DH collections bringing me down.

[SoddingSoda]

I maybe placing too much stress on this ‘issue’ as the cause of my frustrations. I do have a DD (9 months) and maybe next year when I’ve slept more this won’t be such a big issue.

DH is a collector and has lots of perfectly organised boxes full of his collections. He also has perfectly organised boxes of his possessions from a child. Imagine collecting a magazine for a few years as a child, that’s there. Or a box filled of old football boots. Every sporting medal, scout badge, swimming certificate etc. He also collects film memorabilia, which has filled boxes upon boxes. Anything he sees from a couple of franchises he has to buy. He feels by putting it in the loft is a favour to me as he’d prefer to have it out on display in the house. I did mention where he’d like to put his thousand car hot wheel collection? Maybe between the tins of beans or on my make up table…. He does have our office to have shelves filled of this stuff, and whilst there maybe one item from a collection in the other rooms I did have to curb it from taking over.

They have been living in the garage but due to damp/DH finally finishing to board the loft they’ve been moved up there.

They take up exactly 50% of the loft which he feels is fair. But, if I was to put equal amount up there it would then become impossible for the majority of it to be accessed (which he also agrees). I also think he’s probably filled 65% of the space. He wants to be able to access his collections, not just store them.

However the remaining amount of things to go into the loft isn’t really my possessions. Which if it was wouldn’t be an issue as I’m not a hoarder. It’s things such as the Christmas tree/decorations, suitcases, things that DD have grown out of but we’re keeping for the next baby. Useful things that I don’t want to slimline (Xmas decs are tree decs, lights and few misc items - nothing crazy).

He’s spent the last few weekends sorting out his collections, updating his excel document of what he’s got, and what he’s missing.

AIBU to be annoyed that the Christmas tree isn’t my procession and that it’s a problem that he’s got more space for toys/childhood processions that my DD will have. I also want to put a ban on him collecting. He needs to slimline what he’s got before thinking of adding anymore to it…

He’s quite proud that he’s got the loft to 50% his possessions. He’s at work and I’ve been in a foul mood about it all morning. I really don’t want to be a nagging/controlling person but should I draw a hard line on this?

My Gran had a lot of stuff. Not a collector as such and definitely not a hoarder, but had lots of things dating back years. Travel magazines from the 1960s for example!

When she had to go into a home, my parents had a hell of a job clearing it all out. As they found her marriage certificate in the middle of one of the previously mentioned travel magazines, they had to go through EVERYTHING. She had a small terraced house and it took weeks to clear out.

My DPs, as a result, then decided to do a massive declutter of their own house as they didn't want me having to go through the same amount of stuff as they did.

@SoddingSoda I know he'll probably say he has a spreadsheet to keep track of it all, but remind him that one day your kids are going to have to deal with it all and they are not going to have any personal connection to the football boots he wore when he was 10!

I can't bear clutter so this is the sort of thing that would drive me mental.

If he has lots of small collections - presumably they can't be insured. Perhaps you could encourage consolidation on that basis. Plus a programme of simplification and "cashing in" might give him a nest egg for the "man cave" albeit £10-15k is a hell of a lot of expensive collectibles.

Fire risk? Is tons of this stuff paper based sitting in your loft? I used to live across the road from a hoarder and in a freak lightening strike her house [mid terrace] went up like a Roman candle.

I think you should point out that he is entitled to 1/4 of the loft at best assuming you and the children take a portion for your own possessions, household and baby stuff. Personally I think you are being perfectly reasonable to take a VERY firm line on this stuff as it will take over your lives otherwise.

No collection is immune to fashion and yes odd things hold their value. Someone born after Elvis died might want one 78, beautifully framed but they don't want 30 and collections come in multiples. My Nirvana vinyl is currently desirable but most things from the SubPop record label won't be.

The Lego was interesting, early stuff, not much of a market. Space and trains, very popular, Lego City, less so. But my kids won't be buying original 1980s Lego space models and if we'd have just put the toy money in a savings account we'd have made more.
By the time Lego have rereleased the Lego Death Star or VWbus every few years no-one will want to pay huge amounts for an old one, mint or not.

Storing, moving & selling the stuff took a huge amount of effort. We made a good amount of money but I've made an awful lot more working a normal job.

Having an attic full of stuff on the off chance a bloke with disposable income decides he must have it 20 years from now is crazy. Any decisions or limits about collections should remove the 'one day worth a lot of money' argument. Collections cost a lot of money and resources, they are never worth it.

At some point you decided to share the rest of your life with him, share your house and make children. You are actually planning to have another child.

I don't understand your motivations for doing so if you are not happy with such a large part of who he is. Forget the hoarding - what is your actual issue?

How is it possible to to have an ick or a brewing annoyance with a boyfriend and yet just carry on hitching up?
I'd be back on Tinder the very first time he mentioned his collections or any similar afflictions, and yet here you are - married with children.
Maybe you are more suited than most to blank his peculiarities out and lead a happy life. So just do that. Think of his good points and ignore the rest, just like you had to do to get this far. I really don't think there is an alternative unless you are prepared to leave him now after successfully ignoring the signs of neurodiversity for years.

Omg excel spreadsheets of collections 🫣
This would drive me nuts but his hoarding cannot have been a sudden surprise to you? You must have known about this for a long time.
I couldn’t live with so much ‘stuff’, we cleared out our large loft space to put 2 bedrooms and a bathroom up there and it took less than 10 minutes to empty it, 2 boxes of books from when we moved in but at that point hadn’t built book shelves and a box of photos for the same reason, a box of Christmas decorations and some stuff left behind from the previous owners including random carpet offcuts that weren’t from any carpets in the house at the time of us moving in!
It sounds like his ‘collections’ are just boxes of hoarding and not to be enjoyed.
I’m not a minimalist, my house looks lived in but is totally clutter free - the only thing I seem to collect is other peoples children for tea.
I don’t really know what to advise op, he thinks his stuff is really special and important (I’m not sure what importance a lot of it has!) and you think it’s cluttering up valuable space. How do you both come to a middle point in this?

I think it is a big mistake to think that hoarders put a monetary value on their collections. Hoarding is a mental illness; the value to the collector is not money.

He’s honestly got every kind of collection on the go. He is getting better at throwing his childhood items out I.E. his old single bedding (wtf he still had it I have no idea).

I think the issue is that he doesn’t just silently crack on with it. These past few weekends he’s wanted to show me different collections and I have had to cut the show + tell short as either DD was kicking off or wanting to eat them. Then there’s the constant moaning when we’re going to get around to the man cave/displaying these bits. A lot of these collections aren’t worth anything nor sentimental, it’s just that he likes collecting. Then there’s things that migrate from the the loft to the main house. Absolute random shit. A Smurf egg timer. Does he like smurfs? No. Do we need an egg timer? No. It’s made its way to the kitchen as there’s no collection to add it to. Same with the looney tunes remote holder…

I’m just here ranting. It’s just who he is. He’s never going to stop/change. He has said if I asked him to sell it all he would but he doesn’t want to change who he is.

I think you have to be pragmatic

enforcing 50% of a loft space (or 1/3 as others have suggested) would mean he’s able to argue for 1/3 of the house space. You can’t say to someone that all the stuff they love and cherish should be out of sight or confined to one room, and then limit that space too.

My partner has a lot of stuff I don’t like. If I were to force her to keep it all hidden and have no sign of it in the house that would be very controlling and she’d have no presence or personality in her own home. It sounds a bit like that’s what you want here

Take him up on his offer to sell it all, this is no way to live, he's showing so much disrespect.

And then set a strict rule for how much space he can have afterwards.

I suggest you both listen to the podcast A Slob Comes Clean.

It's a lot more than the actual collections though

It's the storage, as already mentioned

The trawling of sites/shows/collector fairs for more additions...... do you get dragged along op? Does he drone on about bloody toy car collections to everyone he meets?

The expense!?

The time he puts in away from family/chores

S as ll accommodated by you! Draining!

He sounds more hoarder than collector. Be very careful OP.

I think the issue is that you have a baby and that you may want a second child. This means that there will be an increasing amount of clothes, toys, pieces of kit and room needs to be found for them. (Some of the stuff the baby has now will have to go to the loft and will need to be brought down again.) As children get bigger, so does the stuff they require - even if then items from infancy get chucked. There'll be the need for them to have the space to play in, and room for their friends.

So at the moment there's a tricky 50/50 split. 50% husband, 50% your stuff and shared stuff. (Not really fair). Logically the bigger the family grows the less the space there'll be for stuff that is exclusively his.

I think it's more about making room for the family and for family life. At the moment it does seem to be about him and his attachment to his own past. And the sheer quantity of these 'collections' seems to be important.

Unless he can acknowledge that he really needs to let stuff go - and get rid of a lot of it quite quickly and efficiently - I'd say the future is likely to be problematic.

How much is he spending on all this Tat?

Yes.
❤️
Similar here, at present no viable choice.

I would address the fact that he is a hoarder before it massively takes over your entire life. Filled 50% of the loft this year? It’ll be 100% next.

OP, please read about the distress being brought up in a hoarded home by hoarder parents causes children and how that can stay with them.

Someone's said here that their father loved his stuff more than he loved them, and the effect that had.

My honest thoughts would be - get this sorted before you even consider bringing another child into the world. He will get worse as he gets older if it is not stopped.

Guess how I know about living with a 70+ Y/o ND hoarder with family issues.

https://www.mumsnet.com/search#/?query=Ho&page=1

Can he use an external self-storage unit?

@SoddingSoda how old did you say he was again??? 6???????? I would have had him topped long ago if he brought all the trash into my house! his mother must have been the same to have kept it all for him!

I think that hoarders and some collectors externalise who they are into their amalgamations of ‘stuff’. In some sense, you are trying to make him remove or change part of who he is, or who he thinks he is. He doesn’t keep his memories, which help to make us who we are, in his head, he keeps them in boxes. And boxes, and boxes.

I’m not sure how you can change this, OP. Maybe you could persuade him to follow the one thing in, one thing out rule ? Could he be helped to start a ‘proper’ collection of objects which other people recognise as collectible and share what would be a limited and to some extent self -limiting set of objects (preferably small, like stamps🤭). There’s a glimmer of hope here in the desire to display/ share some of these items. You might have to take an active interest in this though, at least as a start. Then the regulated collection might render the randoms irrelevant.

You are going to have to address it though, because it won’t be self limiting.

Can you actually afford all this?! How much does it cost and what could you do with the money if it wasn’t spent on tat?
Also it’s obvious he’s addicted to the collecting rather than being a fan of a particular thing. The “absolutely must have everything” of particular theme is a give away. If he doesn’t rein it in it’s going to go into mental health territory.

My dad has collections, with the excel spreadsheets to match. It will never get better, only worse. I suggest you decide now whether you can put up with it forever or leave him because those are the two options.

Not only did we grow up with very organised piles and boxes of categorised stuff everywhere but we never had a nice holiday because there wasn’t the money because it all went on buying stuff, he still says “they’re only £1 each” bit of you buy 10,000 of something at £1 each that’s a lot of money!

Can you enforce a 1 in, 1 out rule? We have an extended family member who is a ‘collector’ ( hoarder ) and it has made life very uncomfortable for both his partner and the step children ( to the point where they cannot visit their mother as it involves climbing over boxes of collectibles ( junk ) to be able to get to bed on an evening.

good luck as it needs curbing now before it completely takes over every spare bit of space on your home.

Mine too!

The problem is going to be that his collection won't stop growing. Then what?

It's good that it's in the loft and not your living room but where will it end?

A collector’s POV here to counterbalance the dismissive comments about “junk” and “tat” (and the assumption that any collecting translates into hoarding).

I honestly couldn’t live with a partner who didn’t understand how much my collection means to me. To dismiss it as mere “stuff” that’s cluttering up the house would be to dismiss me and my feelings. Someone who asked me to make the choice would not like the answer.

However, some very important caveats. One is that I accept my collection is something I want rather than need. Absolutely nothing wrong with having things you want - I find the idea that we must only have useful things so miserable - but it means that I understand the need to prioritise. I would never and have never spent money on collectibles when I’ve been struggling financially. That really would be the sign of a problem. I love them, but I have the common sense to not spend money I don’t have.

Two - I understand space is finite. I’m not going to get rid of things I actually need to create more space for my collection (although I was quite tempted by a friend’s recent suggestion that I convert the en suite - I don’t need two bathrooms, right? 😉)

OP - you talk about your husband acting like he’s done you a favour by having these things in the loft rather than on display. Your response is to feel annoyed that he has more loft space than you. Has it occurred to you that he’s actually made a sacrifice by not having things he really loves on display? He’s probably thinking “I’ve been banished to the loft, and she’s STILL not happy”.

From your later posts, it does sound like he cares about the collecting process more than the collectibles themselves, so I’m inclined to feel a bit more sympathetic towards you. Maybe that’s how you need to frame the conversation. Be understanding about the collections he genuinely loves, but explain your concern over him just keeping things for the sake of it when it’s not really a collection at all.