Please will you kindly support and advise me, as I try to help a friend sort out his home?

[EatingTheElephantInChunks]

Yesterday I started to try to help a friend sort out his home. If I tell you that it took me nearly 3 hours to clear a space on the bathroom floor about 3ft x 4ft, you will probably understand how things are. Today I did a little better. In about 2 hours I cleared another space the same size, which meant I could open a cupboard. Two shelves were almost empty, so I was able to clean those and use them for storage. I will carry on next time with the other 2 shelves and continue clearing the bathroom floor.

It was very satisfying to get rid of a whole binbag of rubbish yesterday and a half bag today, plus a bag and a half of recycling, and a small bag of confidential waste to shred. There is a folding storage crate of things to keep so far, but I'll go through that again to see if I've missed anything that should be thrown out or recycled.

My friend has got into this situation after many years of serious illness and close bereavements, has no family left and few friends, certainly not really close ones. He has been at the stage for several years where he doesn't have visitors. He needs many repairs and much decorating doing, and is getting to the stage where carers visiting would be helpful. I am hoping to get him to the stage where that will be possible. He is such a nice guy, and it's a shame that life has gradually got smaller and smaller for him over the years. It must be terribly lonely.

I feel honoured that he has trusted me with the truth of how things are. I can't talk to anyone IRL as I know it's essential to protect his privacy, and I have changed my username in case anyone makes the connections. I could do with some mumsnet wisdom and support! I have never felt such a sense of achievement over a bit of floorspace 3ft x 4ft, but equally the enormity of the task hit me.

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The author - writing under the pseudonym EatingTheElephantInChunks - claims and owns the copyright of all her posts dated on and after 14th August 2018 as her intellectual property and as a moral right and which are all her own individual and original work. Reproduction in whole or part or any other use is strictly prohibited without her prior written permission.

[Edited by MNHQ at posters request]

🐘 keep on chunking on!

Thanks for the update. Good news about the photos, shame about the gin fund! Hope the sunshine keeps making things easier. Glad it's not been a real backwards slide for your friend more just life carrying on. You could just lob cedar balls (I think that's right) around for the moths or just be done with it and buy the spray!! Keep chunking 🐘🌷🌞

Im a bit of a lurker here, but have been following and cheering you on in the background.

A potential help to the moth problem is moth pheremone traps. You can get them on Amazon, they are meant to smell of very sexy female moths, so the males fly over and get stuck. They work quite well and are not very expensive

Wow - you’re a wonderful friend

I remember this thread from last summer and have just come across it again. What a fantastic thing you are doing. I hope you are feeling a sense of satisfaction in making some progress even if there is still a long way to go. You must be due a big karmic payback.

Hi Nelly, i had to go searching for your post. Glad to hear that you're making progress again, and that your family seems to be out of the illness some. Looking forward to your next update, whenever that might be..

You go girl.

I was following this thread before Christmas, but lost it when everything went quiet, very pleased to see there are more chunks happening! Hope the gin fund is soon replenished.

Hello again everyone, and thank you to all pps for your very kind advice and encouragement, for sticking with me this long, or for joining me now.

I'm pleased to report, on this sunny May afternoon, of progress on The Chunkometer, and a whole £1 for the gin fund - happy days!

I have continued tunnelling on the landing, and spent several hours of my Saturday night on it until the wee small hours this morning. The glamour on this thread never begins, does it?!

I'll post again about the landing progress, but the big news though - small fanfare - is that I actually broke through to my target spare bedroom overnight. I even managed to get inside, do a little private dance of chunking celebration and air punching on a patch of empty floor, and made a start on clearing it with 3 bags of rubbish and recycling out, the window and sill first-cleaned, and the biggest cobwebs down. In the absence of a powerful vac in the space, or even a fancy duster, I found kitchen roll stuffed in the end of an old long wrapping paper tube worked a treat for reaching and in some cases twisting long hanging webs around. Remembering my old friend on the stairs, I apologised out loud for making numerous spiders hungry and homeless in the short-term, but needs must.

With my eyes, nose, throat and even my ears well and truly irritated by the dust, an aching back and not much sleep had, I've at least got a good excuse for drinking lots of tea today and am looking forward to a G&T tonight.

It's just a beginning in there of course, with all the walls, paintwork and ceiling needing dusting down and washing, a huge pile of stuff to tackle, including a mountain of clothes and large bookcase stuffed with very dusty books, and the wooden floor to sweep and mop. But as dawn broke this morning, the birds were chorusing in the trees just outside, and the sun was shining in more brightly through the window. I can see my friend in there - in temporary but greater comfort - hopefully before too much longer.

🐘

🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘

Gosh well done you enjoy your g&t

Sounds like a leap forward, we’ll done.

Well done, obviously.

Breaking cover to say you are doing an amazing job.

Keeping unpacking the trunks and chunkety chunking.

Hello again everyone, and thank you very much to pps

Chunk Report time. I've managed to get rid of another 500L or so of compressed rubbish and recycling. And no, before anyone suggests it, it wasn't all my own gin, chocolate, biscuit and cake empties, honestly!

I've also cleared a 3ft x 4ft space inside the main bedroom door, which was mainly clothing. I've bagged it up and am going to sort through it more thoroughly later on for the laundry - and whether it goes to a charity shop, to rags recycling or is to keep. At least access in and out is much easier now. Almost too easy in fact, because you open the door expecting some resistance from a pile of stuff, only to go flying into the room unexpectedly quickly because there's now no resistance at all! It's caught me out several times so far. Slapstick comedy gold, so it's a good job no one is looking.

The moths are still a problem. Leaping about after them is certainly providing an enrichment activity for the cat. I don't like to kill anything, but have been making an exception for moths. They cause so much damage and the pupae are positively revolting. Think Hitchcock's The Birds, but The Moths instead. There's usually about a dozen of them on the walls or flying about, sometimes copulating. I now know more about the sex lives of moths than is strictly necessary. I asked one of my DCs to look online for the traps as recommended by a pp. We'd previously had a conversation about them, and his immediate question was to ask 'yes but, what happens to all the lady moths if the traps are just for the gentleman moths?'. It took me a while to answer that one. I only just averted a tragedy by grabbing the tablet as he innocently started typing 'sexy lady moth traps' into the search engine, because that's how I'd described them - thanks pp!!!

🐘

That made me laugh Ele good save! Pleased to hear you're getting stuck in. Clothing wise anything with elastic in it is likely to be useless as if it's been there a while it's probably disintegrated. Also all those moths suggest they've been eating clothing or carpets. If there are any wool based carpets they are likely to have been eaten. Any how hope the sexy moth traps are useful .

OP - well done. My sister is a hoarder but with my intervention has not reached the stage your friend is at. I think she would have done though.

I regularly go round to help her to tidy up etc and I regularly push her into sorting through the stuff as it builds up. It makes me sound very controlling but I love her and I know the state she would end up in. She has reached a point where she is happy to be pushed! She can sort rubbish but she finds it very hard to let go of anything more personal (clothes etc). She even sorts through some stuff without me now... She will never be cured but at least I can help her to keep some control.

What you are doing is so valuable and I promise that your friend will feel better once it is done. My sister sometimes cries when we take stuff to the charity shop but she always says she feels lighter after a few days

Wow, great work OP. I love your updates.
Are the sitting room stairs and bathroom now fairly clutter free?

Hello everyone. I'm still here, but unfortunately something untoward has happened to my phone and also email accounts. I'm not sure if it's a virus or hacking, but my phone is now unusable 95% of the time, and I've had security alerts on my emails. I'm typing this expecting my phone to shut down anytime, so apologies for being very brief. The problem seems to stem from a fake email claiming to be from mumsnet, so beware!!! Hope to be with you again soon for a chunk of updates.

Still keeping watch for updates. Hope you manage to fix the phone gremlins.

I hope your phone is fixable. Keep on chunking!🐘

Been a while since we heard from you ... all still good ?

Hello everyone, I'm still here 🐘

That's worked! Oh good. I typed out a message but it wouldn't post, so I had to start all over again. I thought I'd better do a short test one first. 🐘