Cleaning House: When Little Messes Become Big Problems
Published on - August 12th, 2008 (by J.D. Roth) Kris and I drove down to clean Mom’s house last night. Over the past decade, her place has gradually been overtaken by Stuff and clutter. Since Mom is still in the hospital, we figured this was a great time to tackle some of the mess.
After three hours of cleaning clutter and sorting Stuff, there’s no mystery about where I acquired my compulsion to buy. I come by it honestly. But while I’ve managed to kick the habit, Mom is still under its sway.
The gift that keeps on giving
We started cleaning upstairs in the spare bedroom. It was difficult to even get the door open, and when we did, we didn’t know where to begin. The room was piled with boxes and bags and bubble wrap.
Mom has a thing for ordering from catalogs like Current, ABC Distributing, and Colorful Images. Over the years, she’s ordered boxes and boxes and boxes of Stuff from these companies to give as birthday and Christmas presents. She’s given most (but not all) of these things away, but, for some reason, she’s kept the boxes.
She’s also kept some of the gifts, misplacing them beneath stacks of paper and plastic. Kris found one item intended for our nephew, Michael. Mom wrote herself a sticky note: “Christmas 2002 2004″. It’s now 2008. Michael will be ten years old this winter, and the gift is no longer appropriate.
The spare bedroom also contained:
- Over 50 rolls of wrapping paper
- Mom’s collection of mail-order dolls
- Unused exercise equipment
- A personal computer from about 1993
- Stacks of newspapers from the mid-1990s
- Immense quantities of packing peanuts and bubble wrap and other shipping debris
At one point I stopped and sighed as I looked around the room. “This is a great example of why you shouldn’t buy too much in advance,” I said. “This whole thing is a mess.” I’m sure Mom no longer has any idea what is left in the room. She ought to take an inventory.
Best by date
Next we worked on cleaning Mom’s refrigerator and pantry. We sorted the old, expired food from the good. Little was good. “This soup is from 1997,” Kris said, discarding a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom. “And this Wheaties box has Clyde Drexler on it.” We laughed.
We found many similar examples:
- Mayonnaise “best by” 1996
- Juice boxes from 2003
- Green olives black with mold
- Snapple long since turned to sludge
Mom apparently buys a lot of food at Costco in bulk packages. She might drink the first two bottles of a Snapple four-pack, but then the last two become spoiled. Or she’ll buy a six-pound bag of pretzels but forget about them.
(“Maybe she likes pretzels,” I said when Kris showed me the bag. But she replied: “No woman living alone should buy a six-pound bag of pretzels.” The bag was from 2001, so I’ll give Kris the point on that one.)
We threw out several hundred dollars in spoiled food, nearly all of it in giant Costco containers or bound as part of a Costco bulk pack. Costco (and other warehouse clubs) can be a great way to save money, but not if the food doesn’t get used. A bargain is not a bargain if it goes to waste.
Little messes become big problems
Eventually we noticed something alarming. My father had actually purchased many of the items in the freezer and the fridge. My father died in 1995. Obviously it makes no sense to throw food away just because the person who bought it has died. But it also makes no sense to keep the food for twelve years past the expiration date.
“You know,” I said. “Mom probably never meant to save this Stuff so long. I’ll bet it started small. She let a couple little things slide. She kept this jam, for example, or those pickles. Before long, she wasn’t throwing away any of her old food.”
A similar problem became apparent with the cats’ litter boxes. What had started as a single “accident” is now a looming disaster, an accretion of months or years of similar accidents. The stinky mess has ruined not only the linoleum, but perhaps also floorboards underneath. If you let the little things slide, they eventually become big things. In this case, a mess that might have taken a few moments to clean will probably now cost several hundred (or several thousand) dollars to repair.
A small step
Going through all of Mom’s Stuff, and handling her finances recently, I feel like I’ve been given a peek at a secret life. I’m able to see how she handles money, what she spends it on. Mostly she’s doing okay, but like all of us, she has blind spots.
We didn’t finish the job tonight. We managed to get a lot of Stuff out of the house, but Mom’s back porch is littered with trash. Her laundry room reeks of cat urine. We have a shopping list of things to buy for her. Even after we take care of these tasks, the work will continue in the weeks and months ahead.
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If you’re mom is hesitant to get serious about her hoarding problem, you might want to get her a copy of Peter Walsh’s book “It’s All Too Much.” He’s from TLC’s Clean House and helped that epic hoarder on Oprah. Anyway, the book isn’t about how to organize stuff. It’s about figuring out what causes you to hoard – the psychological root – and then overcoming it so you no longer feel the need to hoard. And then he has some organizing tips, too. But he’s very firm about setting limits on stuff so it doesn’t get out of control again.
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how timely. right before reading this post, i watched a documentary called “Possessed” about four hoarders in the UK. it doesn’t make any judgments or commentary, it’s just interviews and footage of their homes. here’s the url: http://www.vimeo.com/603058
for me, as more of a compulsive cleaner, i find the hoarding mentality confusing and, when it becomes extreme, quite disturbing. that’s not to say i don’t have my own little collections here and there; but, almost on schedule, there’s a yearly sort’n'purge of things which are weighing me down.
my boyfriend is a hoarder/collector. it’s one of the biggest reasons we probably won’t ever live together. his inability to throw away receipts from items he purchased three years ago baffles and frustrates me to no end.
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Heartbreaking. I hope it turns out well — I’m related to a collector and I absolutely hate going to the house, and dread the eventual disposition of all that Stuff.
However, on a slightly practical note (I hope) — if the floorboards are not utterly ruined near the cat box to the point where you have to rip them out and replace them, and you’re still going to try cat urine cleanup stuff, look into a product called Stink Free. It’s expensive (I just bought a gallon jug from PetSmart for $28 yesterday), more so than most of the other products I’ve seen at pet stores, but having tried absolutely all of them, Stink Free is the only one that ever really solved the problem. The enzymatic ones just wound up making it smell of cat urine + cleaner fragrance, which was even more repugnant. So if the situation is reparable, I’d buy a jug of that and use it liberally wherever you find stains. (It’s cheaper to go straight to the expensive-but-functional product than to work your way through $150 of products that don’t work or make it worse!) Hope that helps.
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Ah…here’s another with parents who are pack rats! My mum keeps all her mags from the mid 80s to the present! Oh why oh why?! I dont want to be like her so as soon as I get a mag I read it cover to cover in about an hour then put immediately into the recycling pile. Even better, I let all my subscriptions run out.
My father often jokes that he feels sorry for me after they die – since I will have to clean out the house. They also wonder how four ppl lived in the house – since 3 of the 4 bedrooms are so packed you cant walk around in them.
What’s made it worse – both of my parents’ mothers died and now their stuff is stored there too! Grrr.
Partly why I like my small place with poor closet space – is that it is easy to fill it up – so I’m extra careful to not obtain too much stuff. Isnt working 100% though – I always have a pile in a corner I havent moved on. I’m good at rearranging the pile though
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The standing order with my family is that anything my mother offers us, we say thank you and take regardless of size, use, condition, etc.. She typically has a bunch of things “ready” for us every time we visit and it’s usually things she recognizes she needs to get rid of but like depression era folks just can’t bring herself throw it away because it might be useful to somebody, somewhere, one day. Giving it to us lets her get rid of it under the pretext that we can “use it”. Every third item is something we can find a use or home for, a good chunk gets donated, and the rest gets trashed. I’ve even begun asking if she still wants something if she begins to complain about it, sort of a pre-emptive strike.
Of course, the worse thing is the boomerang gifts coming back at us a year or so later. That can hurt the kid’s feelings but we’ve prepped them for it as well.
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My great-aunt is a major hoarder–she has stacks and stacks of magazines and newspapers dating back to the 60s. I remember going to her house when I was just a kid, and not being able to sit down anywhere because everything was piled with stuff–there were only two available chairs in the whole house (one for her, one for my great-uncle). Eventually it got so bad that they quit letting anyone come over; when my grandmother finally forced her way in years later and started to shovel piles of stuff around, she discovered that a whole family of possums was living in there, too, but my great-aunt and -uncle had never noticed because they couldn’t see around all the stuff. Even when I was growing up, the family was already arguing about who was going to have to clean out the house when the couple died. (My vote: just let the fire department burn the whole place down as a training exercise or something.)
The clutter so quickly gets out of control and snowballs into something much, much worse. My great-aunt’s only child died in early adulthood, and that’s when her clutter problem started; the stacks of magazines and papers date back to the year of his death. She couldn’t bear to part with his things, of course, but then it spread to not being able to part with anything. Her biggest problem was with newspapers and magazines; I think she felt a need to somehow hold onto all the events and news that her son didn’t live to see, or something like that.
The scary part is that everyone else is my family (myself included) is a packrat, too, even though we’ve seen the darkest side of that. It can be so easy to cross the line from “messy/cluttered” and “downright unhealthy” before you’ve even realized it.
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Wow, that is pretty bad. It sounds like it’s going into “hoarder” territory. Have you thought about getting her professional help, or do you believe it isn’t that serious yet?
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As you know Jd we are going through a lot of this with or parents. What is it with the older generation? My parents still have 500 glass cups and plates from when they had their catering business years ago. They have all the big serving bowls too. My dad is hanging on to a cake fountain because “I paid so much for it and now if I sells it I wont get my money out of it!”
My brother went into my Dads shed the other day and reports that there are 25 tires stored in there!!!! Our parents wont let us get rid of anything!
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One thing I found helpful from the Squalor Survivors website was their description of the “stages” of squalor and clean, because it helps show that going from one stage to another is a gradual process…
First degree squalor
You are getting behind in tasks that you would normally manage, like laundry and dishes. You are not the tidy person you once were. Little piles are starting to emerge and your disorganization is starting to affect your life and inconvenience you. Things are just starting to get out of hand and become unmanageable. A sign of first degree squalor might be that you are embarrassed for other people to see your mess … but you would still let them in the house.
Second degree squalor
Now things are really starting to get out of hand. Signs that you have reached second degree would include losing the use of normal household items like your bed, table, television or telephone, because the piles have expanded to cover the items up. You start to develop new methods of moving around your house, as normal movement is impeded by your piles of stuff. You might start making excuses to discourage people from entering your house.
Third degree squalor
At this stage, you have all the above, plus you have rotting food and animal faeces and/or urine in the house, and this is the rule not the exception. You cannot cope with the growing mess. Essential household repairs may not be done, because you are too afraid to let a tradesperson see your house. Just the thought of someone seeing your mess causes you great stress.
Fourth degree squalor
At fourth degree squalor, you have all of the above, plus you have human faeces and/or urine in your house that is not in the toilet.
Stage one clean:
Surfaces are neat; the centre of the room is free; piles are on perimeters. No rotting food, but current meal remnants allowed. Current craft projects, current books/magazines ditto. Perhaps some de-cluttering still to do; also smallish dust bunnies lurking UNDER furniture. But in general room looks nice. You feel ok about things. Unexpected Company would be welcome … especially at night!
Stage two clean:
No piles. No dust, even under furniture. No food at all. Insides of drawers/cupboards/shelves: neat and clean: even if no one can see! You are elated! There is now a GLOW to the room, a lovely welcoming feeling. Company encouraged: even in daylight!
Stage three clean:
Now we’re into serious stuff: fresh flowers; rugs shampoo’d; chandeliers washed; windows sparkling. No dust (of course); no fingerprints on walls; company stunned by beauty! As for you — this is beyond your wildest dreams!
Stage four clean:
This requires $$$$ and/or TIME and/or ENERGY: time for redecorating, renewing, replacing. New paint, wallpaper if needed. New carpet/flooring if needed. You are now finished: “House & Garden TV” is filming the room! This perhaps is just a dream…….
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What you’re describing sounds an awful lot like Compulsive Hoarding Disorder. You might want to look into it, chances are when your mom comes home she’ll just recreate the mess if she doesnt get treatment. I have the same problem. Its miserable.
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I hope I never have to do this for my parents, though it would be great payback for all the useful and wanted things of mine that my mom has thrown out or given away without my permission.
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wow. sounds like quite an accumulation. it was good of you to help her out with the cleaning. after the problem reaches a certain point, i’m sure it can be such a relief to receive a helping hand.
also, by cleaning house you make her environment a lot more healthy, hopefully avoiding and removing potential sources of disease.
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The state of your mom’s home sounds like what my mother-in-law’s home was like a few years ago. We were helping her move… it would have been SO MUCH EASIER if she had not been there to “help” us. She insisted on keeping so much stuff, most of it trash. And the cat litter box thing… I totally understand. You have my sympathy. Best of luck with the cleaning, you are doing her a great favor.
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Oh my gosh! I had to comment when I read this article. My mom is the same way. If there is an empty space, something must be there: picture, table, stuff on the table, stuff on the stuff on the table… My folks moved into their house 14 years ago, and there are still some boxes that haven’t been unpacked.
I liked the comment a previous person posted when they said they were teasing their parents about when they die, she was going to show up with a dumpster. I told my mom I was going to have a sale and everthing would be a dollar. That way she can look down from Heaven, and say, “what on earth is my daughter doing?! Doesn’t she know how much I paid for that?!”
My mom’s problem is that she is a shop-a-holic. She buys something (always on sale, of course), then puts it still in the bag with the receipt in the spare bedroom (or my old room or the office, or their room, etc.) and there it sits. Almost everything still has the price tag on it.
I used to get upset about all the clutter, but I remind myself that I cannot change her behavior. I think my dad is resolved to the fact that this is the way it is. Maybe that is why he likes to get out and go fishing.
In addition, it is not bad enough that she can shop and bring items home, she also likes to bring lots of paperwork home from her job. Why, I have no idea. I bet she keeps it when she retires….good grief!
Sorry for the length, but I believe we all get so frustrated by this type of behavior from our relatives, but the offending relatives don’t have any problem with it. I don’t know why they can’t see that there is so much stuff in their homes that they can’t enjoy them. When you can’t use a room for it’s intended purpose, when there is no place for people to sit when they come over, when there’s even no where for the homeowner to sleep because of all of the stuff, some serious questions need to be asked. But as someone else said, many times the person you want to “fix” doesn’t want to be “fixed.”
Also, I’ve heard many people say that those who lived thru the depression are keen on keeping things. However, there are younger people (one of my relatives included) who do the same thing. I wonder if it’s because we are more affluent in this day and age, along with being bombarded with advertising, that we buy, buy, buy.
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Sounds like that could be hard on the emotions, seeing your Mom’s place like that. Hope it starts to get better. I guess it’s all part of getting older, eh?
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It’s hard not to live a pack rat life. We end up collecting stuff because it represents who we are. But in difficult times, we realize how short life is and we are just “passing through.” Which such impacting experiences, we should embrace the how we want to use the limited resources in our life to live a life that we want. Life is all about focusing on what’s important, and being creative on how to get there. -Cheaplee
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In my limited experience, I also think that hoarders have to come to the realization themselves that they need to change things. And you have to be prepared that they probably never will. My former next door neighbor (85 years old) had one pathway through her apartment. On each side was stuff piled feet high. Her bedroom was completely inoperable from excessive stuff. When I saw the pictures of J.D.’s mother’s house, my first reaction was “That looks downright sparse compared to my neighbor’s place!” She slept on a small couch at the front of the apartment. There was nowhere else to stand or sit anywhere else in the apartment (well, I guess except the toilet!). While this was depressing to me everytime I came over to visit, it didn’t seem to bother her that much. Perhaps it did and she didn’t tell me, but I had to come to the realization that I couldn’t help her, and I either had to accept her with her stuff (and not let it depress me) or decide to no longer come over. I opted for the former and am glad I did. While it still stresses me out to enter her apartment, I understand that she made her choice to live that way. And I figure all the stuff either ends up in the landfill now or later. In her case, most of the stuff really is junk – magazines, empty boxes, even empty Kleenex boxes that she might someday have a use for. I figure, and feel free to disagree with me, if it makes her happy to be surrounded by junk, why should I judge her for that? The only real reason I could come up with to challenge this was the fact that it is a fire hazard to have so much paper in one’s house (and of course, rotten food would also be a problem, but she didn’t seem to have any). Anyway, this is all to say that I think it’s a sensitive issue. One man’s clutter is another man’s security blanket or comfort.
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Yeah, that’s familiar. I try not to think about it anymore. It’s a big reason Christmas is so stressful for me now – I have to bring my 2 little kids into that, but the rest of the year I stay away. I grew up in it; I can’t deal with it anymore.
In my experience, it is most emphatically NOT a comfort or a security blanket. It is a stress and a worry to the people living in it. But they feel frozen, helpless, and ashamed. It is a (literal) dirty secret that has to be hidden from the world. It can often be related to depressive disorders, in a downward spiral kind of way.Certainly do not judge the hoarder – that is their greatest fear, and the reason they shut the world out – but don’t think they live like that because it is fun or comfortable. It definitely isn’t.
Please let us know how it works out!
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JD i feel your pain.. my mom is the same way.. she is a total packrat.. she grew up in the philippines where they did not have much growing up.. so she tends to hold on to every single possession she owns now that she lives here in the US
we’ve gotten rid of some clutter.. but still have plenty of it.. we have a 3 car garage and only get to park 1 car in there.. because most of it is filled with JUNK!
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Well, did you tell your mom you were going to have a cleanup?
Normally clutterers will not appreciate someone throwing their “treasures” away.
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My last vacation we went to a friend’s place on the other coast. She had warned us that it had gotten a bit messy, but I didn’t expect what we arrived to. We threw out five big black garbage bags of pop cans, assorted garbage and expired food (including 6 month old egg nog in the fridge). For those we just informed her what we had put into the bags and got them out of the house.
In the week we were there we were able to get much of the kitchen done – 5 boxes of items to a community garage sale – by dint of having her sit in a comfy chair in another room and bringing out items for a verdict. Showing that she had multiples of certain things was good – I think that she felt better being able to select the one to keep.
In the midst of all this cleaning and decluttering, our friend saw an electric ice crusher at the local pharmacy and just _had_ to have it. At least there was space in her cupboards – for now.
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When my father in law passed away he left a tremendous amount of papers neatly packed in boxes. All the papers he thought were important over his adult life. Add to that his parents important papers. My mother in law had to go through all of them piece by piece because mixed in with the useless papers were stock and bonds. My parents struggle with these issues too. My husband and I also kept too much stuff. My husband passed away suddenly a year and a half ago. I had to bring home the contents of his office. All that stuff from his office and alot of his other “important stuff” filled my garage to capacity. I work every day at getting rid of the excess and organizing what is left over. I don’t want my kids to be left with a bunch of junk to deal with.
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I can identify with your post. Your description of the house resembles the house of my mother at 85, to years ago. My brother and I cleaned the house. It contained at least 20 years of newspapers and magazines and lots of food: under furniture, in cubboards, in the attic, everywhere.
My mother is in a home for elderly people now. It took my brother and me moths to clean the house. I don’t want my kinds to find such a mess in my house when the time comes.
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JD, you are doing a great thing for your Mom. I’m an anti-packrat and get stressed out at the smallest sign of clutter. I couldn’t imagine trying to clean out so much stuff. I know a lot of people who have houses and garages packed with useless stuff and yet they complain about their lack of money. But when you buy lots of things you don’t need because it’s “such a good deal,” I guess the stuff creeps up on you as the money creeps out of your bank account.
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JD,
Hope your mom is making a quick recovery. I had to comment. First the effort you and your wife are making is great. It may just be that your mom, like many others, is unwilling to let go of things. My in-laws moved a month after my husband and I did. While we were very successful in throwing away things of our own. We inherited an entire truck load of things they were not willing to throw away. Since then, I’ve been donating and throwing stuff out one or two boxes at a time. Giving smaller pieces of furniture away to folkes who need it. It has been enlightening to get rid of things, a type of cleansing if you will. Maybe every item has it’s expiration date?
I also shop clearance/sales and in bulk at that, so this is a good lesson to confirm that the savings are true if the items are being used. I have had moments where I’ve held back, realizing that “savings” are also savings of money never spent.
I hope your mom is able to enjoy the clean slate you and your wife are giving her. Best of luck
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Hoarding is a serious problem. I’ve known a few people with the problem including my own mother. My father knows a woman who can’t even live in her own house its so bad so she’s had to rent a place and her house sits unused full of junk and garbage.
Theres a lot of issues that can cause hoarding. People might be natural collectors, they might be frugal and not want to be wasteful, they might have shopping compulsions, etc. It could be a sign of depression or other issues. As time goes on it can get a lot worse. Eventually they might have medical issues that make it even harder for then to deal problems. The medial issues may contributed heavily to JD’s mothers problems. My mothers problems got worse as her health declined. Her house had a full basement and as she got older she had more difficulty going up and down the stairs so anything down their (including a large pantry of food) just ended up stayed there.
I think theres varying degrees of the problem for sure. Some people may just have ‘too much stuff’ for common reasons. Maybe they moved from a large house into a smaller one and didn’t have/make time to sort it all out. These people may just need a little help from someone to sort and get rid of stuff.
But other peoples definitely have a real mental issue difficulty getting rid of stuff. These people will just not be able to bring themselves to throw out even simple trash. Thats a different level and might need some counseling to resolve.
I have sympathy for JD and anyone else dealing with this kind of problem with loved one. It can be a difficult situation.
Jim
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When my Aunt’s mother and father passed away (my Aunt through marriage, so not my grandparents) they said they cleaned out their house of course to prepare it for sale.
One of the rooms was their home library of many hundreds of books, paper back novels, magazines, etc. After tossing books for a while, one of them noticed a $10 bill fell out of a book. They went back through all of the books and found over $10,000 of cash in all the books. They grew up in the dirty 30s, so they stashed all the spare money they could because they didn’t trust the bank with all of their money.
Cleaning out my basement the other day, I found a birthday card for my brother from my grandparents. $35 cheque for his birthday in December 2002.
It certainly takes much longer to search each item, but it can certainly pay off.
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Sounds about like what we went through when we were cleaning out my rental house. Its amazing how much “stuff” accumulates over the course of time…
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Sometimes there are treasures amidst all the “treasures”. After my grandfather died, my parents had to clean up the house so it could be sold. Amongst all the empty paper bags and those little bags from KFC (with a napkin, spork, and salt & pepper packets) was a brand-new windshield, still in the original box, for a car that was long gone – a 48 Packard, if memory serves. My dad contacted a car group and found a collecter who eagerly bought that windshield. Of course, now when I try to clean up some of my clutter, I have to be careful not to think “this will be valuable someday…”
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I can sympathize. When my grandma died a few years back, her five children and the older of us grandchildren tackled her accumulated stuff because my grandpa couldn’t bring himself to do it. My job was to call the numbers listed on food products to find out what the expiration date of various canned good stamped with cryptic codes was. We also found a coffee can in the back of the cupboard that contained my father’s childhood dog’s ashes. Since then, I have thrown away as much of my own clutter as I could. I already have my grandma’s compulsiveness, I don’t want to become a hoarder too.
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I had the same experience when my Mother passed away unexpectedly. We found 8 plant pruners in her things. Lots of clothes that she had never worn with the tags still on them. The lid to a teapot, but no teapot and on and on. There was so much volume to her things that we found ourselves rushing to throw things away and package them up for goodwill. I sometimes wish we had taken a little more time and kept a few more things of hers, but in the end it’s just stuff. I can’t imagine how she must have felt smothered with all those things.
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I don’t think it’s necessarily a sign of mental illness or needing therapy when people hoard — especially people of an older generation.
It’s easy for us 20-, 30- or even 40- somethings to not feel the hoarding need since most of us have grown up with an overabundance of stuff and the means to get it (even if it means debt).
Older generations lived through different times — some of them experienced immigration and having nothing, most of them experienced the depression and rationing during WWII. Most of them grew up without such a thing as easy credit.
With my own family, I think it was more a matter of not really stopping to think about what was worth keeping. Between constantly fighting to be able to make ends meet and encroaching old age, they just never stopped to think that they might not need that stack of bank records from 1934 now that it was 1976.
I can’t judge them for it. I’m just sad that they didn’t think they could ask us for help if their stuff was overwhelming them.
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P.S. — Based on a few responses, I don’t think JD and Mrs. JD were decluttering the tschotskies. I think they were going through and cleaning out the genuine trash.
Mom will likely still be a bit mad — probably due to embarrassment. But really, she’d have to see that it’s for the best the moldy olives are gone.
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When my husband’s Grandmother moved from The Old Homestead to an Assisted Living Facility, we were handed a car load of stuff to store for her just in case she needed any of it.
After shifting these boxes around in my closet for a year, I finally looked inside one of them and had a good laugh.
What was inside? Tons of USED gift wrap! All neatly folded and stored! I could not believe I was giving up valuable storage space in my house for something like this, shifting it from place to place saying “This is Grandma’s box. Gotta keep this safe.” Argh!!!! And the other precious boxes? Much of the same junk!
Good luck with this, JD! I hope your mother understands that you are only trying to help!
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When my mother-in-law died, we spent weeks cleaning out her house. We found almost $10,000.00 in uncashed pension checks. We literally filled 7 of the large dumpsters that hold 2000 pounds each with trash, plus we needed a middle size one to finish–that held only 1500 pounds, but then we overfilled it. This is a common “disease” for older people, especially poor ones. They feel that if they have “stuff”, they are not “poor”. Good luck.
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Is this necessarily a case of hoarding? It just seems like when people age and/or fall ill, little things spiral out of control and it’s easier to just shut a door behind it than ask for help from your children.
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I was lucky that my mom didn’t leave a mess. She passed away in May and she knew her days were numbered. Her finances were in order and we filled out a will and she got it notarized. Fortunately the court accepted it. It took us about 1-2 weeks to sort out her stuff. She had a fontinini collection (nativity set) that took 3 of us 8 hours to put into their boxes for storage. And it took a 2 day estate sale and the wonderful craigslist to get rid of everything we didn’t need, want, or have room for. Shoot, I just sold the bidet (don’t ask) just yesterday.
The one thing that I noticed that she had problems with was standard house maintenance like pressure washing the house, replacing caulk in the siding, getting the moss off the roof, and cleaning gutters.
Let me tell you, I felt bad that we weren’t more insistent in just going in and doing those things for her while she was alive. It would have made her feel better and it would have made our work easier when we went to sell the house. My mom didn’t like relying on others and she didn’t think these standard up keep items needed to be done.
Well, hopefully we have learned our lesson. My parents are both dead now (I’m 39) but my husband’s parents are both alive so I can dote on them.
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Great comments today, everyone.
I had misgivings about posting this since I know it’s not strictly about personal finance. But I’m glad to see that many people can relate, and can understand that this *does* relate to money in a very real way.
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Best of luck.
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My wife and I went through this with her parents passing and acquired many items from the estate. We went through her parents house and had to deal with years of clutter, old computers, books, clothes, everything. It was overwhelming for us! In fact we probably should have gone through some therapy after it all.
We are still going through the effects of it as we have more “stuff” in our garage and house now. It’s hard to throw out items that have memories and meaning to them. But, it’s still “stuff”.
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For anyone online, readers, parents with issues (those who are not too ill to make progress on their own), etc. Flylady (www.flylady.net) is really a great resource for teaching you how to purge and declutter on an ongoing basis. (Of course, she also has a book as well that people have found very helpful, even those who are online as well.) She teaches you about the emotional aspects of why you are holding on to stuff and how to let it go a little bit at a time. When you subscribe to her emails, you get daily and weekly reminders that allow you to keep up with decluttering, household activities like laundry, etc. 15 minutes at a time. All of that comes into play in keeping your house sensible. One of my favorite sayings of hers is “you can’t organize clutter.” Well, yeah, no matter how many storage tubs or containers you get, it still won’t work. It might look good for a short while, but you still can’t find what you want and you still have stuff you’ll never use. Frankly. I feel many of us are like this collecting stuff, but when we are younger, we can keep up with the clutter … perhaps doing it through mad cleaning and purging binges when we have guests coming for a stay or a party coming up or getting ready for a yard sale, but as we age, it becomes way too much to handle in that manner … we might not care any more, we might not have the energy to deal with it, etc., but most of us are like this–just at a more acceptable degree. It’s so easy to see when we are looking at someone else’s house like our relatives or friends. If you’ve ever watched the decorating shows on HGTV where the person comes in and critiques the house, you can easily see the clutter and ridiculous stuff people hold on to. (And, that’s a technique that Flylady suggests, go into your house with a clipboard and pretend to be a realtor and note the flaws, issues, junk, etc.)
Obviously J.D. and his wife had to do this to help his mom because she’s ill, but for other relatives who are in good health, it’s better to work with them than do it for them. You don’t learn if someone else does it for you. you don’t go through the process where you learn to let go. It’s also important to do it in small increments of time. It can quickly become overwhelming. Do one drawer each day … don’t dump the whole contents of all the drawers on the floor and swear you’re not leaving until you’ve cleaned them all out. Even working on a drawer while you’re waiting for your computer to boot or while there’s a commercial on can produce amazing results over a short time. And, when you do “get it”, how freeing and liberating it is to let stuff go, it is addictive and you don’t want to do back. You might slip up, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever go back to your original state. And, if you do, by the skills you’ve learned (like through Flylady), you can easily get back on track.
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From one Flybaby to another – thank you, Shirley, for mentioning Flylady!
Yes, please, if you’re struggling with clutter and hoarding yourself, please visit http://www.flylady.net and give her “Beginner’s Babysteps” a go!
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Oh, I know what you’re talking about. Had the same thing when my aunt and my mother passed away.
A thought, take a good look at everything you’re throwing out. My aunt was hiding money and jewelry in with the trash she was keeping.
On the bright side, I found a few vintage things (like 1950s soap!) that I was able to eBay.
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You have just written my greatest fear about my mom. That I will clean her house of 5000 sq ft full of junk. I could have written excatly what you wrote. It is so scary to realize your parents have tons of crap!
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Time to sell some of those old stuffs for profit. My mother also has that “habit”. She buys things in advance but then forget it, and all the stuffs just hang in her room. I managed to get rid of some of them but then she got so emotionally attached its hard to get of old stuffs!
Sam
Fix My Personal Finance
http://fixmypersonalfinance.com/
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I just made a trip to the hospital to see Mom. She’s doing well, anxious to go home, though she knows there’s still a week or two left (at least). I told her about our cleaning bonanza, and she seemed pleased. In fact, she told us about a couple of other things that could be cleaned. More work Thursday night!
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My mother is also living surrounded by Stuff, but she’s not a hoarder in the usual sense of the word. She just never gets rid of anything, and doesn’t keep up on taking the trash and the recycling to the dump.
It’s truly awful to watch your parent live like this, but until she’s incapacitated, she won’t let us into the house to help her out.
Good luck as you work through this difficult project.
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Any recommendations on how to approach parents on Stuff? My mother has her entire basement and guest bedroom filled with stuff. I could sell half of it on Ebay at least.
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It took my dad 3 months of half-time work to clean my grandma’s basement when she moved out. No one else could help because grandma would only allow her son to part with anything. She’d have things like a dozen winter coats in the same color. But he also found lots of letters between family members from WWII and other fascinating things worth keeping. He was in the midst of retiring and could spare the time, but going through 45 years of stuff was crazy.
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I’m glad your mom was receptive to the cleaning bonanza- sounds like a case of being overwhelmed rather than classic hoarding. This way, you can get her input on what she truly wants to hold on to, and what you can get rid of.
If you get BBC America, I suggest the show “How Clean is your House.” Two professional housecleaners go into some of the worst, filthiest, houses, almost always belonging to hoarders, and clear out the junk and do a deep clean, using things like vinegar, dish soap, baking soda, and essential oils. They have many useful tips and it’s good to see that others are in a similar situation.
Also, for the cat pee, Nature’s Miracle enzymatic cleaner really truly worked for us. But you have to use a LOT and let it air dry, which can take as long as a week or two. Also, most cats will ignore a litterbox that’s not completely clean, so maybe using some of the proceeds if you sell off some of the Stuff to purchase a self-cleaning litterbox will help the problem from getting worse, and help your mom, since it’s probably not an easy task for her to clean litterboxes daily.
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