Hoarding in your family?

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My mother is one of those hoarders who fill entire houses with worthless junk. Anyone else grow up in this kind of environment?

me me me ! !
To extreme and rediculous proportions.
...and I do it too..
my parents do it and my grandparents did it...
I am too groggy to go into the extent of the details...

My grandmother, compulsively. She has a room which she just throws new stuff in - the door got blocked with new stuff and couldn't be opened sometimes. I was very skinny as a child and often got hoisted through the gap in the top of the ajar door to tidy things up enough for the door to be openable. I think my younger cousin has the job now I've moved away.

My father had this from his family.
Grandfather kept everything useless in storage.
Than as i was a kid whenever i wanted to throw stuff away my dad gave me this speech about how i should save it for later.
These days i tend to throw away less things than i would like to simply because it was drilled into me that it's wrong.

My parent's house is nightmarish in this regard. You simply can't get into one of the rooms, and it's difficult to walk across the hallway without bumping into anything. For a while, I had to squeeze past a chair with a huge unstable pile of newspapers right in the middle of the hallway just to get into my room. There's also a bookshelf in the hallway leading from the kitchen to the laundry room

Other areas are similarly crammed. Every available inch of surface area in the entire house is covered with objects, often with deep piles (like on my dad's desk). and much of it is unstable and ready to fall down at any time. All floor areas not being used for basic navigation are also filled with junk. Every closet (including about half of my own, while I was there!) is filled with my mom's old clothes. They also have a garage and 10x10 storage unit, which are filled to capacity. My mom even has a second 10x10 storage unit with my grandmother's stuff that she inherited a few years ago.

If I ever visit, it takes at least an hour just to clear enough room to put down an air mattress.

Ugh. I feel sick just thinking about it.



...and I have to admit, I've picked up some hoarding tendencies of my own. I have hoarded videogames, magazines, computer game boxes, comic books, text books, DVDs, computer parts, cables, household goods, and more. At its height, my DVD and comic book collection filled the walls of an entire walk-in closet. I had a second closet dedicated to videogames, in addition to several shelves.

Before moving, I got rid of the boxes and magazines, and a lot of the foreign language comics. Since moving to California, I've thrown out nearly all of the DVD and CD cases (keeping most of the disks) and put them into binders (which still fill up most of the top shelf in my (much smaller) closet), the unused household goods, old clothes not in wearable condition, the my classic videogame collection (besides some choice rare titles, but all actual gameplay is now through roms, since the systems are gone), and more. Before anyone asks, I gave the games/systems to some friends of mine.

Even so, my room is still pretty full, but I'm still trying to cut down.


I actually spent most of yesterday trying to manage all of the clutter. While I didn't throw away anything other than trash and receipts (I hate those things), I did move several piles of books to the storage shed, so that my textbook shelf no longer has books stacked on top of other books on the top shelf, or overflowing onto the floor.

It's also kind of annoying that in my, you can't dispose of more than about two full kitchen trashbags in a week, which is in a way pro-hoarding. Most of the stuff that I got rid of was during the annual "trash week", when the city drives huge moving vans though the city to pick up anything that people want to throw out.


Yeah... I have problems too.

me, pop, caroline, their children.

and i have a compulsive cleaner as a mother.

i collect everything.

i even have a jar of dust

My grandparents do this somewhat. Grandma keeps buying new things for her house, although she never packs any of her old things away. And since they have a little house with no basement, some of their stuff ends up in our basement. But the thing is, my mom's about to get the basement finished, so they're not going to be able to store their stuff down there anymore. The only storage spots that'll be left will just be for our stuff (as it should be).

Have you ever seen a 20 or 30 year collection of margarine containers? I have, it's not pretty.

Egg cartons, cool whip containers, bread ties....both my grandmother's hoarded a bit.

My dad took broken things apart and saved all the hardware...I have organizers full of stuff.

I'll admit I'm a bit of a hoarder myself mainly because I'm always tinkering with stuff like my dad, but I clear out occasionally, selling some of the stuff I've fixed or giving it away to someone that can use it before it slowly takes over the house.

I hoard old comics, the complete works of Terry Pratchett, Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis, pulp novels from the 1920's to the 1970's, movies on VCR and DVD, and a bunch of the usual garage paraphernalia, but they're all organised into plastic tubs and bookcases. I could probably stand to let go of my weight set and spare bike from the garage

What I hated most about my parents' house was the filth and clutter. Everything just spilled all over the place. We could never have friends over after school because it was too embarrassing, and it just got worse as time went by.

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my mom is an ex-hoarder....moving 5 times in 2 years made her rethink the need for all this stuff

My grandmmother.
Not only is her house piled with stuff from ages ago, her fridge is always always extremely full. It must have skipped a generation though, because my mom (and aunts) didn't inherit it, but I sure as hell got it from somewhere, despite my father being totally oppossed to it (caused a lot of misery in my life, that).

I had one of those "flash" special interests a couple of weeks ago about this subject, ( after reading a thread here in News and Current Events about a woman who was found dead under her rubbish ), and stayed up till nearly 3 am watching clips from the USA TV show, "Hoarders/Hoarding: Buried Alive".

The thing is that I see tendencies to it in all of my family:

My dad collects/hoards books; he has so many that every single bookcase is two or three deep all arranged with microscopic precision to make maximum use of the space, and the cellars under the house are so full that when he, or my sister, ( who has stored some of her hoards there too ), go down there they have to crawl between the boxes.

My mother hoards receipts, old letters, kitchen gadgets and margarine tubs, empty jars, and a couple of other categories, but it's kept within reasonable bounds.

My sister mainly collects old newspapers and journals, and books that noone else wants, but she also has quite impressive collections of margarine tubs, etc. Two of the rooms in her house are full of boxes full of newspaper clippings, etc. A few years ago in another house her bedroom had so many boxes in that there was only a tiny passageway to get to the bed.

And after a couple of decades ( from early-mid teens onwards ) of loathing and binning clutter, with a sort of anorexic fervour, which had me throwing out mountains of perfectly wearable clothes, good books, music tapes, ornaments incl family heirlooms, and letters from people, aswell as ruthlessly weeding my own papers, journal, artwork, poetry, etc ... I seem to have passed some sort of watershed in the last 5-10 years, and have begun collecting; clothes and DVDs mainly, but also books and papers, ... and in recent months I have begun to feel slightly oppressed by my clothes ... there are so many of them, most of which I don't wear.

Which is why I felt horribly connected to the cases I saw on the TV clips. I could so understand them, not the ones who live in appallingly dirty messes so much as the ones who carefully organise their clutter, and the woman, ( who I was pretty sure was probably on the spectrum ), who says that she is almost afraid of going out because she can't pass a secondhand shop or even a roadside rubbish collection point without thinking, "I'll just have a look ..." which I know so well.
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