Do you have a hoarder in the family?

[Alexander's Horse]

My father is a hoarder. I just stayed with him and Mum for a week, to support my Mum after her sister died. My oldest son is staying with them temporarily before he goes to university. He asked me to buy him a study desk because there isn't a surface in the house that isn't covered Dad's stuff. That made me realise we have a problem. You get used to clutter when you grow up with a hoarder.

It isn't like Dad is TV show material but it's bad. He is 79. My Mum is suffering but looks like the only solution is wait until he dies. She is kind of an enabler. She has put up with it for so long. But they are getting vermin in the house sometimes now and that is frightening for her. She is 82.

I think Dad mainly hoards because he was a depression child and they didn't have much. Other traumas later in life like the death of father and his brother seemed to make it worse. Hoarding is a real illness.

Do you have a hoarder in the family? Were you able to do anything about it?

[Alexander's Horse]

Obviously no hoarders here, or maybe you are ALL hoarders *runs*

[loinburger]

My great-grandmother was a hoarder, I was to young to remember it but apparently it took weeks to clean the junk out of her house when she died

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Maybe we are ...

[-Jrabbit]

I'm a bit of a pack-rat, but definitely not a hoarder.

[Alexander's Horse]

same here, I'm a collector of various things

[loinburger]

I move every three or four years, and always throw away or give away half of my crap because it's easier than packing moving and unpacking it. Then when I arrive at my new apartment I throw away or given away another 10-20% of my crap because I leave it boxed up for six months and then I say "well if I've left it boxed up for six months then I obviously don't need it."

So I'm not a hoarder.

[Dinner]

There were (and are) lots of people who grew up during the depression and WW2 and remember having to go without so now they don't throw anything away if they can come up with any excuse to keep it (no matter how irrational). It's sad but sort of understandable.

[Hauldren Collider]

I tend to accumulate crap I don't use, but when it gets the point where it's in the way and annoying, I'll go on a destruction binge for a weekend. It's mainly laziness, but I have some really old crap lying around that I never use but don't feel like throwing away because it isn't obstructing anything. So I don't think that counts...

[DaShi]

Sounds like you have a severe personality disorder.

[Aeson]

One of the first games I got for the PC was Ultima VI ... and I went through the entirety of Britannia killing and looting everything. I put everything in a chest in the palace. Including the corpses of everyone in the kingdom, my own party members, and myself. (But not Lord British ... not for lack of trying of course. I had a running battle with him and a cannon across all of Brittania that lasted hours until I found out I could just leave a macro going using the ship's cannon overnight ... that of course was fruitless as well ) Then when I opened the chest so many items popped out that every tile in the rest of the game went blank, including my character. I had achieved permanent invisibility and cleaned the entire kingdom! So who says crime doesn't pay?

Later, when I was in Ultima Online I had a chest at the bank with roughly 12 billion scrolls organized into nicely color coded backpacks that ran a couple levels deep (with ~16 packs per pack). I'd sit there selling scrolls to passers-by ... amassing a huge fortune which I planned to buy more regents and papers with to create more scrolls with until finally the weight of all those scrolls would cause the bank walls to come crashing down. Then one day I double clicked one of my backpacks to open it, it didn't open, so I doubled clicked it again and due to the lag that resulted in the backpack opening and me using an Earthquake scroll attacking everyone on the server and becoming wildly popular for a few minutes. After that I was KOS by the guards and couldn't get into the bank so just ran around as a ghost helping macroers increase their ghost reading (or whatever it was). **** macroers and accidental earthquake scrolls. I guess that was the moment I was "cured" of my hording in Ultima games.

[Kidlicious]

My mom is a hoarder. She likes to pretend she is getting rid of her stuff by moving it from storage to house and from house to storage, but she only collects more stuff. She also tries to get people to help her move her stuff around. It's not good, but there's worse problems people could have.

[SlowwHand]

I just threw out a 30 gallon trash bag of very old mail and other paper at my mother's house. I cleaned out the refrigerator/freezer and filled another 30 gallon bag of meat from 2007, eggs from 2009 and other assorted crap. Mom is 82.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

One of the first games I got for the PC was Ultima VI ... and I went through the entirety of Britannia killing and looting everything. I put everything in a chest in the palace. Including the corpses of everyone in the kingdom, my own party members, and myself. (But not Lord British ... not for lack of trying of course. I had a running battle with him and a cannon across all of Brittania that lasted hours until I found out I could just leave a macro going using the ship's cannon overnight ... that of course was fruitless as well ) Then when I opened the chest so many items popped out that every tile in the rest of the game went blank, including my character. I had achieved permanent invisibility and cleaned the entire kingdom! So who says crime doesn't pay?

Later, when I was in Ultima Online I had a chest at the bank with roughly 12 billion scrolls organized into nicely color coded backpacks that ran a couple levels deep (with ~16 packs per pack). I'd sit there selling scrolls to passers-by ... amassing a huge fortune which I planned to buy more regents and papers with to create more scrolls with until finally the weight of all those scrolls would cause the bank walls to come crashing down. Then one day I double clicked one of my backpacks to open it, it didn't open, so I doubled clicked it again and due to the lag that resulted in the backpack opening and me using an Earthquake scroll attacking everyone on the server and becoming wildly popular for a few minutes. After that I was KOS by the guards and couldn't get into the bank so just ran around as a ghost helping macroers increase their ghost reading (or whatever it was). **** macroers and accidental earthquake scrolls. I guess that was the moment I was "cured" of my hording in Ultima games.

great story

[Alexander's Horse]

I move every three or four years, and always throw away or give away half of my crap because it's easier than packing moving and unpacking it. Then when I arrive at my new apartment I throw away or given away another 10-20% of my crap because I leave it boxed up for six months and then I say "well if I've left it boxed up for six months then I obviously don't need it."

So I'm not a hoarder.

My Dad is definitely in that group. He is also a very generous man and keeps some stuff because he thinks "other people" might need them. Christmas was big at our house.

My brothers and sisters clean up around him.