personal finance show like Till Debt Do Us Part. How the gently caress do they own so much poo poo? I mean, other than the ones who just hoard literal garbage and bodily waste, all these acres of things have to cost some money.
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Aug 11, 2015 05:15
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tuyop posted:I really want them to mix the show with a personal finance show like Till Debt Do Us Part. How the gently caress do they own so much poo poo? Often, hoarders are the kind of people to "never pass up a good deal". A lot of stuff comes from thrift stores, garage sales, or Walmart. That's why there's so much of it. Some of them even dumpster dive for their stuff. One guy on the show had an explicit shopping problem where he was 30 grand in debt because he bought things as gifts for people and never gave them to those people. He would have rather bought some cheap fabric softener for his daughter because it was a good deal than help pay for her college tuition and books. Every Christmas and birthday, my mom gives us tons of stuff. So many presents, and lots of the gifts are stuff we don't want, or don't need. About a third of the gifts are stuff we actually like and appreciate and at least another third is stuff that will just go in a give-away bag. I would be totally happy to just get the nice set of kitchen knives, a teapot and a nice blouse. I don't need a box of Avon stuff, more cookbooks I won't use, a day to day calendar, a spaceship alarm clock and 10 pairs of Christmas themed socks. She goes waaaay overboard.
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Aug 11, 2015 05:39
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Nessa posted:Often, hoarders are the kind of people to "never pass up a good deal". A lot of stuff comes from thrift stores, garage sales, or Walmart. That's why there's so much of it. Some of them even dumpster dive for their stuff. This is most likely. When you watch a picker show they don't turn up with two flatbed trucks to haul the good stuff away. Just a van in case something is big. The number of times you see them go through a barn full of stuff and determine that it's all worthless. I just wish one of the picker shows would arrive and find a barn full of grey rocks.
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Aug 11, 2015 05:54
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Nessa posted:
Dude don't freak out but I think we have the same mom Actually, I can't believe I forgot to mention this, but I've lived with a total of 3 hoarders. One (my mother) was just the "I got a great deal!" one, my ex mother in law was the one who let her dog poo poo in her basement and the third was my roommate, who would bake cakes and then hide them so they'd rot. Instead of washing her towels, she'd buy new ones. She would also save used kleenex.  Mmm.
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Aug 11, 2015 05:57
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cash crab posted:Dude don't freak out but I think we have the same mom That sounds horrible. My mom's dog would poop in her basement and she never noticed for a while because she barely ever went into the basement. The basement is full of black mould as well, due to previous flooding. This year, she's been trying to get the water out of the basement because it's flooded again, but the water just won't go away. She'll spend an hour with a wet/dry vac, take a break and then come back to more water, as if she hadn't done any work at all. :/ I don't know how she's ever going to get her house fixed up to sell it. She wants to move closer to family in the city, but she has to get her of her deathtrap of a house.
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Aug 11, 2015 18:17
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Nessa posted:That sounds horrible. My mom's dog would poop in her basement and she never noticed for a while because she barely ever went into the basement. The basement is full of black mould as well, due to previous flooding. Literally the exact same thing happened in our house. For context, the top floor of the house was inhabited by me and my ex, and his mother in law would show up occasionally for the weekend, but otherwise we lived alone. She owned the house on paper but was rarely there. She then decided to rent out our bedroom to her friend, so we went into the basement for the time being. Neither of were paying rent so no one complained (although some rooms had so much garbage we couldn't use them, and just went from the bedroom [which was filled with rocks???] and the bathroom). So, one day while she's in town, one of the pipes burst and destroys a bunch of our clothes and recording equipment. She thought it was funny. Luckily my ex's grandparents are fairly wealthy and paid for junk guys to come in, clear out the place, and renovate the place before the water damage and mold issue became too severe. It's nothing we or the mother in law could have done ourselves. Unfortunately, your mom is going to have to probably do something similar, or at least enlist some family help to stop more damage.
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Aug 11, 2015 18:57
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The thing those hoarding shows get wrong is the mantra; "the object is not the memory," or something along those lines. They cajole/bully people into the mindset of objects not being your life--just remnants that do not need to be held onto in order to keep the memory or feeling attached to it. It's necessary framing of the project because otherwise, nothing would get done. I am not a hoarder, but between my mother's library, my brothers autism, and my father's photo and train collections... the house was pretty bad when I took over as a reluctant head of the family. I admitted defeat and called in a professional organizer and her team. It broke my loving heart to see piles of books as tall as me get marched out to the snowy driveway to wait for a recycling truck to pick them up. Most of the stuff wasn't mine. Still, when things were practically flying into the dumpster, a few times it just felt too fast. At the start, I told the organizer, "we are going to make mistakes, and some things I wanted are going to get lost. I am willing to pay that as the price for a fast solution to this problem." I tried to remember that, but sometimes it felt like I had lost control and was getting anxious about mistakes. I was painfully aware that a lot of things I was throwing out were loved by my mother or my father. They didn't collect things they didn't want/need--they just had a lot of stuff with a poor organizational system that collapsed entirely after mom died. Now it was mine, and I had no authority above me to decide what my brother and I would keep in our lives. Back to the point. The object is not the memory, but sometimes it might as well be. I found my mother's old journals, where she wrote about her worries for my brother and I. I found cassette tapes from my youth and stuffed animals whose names I remembered. Gifts I'd given either of my parents, or an entire collection of Monty Python videos on VHS. Every closet I emptied rattled with skeletons my mother had tried to hide. I would pick up something and get hit with emotions that were too loud to really define. Oddly, it was the painful things that were the hardest to let go of, as if they were my penance. But when you get to that point, you're tired. You feel hollowed out and probably a little humiliated. You're scared and grasping for things. I remember the organizer asking me in that therapist-voice if I really needed that box of old maps. I said "I want to keep that," but after the third time I got asked, I said "gently caress it, into the pit." I regret that. I could have done so many art projects with those. There were a couple other things I wanted to hold, but was coaxed out of; I can't even remember what they were, now. Gave me a lot more empathy for people who actually do hoard. Its scary to let go of things when they're tangled up in powerful memories or comfort. It wasn't even my stuff and I felt like I was erasing history with every empty bin, bookshelf, or desk drawer. e: It's been done with for a couple years now. My personal policy is that every single thing in this apartment must have a place--a shelf, drawer, whatever--even if it isn't in there all the time. If there isn't room for it to have a place, I don't keep it. Even the 2 cats have their own Ikea cube shelf perches. Pixelante fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 20:05
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I literally don't own anything that couldn't be replaced. Eat poo poo, sentimentality havers.
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Aug 11, 2015 20:41
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It's easy to hoard taxidermy because each animal was an individual thinking thing. It's really hard to sell; I can only ever donate it.
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Aug 11, 2015 20:49
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Wanamingo posted:I literally don't own anything that couldn't be replaced. Eat poo poo, sentimentality havers. This is me, too, but also everything I own except for like my PC is the cheapest non-thriftstore garbage. Except for a coffee table and an end table, which are both thriftstore garbage  That said, I'm mostly talking about furniture, which I don't think is a thing that people usually end up hoarding.
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Aug 11, 2015 21:06
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Pick posted:It's easy to hoard taxidermy because each animal was an individual thinking thing. It's really hard to sell; I can only ever donate it. Maybe it helps if you think of them as inflated carcasses?
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Aug 11, 2015 21:10
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cash crab posted:Literally the exact same thing happened in our house. For context, the top floor of the house was inhabited by me and my ex, and his mother in law would show up occasionally for the weekend, but otherwise we lived alone. She owned the house on paper but was rarely there. She then decided to rent out our bedroom to her friend, so we went into the basement for the time being. Neither of were paying rent so no one complained (although some rooms had so much garbage we couldn't use them, and just went from the bedroom [which was filled with rocks???] and the bathroom). So, one day while she's in town, one of the pipes burst and destroys a bunch of our clothes and recording equipment. She thought it was funny. A few years ago, she did rent a dumpster and I helped her shovel tons of damp, moldy crap out of the basement. But now the water is lifting up the linoleum and has gotten on her phone lines (there's a crackling if you call the landline). She called the town to see if there was a burst pipe, but nothing was found. We think there might actually be a wellspring underneath her house. All the land in the area becomes a marsh every spring. :/
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Aug 11, 2015 21:43
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Foundations require professional repair. You might have to accept lower ceilings and fill the basement with a foot of concrete.
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Aug 11, 2015 23:33
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Pixelante posted:The thing those hoarding shows get wrong is the mantra; "the object is not the memory," or something along those lines. They cajole/bully people into the mindset of objects not being your life--just remnants that do not need to be held onto in order to keep the memory or feeling attached to it. It's necessary framing of the project because otherwise, nothing would get done. That's an interesting point, and I agree that what the shows are doing is not helpful. The problem is hoarders ascribe these precious memories to things with no value. My stepmother has a broken metal paperback stand from her parents long-ago shuttered bookstore. It's rusty and ugly and smells bad (it's made of metal WTF) and she will never, ever let it go.
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Aug 12, 2015 00:40
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Delta Echo posted:The Dell computers scare me. I might have trouble letting them go, too.  Bad Caps from 2001 are something to save for the future, so it never happens again!E: I may be a borderline hoarder. At least 2-4 times a year I do a purge and everything gets thrown out/cleaned/scrubbed down. Usually after trying to find something in my parents' mess at their place. That said, I own far too many cars to be healthy. They all work, and I take care of their maintenance, so..  Two are for sale, and a third is a fixer (nearly done, waiting on parts) for close family to get rid of their deathtrap. Thats half of 'em!
TwoFire fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 02:46
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gently caress this thread im out yall eww
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Aug 12, 2015 03:23
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TwoFire posted:I may be a borderline hoarder. At least 2-4 times a year I do a purge and everything gets thrown out/cleaned/scrubbed down. Usually after trying to find something in my parents' mess at their place. Dude you're just white trash.
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Aug 12, 2015 03:26
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AuntBuck posted:Dude you're just white trash. You done said you ain't gonna be followin' me no more affin' them judges done said ya ain' gonna-do, AuntieBuck!
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Aug 12, 2015 03:36
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AuntBuck posted:That's an interesting point, and I agree that what the shows are doing is not helpful. The problem is hoarders ascribe these precious memories to things with no value. My stepmother has a broken metal paperback stand from her parents long-ago shuttered bookstore. It's rusty and ugly and smells bad (it's made of metal WTF) and she will never, ever let it go. Maybe it is the fact that many hoarders are socially isolated and may, in fact, not have much worth remembering - and definitely no mechanisms for social memory, which, while we don't often talk about it, is a huge part of our identities. Useless crap creates a physical reminder of some sort of narrative, no matter how incoherent, and can become addictive when social mechanisms for "being a person" are absent?
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Aug 12, 2015 04:16
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TwoFire posted:You done said you ain't gonna be followin' me no more affin' them judges done said ya ain' gonna-do, AuntieBuck! I'll stop reporting your lawn if you let my family live in one of your cars when they accidentally burn their house down. Deal? Fasdar posted:Maybe it is the fact that many hoarders are socially isolated and may, in fact, not have much worth remembering - and definitely no mechanisms for social memory, which, while we don't often talk about it, is a huge part of our identities. Useless crap creates a physical reminder of some sort of narrative, no matter how incoherent, and can become addictive when social mechanisms for "being a person" are absent? That... really fits. That might also explain some other behaviors. Being a disabled person is a very important part of my hoarder parent's identity. Problem being she is not disabled. She's constantly seeking attention for made-up illnesses, but maybe it's also about being part of a larger group? I don't know.
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Aug 12, 2015 04:54
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AuntBuck posted:I'll stop reporting your lawn if you let my family live in one of your cars when they accidentally burn their house down. Deal? only if'fn they live in a domestic- i ain't gonna share my exotics with hoofbreathers AuntBuck posted:That... really fits. That might also explain some other behaviors. Being a disabled person is a very important part of my hoarder parent's identity. Problem being she is not disabled. She's constantly seeking attention for made-up illnesses, but maybe it's also about being part of a larger group? I don't know. Just show her how to sign up to reddit.
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Aug 12, 2015 04:57
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Fasdar posted:Maybe it is the fact that many hoarders are socially isolated and may, in fact, not have much worth remembering - and definitely no mechanisms for social memory, which, while we don't often talk about it, is a huge part of our identities. Useless crap creates a physical reminder of some sort of narrative, no matter how incoherent, and can become addictive when social mechanisms for "being a person" are absent? A lot of the time, it seems hoarding is caused by some sort of trauma. A cheating spouse, a death in the family, declining health, that sort of thing. Sometimes it's caused by other kinds of "trauma" like "my daddy threw out my toys when I was little so now I get to have ALL THE TOYS FOREVER!" or "I have difficulty socializing so objects are my only true friends." Some of the people on the hoarders show definitely seem to be on the autistic spectrum too.
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Aug 12, 2015 05:16
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Nessa posted:A lot of the time, it seems hoarding is caused by some sort of trauma. I'm going to disagree with that. I've compared notes with some other family members of hoarders about their life experiences. They really haven't suffered any more trauma than the general population, on the whole. Trauma may exacerbate their hoarding behavior and personality problems, as these people are poor at coping with life in general, but there's rarely one event that started this behavior rolling. Hoarders' behavior tends to slowly worsen over time, so it might look like you can trace it back to point X. Think of it more like a degenerative disease.
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Aug 12, 2015 05:51
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AuntBuck posted:I'm going to disagree with that. I've compared notes with some other family members of hoarders about their life experiences. They really haven't suffered any more trauma than the general population, on the whole. Trauma may exacerbate their hoarding behavior and personality problems, as these people are poor at coping with life in general, but there's rarely one event that started this behavior rolling. Hoarders' behavior tends to slowly worsen over time, so it might look like you can trace it back to point X. Think of it more like a degenerative disease. I was just going based on the Hoarders episodes I've seen. My mom blames her hoarding on my grandmother and her rough childhood of having to milk cows and make breakfast in the morning, but I think it really got worse when my dad up and left the family. My dad blames his hoarding on his abusive father who threw out all his things.
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Aug 12, 2015 06:05
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