Anyone else live with a hoarder?

[WhenSheWasBadSheWasHopeful]

Dh is a lovely man and I am very lucky to have him but the hoarding is driving me crazy.

He has the ability to clutter a room within seconds. When we moved into this house the agreement was the loft room is his to use as he pleases (ie fill with useless shit).
He struggles to throw anything away, is a world class procrastinator and seems to see the value in every bit of tat and random item of paper work imaginable. Any hint that I may organise or heaven forbid throw something away is extremely stressful for him.

What really pisses me off is that if we have people round they must not be allowed upstairs incase they see his ever expanding messy hoard. Why is it ok for me and dd to put up with this but others can't be allowed to see it?

Grrr. Anyway we are making small amounts of progress tidying up and he is even ebaying some stuff.

Is anyone else in the same boat?

LemonDrizzled

There is aslo an app based on the flylady routines

I never learned about the concept of routines and regular cleaning. I only learned about crisis cleaning. So unless I saw disaster I didn't click "oh, there needs doing". And unless I was turning housework neglect armageedon into pristine...there wasn't any sense of satisfaction at all.

Not all children of hoarders become hoarders, but quite a lot of them live in squalor because their clean radar is wonky and they have no skill set.

I use the app to keep me on the stright and narrow. I need a crutch, something that tells me what to do, when, and for how long.

And I love getting my gold stars

I like FlyLady, the site, but i can't deal with the emails, I feel crushed under a hecotring wieght, and my inbox gets cluttered which makes me anxious, but I can't delete without reading and doing or I feel guilty and the .......

Carpe come over to the fledgling flyers thread in Good Housekeeping. The links get posted every day, no need for e-mails and we are all very lovely ( I hope!).

It's odd isn't it, my siblings are extremely clean and tidy. I have never developed habits and strategies to keep a clean house. I'm terrified my DCs will grow up without this skill set. In trying to do something about it but its hard to learn as an adult! I think from the pictures, we are mostly 2 to 2.5, although my bedroom is a 3 (gross) so I'm going to try to tackle that today.

Trazzle

Which section is it in ?

I forgot to post this one before, there is a group also for people with hoarding issues and messies issues.
health.groups.yahoo.com/group/Messiness-and-Hoarding/

I use it as "eye opener" reading. To try and get inside the thought process and understand how it worked for my mother.

Oh, you said, Good HouseKeeping. I am off to the board index......

I find it ironic that Fly Lady, a decluttering and tidying website, clutters up your email in box. I thin I lasted 2 days before I screamed and unsubscribed.

Wot Soup said.

I like a lot of what she says, but watching my inbox fill faster than I could read and do ....ended with me on the sofa eating a whole bar of chocolate feeling like a failure before I even began.

I am not good in the face of clutter, any clutter, even inbox clutter. I go bonkers and start indescriminatly throwing stuff away. If not stopped we'd end up with a plate each and a shared fork, and an empty house.

See I would be really good at housework if it were all empty rooms. It's the fucking stuff being there that makes everything difficult.

People who do this to their kids are guilty of child abuse/neglect IMHO :(
I have seen first hand what it does to the kids and its not pretty.
My friend ended up with fleas fgs! My mum deloused her but the next week they were back.
What made it worse (for me) was that the mother was a nurse.
If it were drugs/drink problems then these families would get help.
Why is there no help for these people - and more importantly their families?

My dad's hoarding has got a hundred times worse since my mum died. He no longer can differentiate between objects and people/events. The house is clean and somewhat tidy, as he has a housekeeper, but she can't throw furniture away, obviously, so in a bedroom he'll have six or seven chairs so you can't really get to the bed. If you say, hey, maybe this spare bedroom only needs one chair? He grips them in this panicked way and says "This is your granny!"

It's not. It's just a chair she had once. And when you add it to the chair my aunt had once and the chair he bought with my mother at an antiques shop once and the chair... It's too many! They're all nice things but...And it's like this in every room so you have to edge around things in these rooms that should be beautiful. It's mad and horrible but he's constantly "sorting" the house out so if you challenge him he reckons he's on it. But he never sorts it out. He just picks things up and puts them down, round and round, over and over.

I find it really disturbing. When you mentions the stuff he really seems unhinged. He's not mad in any other way. He runs a very successful business, still, at 70. It's a biggish house so the public rooms are mostly clear...ish, and it seems okay because it's so clean but there are no clear surfaces anywhere. Everything has piles and piles. I don't think he can see the piles of STUFF. There's too much furniture in every room. Two or three beds in a bedroom meant for one. It's really suffocating. He has two tables in the breakfast room. One to sit and eat breakfast at and one to pile and pile with junk. In the sitting room there is, insanely, a six seater high backed monks bench shoved behind the telly. Everyone bangs their shin on it as they try to get in the room.

He shops at Costco. He's a single person! He piles it all on the junk table. There's at least one junk table in every room.

He doesn't care about living people. He's not interested. All his conversation is about dead people. The furniture is him hanging out with them in preference to us. He's a lovely man in every other way, but ultimately: not present.

And Carpe, I am the same as you. I have rages of decluttering. I do it extra after I've been at home, as a kind of self medication, I think.

Last time I went to my dad's house, when I got back, I got rid of my (only) armchair. I just had to do something!

I didn't mean my last post to sound harsh - although I realise it must have.
I perhaps and the polar opposite of a hoarder mentality.
I cannot abide clutter. It makes me anxious and annoyed.
" a place for everything and everything in its place" is an adage I live by.
Good storage helps (which is hard in modern houses as there isn't any)
I tend to only buy things I need rather than buying things against the idea that I might need them someday.
The children have loads of stuff, but before each b day and Xmas I have a cull and anything they don't play with goes to the charity shop/friends.
They both have a memory box in the loft and I add to them after each school year with their pictures/work/certificates etc.
My dh has hoarder tendencies but I limit him to his shed and the loft.
I don't care what he has in there! (And it's probably best I don't know tbh)
I think those of you living with hoarders come across as very tolerant and compassionate people.
I don't know how you do it :(

I can sympathise. My dj isn't quite as bad as some of yours but I can see how it might escalate in the future!
When his mum moved house she had a bunch of stuff she wanted to ditch and he was like, oh that's worth some money I'll 'sell it on eBay' for you. Now every time I bring it up he gets defensive like I'm suggesting throwing away family heirlooms or something!
Luckily we're moving ourselves soon and he has managed to chuck quite a bit of stuff so far so fingers crossed!

Why is there no help for these people - and more importantly their families?

Becuase I think it's fairly new in terms of recognition, study and thinking about stratagies that might combat the spectacularly bad ricividsim rate.

As for families, well they are often seen as pure victims of drink, drugs etc. But right from teeny tiny I was blamed for much of the mess, and believed it right until my husband pointed out that...it wasn't actually my stuff. Mum would cry on firends' shoulders that we were impossibly messy, and that's a very comon complaint, so was believable. And we got lectures from outsiders about helping more and not causing pur mum so much work.

When ypu get older there's a lot of "how could you let her live like that ?" ...abd so on and so forth.

It does seep into the soul of you. The idea that it's your fault, or your responsibility, that you must be dirty, or disgusting to live in such conditions. And it doesn't seem to matter that in terms of logic all the fights, the sneaking around, the cajoaling,bthe begging to be allowed to clear and dump point to something entirely different.

I have seen a lot of people come around and be symathetic towards people who hoarder since shows made it more visible and understandable. But ai can't read threads about the shows, becuase quite quickly the family blaming starts, and ...it's like I shoot back in time when everything was so raw, and I was so confused and full of self blame and misplaced responsibility.

It's still new. Give it time, maybe people will come around to the idea that just like hoarding is more compicated than they thought it was, so too is the lot of the family.

Oh carpe :(
She blamed you?
That's just....awful.
I'm so sorry.

I got rid of my (only) armchair. I just had to do something!

Oh that I understand.

Dh had to wrestle the xmas tree off me last night. I wanted to throw it away. My reasonng being I needed to throw something away (consequence of opening the door a crack on this subject) and it had fallen off its shelf twice in three days thanks to Lilly the Kitten, which made the storeroom look like a tip, cos it lay there in all its spikey, arms everywhere, floor consuming mess. TWICE!

If it hadn't been the tree, it would have been something else.

I really have to watch it. I don't want to indulge my kneejerk reations to the point that I teach my son wierd reations or to walk on eggshells around my psyche.

I know it's not good, and I know DH is alert for it to make sure it stays under control. But ...I want in some way to "mother" the ghost of the girl I was, by getting it under control by myself, for her sake. To say "you are worth my stuggle with my wierd emotional connection to stuff, and I'll win so you don't lose".

Oh fuck it. If I haven't demonstrated that I am wierd headed by now then people haven't been paying attention

I don't want to give people the wrong impression. It is possible to recover, live well and not be all "odd", lots of the time. Generally I do very well. I am suffering from a moment off kilter.

I haven't spoken to my mother since she left the house we bought to accomadate her due to losing her own home....leaving The Hoard here, pleanty of it having leaked all over my side, mixed in with my stuff. That was almost a decade ago.

Two days ago out of the blue my uncle called, haven't spoken to him since my grandmother's funeral way back when, asking if there was anyway he could broker an end to the estrangment. I said no, he was lovely, I'm fine with that. But Pandora's box of memories got cracked open a bit, and I am in post sting, wound licking mode.

I am both glad and infuriated with myself that I saw the thread title and clicked.

I like tidy. But...sometimes healing isn't tidy. It is sitting in the towering piles of chaos of conflictual feelings, from the relief of explaining how you came to be, to the shame of what you are, the hope when you read your own words and see how far you've come and the despair that Pandora's box can take you right back for a moment at the speed of light.

I am sitting in a metaphical hoard of emotions. It's uncomfortable.

And I tried to take it out on an innocent xmas tree

She blamed you?

It's very common I discovered. Very, very common. Which actually made me feel better about it. Not sure why. But it did.

But that is where a lot of my residual anger cones from. I believed her. I believed I was genetically incapble of being clean and tidy.

So I lived in 4th degree squalor (I do not advise looking the definition of that up unless you want to heave) when I left home becuase... I truely believed that was who I was.

I don't have a great skill set for housework. And I do find routine hard to keep without a crutch like the HomeRoutines app. But guess what. I am not as revolting as I believed myself to be. I am actually quite good at cleaning when it's cleaning and not an emotionally charged activity of self loathing.

My parents both blamed their children for the mess. But now, in our thirties, only one has a hoard. My brother's hoard is bigger, actually. He has filled several houses... oh my god that's insane. I have just realised.

Us other three have all gone the other way. I feel oppressed by things, like I need to defeat them. I experience all my emotions as metaphorical objects vs space. Depression to me feels like having invisible cardboard boxes stacked up in every doorway. Happiness is a wide open sky.

My brother doesn't even display Christmas cards: he opens, reads, recycles.

Er, my *other brother.

badvoc you are so right about modern houses having no storage. It drives me mad - bought on old Victorian house instead.

I know modern technology means you don't need to store CDs or books like you used to but people will always need an ironing board, Hoover and room to store clothes.

I think it's criminal the way modern homes are designed.

Thanks for the suggestions to try the fly lady app that sounds great. Not going to get emails sent though, I don't read the ones I get at the moment.

Sudo, I love what you said about emotions and space.

When....My sister lives in a large 5 bed 3 story house.
There is not one storage cupboard!
It's ridiculous what developers get away with.
I can relate to the feeling of being oppressed by "things"
I don't ascribe feelings to objects. I think thats deeply strange, but I know people who do.
I put up cards. Then i take them down after the b day.
At Xmas I have a card holder on a door so they are contained :)
I love Xmas and getting the decs up, but then by Boxing Day I am ready for them to come down...I hold off til NYE though.
For me, toy boxes, trofast storage from ikea and 2 large storage cupboards seem to contain all our stuff.
Dh has the loft and his shed (sigh) and the house is always tidy (if not always super clean)

It's ridiculous what developers get away with

It's not just new houses.

Mine is a 17th centuray Lombardy farmhouse.

It is a shot for making storage hard, cos in True Italian tradition they leave a whole 30cms between side wall and window on the ajoining external wall. So you can't put in a row or wardrobes or cupbpards, cos they "jut".

I had to sacrifice the downstairs loo by ripping it out to create a storage room and one bedroom to make a walk in wardrobe.

Which I could only do cos we bought this house to home two "families", one half for us and one as a joined but indpependant home for my mother.

And since she flouced (sans hoard) I have been left with a stupidly big sized house to keep clean,ntidy and cobweb free. (even if perfectly tidy it takes two hours to hoover,mdust, de-cobweb and mop all of it) So I decided to make the best of it and rearrange it work storagewise by repurposeing rooms. Otherwise I'd be screwed storagewise. Cos big doesn't always mean rooms lend themselves to creating places to put stuff so it behaves.

it's a shit , not a shot, it contains no guns.

Ohhhh carpe that sounds amazing!
But, yes, period homes dont lend themselves to storage either.

that sounds amazing!

Sounds, yes.

Is, meh...depends on the day and how many spiders I am chasing with the hoover.

Or how many mosquito window nets the cats have pulled down.

Or if a new damp patch has appeared.

Or if a beam has decided to shed some extra dust.

Or it's making funny noises. Which normally ends with a mouse falling out of the fireplace and me on the sofa screaming while it runs around leaving sooty paw prints everywhere and laughing at me. The bastard.

Ah, I don't mind mice.
Or dust (ds2 loves to dust) but the mozzies...hmmm...that's not good.