Want to drive your relatives crazy? Become a hoarder!

Bobw235

Bobw235

Senior Member
Location
Massachusetts
Just hoard all kinds of crap, stuff it in every nook and cranny of where you live and then when you pass away, it's their problem to deal with it. Just spent another three days in FL going through my mother-in-law's condo, cleaning out much of the accumulated junk that my late father-in-law saved. He saved everything! One brochure was never enough if he could have five of them. One copy of a photo was never enough when he could have ten, all tucked away in various places. Plastic bags? Tons! Newspaper clippings? Way too many going back for years. Office supplies, pens, paper, rulers (I stopped counting at about 20), old Medicare and insurance statements, you name it, we found it. One entire day was just devoted to a storage closet that was stuffed to the gills. Did I mention that their storage closet is part of an non-air-conditioned porch that bakes in the FL sunshine all day? All the work did produce an organized closet in the end, plus we found valuables that my mother-in-law had hidden away and we thought were long gone. She's got serious dementia, so really can't help in this exercise. We've found dozens of boxes of photo slides stuffed in the back of a kitchen closet meant for pots and pans. I'll need to be a contortionist to get them out.

My wife endeavored to get her mom to part with clothing and shoes that she'll never wear again. Nope, that didn't fly. She claims that she enjoys looking at the clothes and shoes, even though she's bedridden and can't see them from the hospital bed. We'll try again on the next visit.

We did a similar cleaning of an larger closet back in March over several days and there's still way more to do, but progress has been made!

I'm already taking steps to make sure my son doesn't have to deal with this kind of situation one day.....unless he pisses me off, then all bets are off. :cool:

Ah, the joys of aging. Glad I am retired and can spend time doing this.
 

Bob, my hubby passed away seven years ago and I am still going through things. He was a real saver! It is very time consuming and frustrating because there are gizmos I have no idea what they are or why he saved it. Someone suggested going on line to try and identify stuff but OMG that would take forever. I am not a yard sale type of person so I give away, offer, donate or throw out. I don't want anyone to have to clean up after me either, it's not fair. They do have people that clean out houses but you never know about older people as they often stuff away treasures and money. Glad you see progress.
 
On the last trip we spent much of the time going through hundreds of video cassettes and audio cassettes. It was amazing how many TV shows my late FIL recorded. They all went into a dumpster. In the last several years of his life, Alzheimers robbed him of the ability to do anything as complicated as watch a video. We're getting there slowly but surely. At our house we've gotten rid of quite a bit of stuff we no longer use, mainly through online selling (We use "Close 5", an app on our cell phone). It's very freeing to get rid of stuff you no longer use. My next project is getting rid of much of my working life wardrobe.
 

Bob, I feel for you having to go through all that. We had to go through all of my mom and my dad's things when they passed. There were things I know she valued and felt kind of funny throwing away but I had no room for them and neither did anyone else. But it is a relief once you get it all done. I understand where your MIL is coming from; she is having a hard time letting go of her things as they are a part of her now, a part of her history she has had for a very long time. There are some things I can't part with yet just because...But there may come a time when she no longer even knows who you are let alone her belongings..sad.
 
Glad you are slowly getting there. I helped my sister in law clean out her mother's home. We all took a room. I ended up with the living room that had a very large entertainment center and coffee table with big drawers. They were stuffed with old greeting cards. Each had to be opened because through the years many people sent her money in the cards. I ended up with quite a sum of money that would have been thrown out. I also found two,twenty dollar bills under an ancient snake plant!
 
When my husband's parents became elderly and sickly, and he had a major stroke, we move them into our home to live with us. My mother in law saved a lot of stuff too, lots of bags, rubber bands, multiple copies of photos, and she had lots of clothes that she never wore, like coats, but didn't really want to part with.

With some patience I worked through everything with her, one box for donating, another for trash. Their neighbors took a few of her things for themselves. I had to go through the remainder of their things in my own home as they both passed on. Pretty much everything was donated (or trashed), one of their wheelchairs was donated to a nearby nursing home, a woman wanted it for her father who also had a bad stroke.

I save some stuff too, junk drawers overflowing. I've seen those hoarder shows on TV, and I'm truly amazed that people can have clothes and other stuff, some they never used, just sprawled all over with barely a path to walk through the house. Some of the hoarders had really dirty homes too, dishes piled up in the sink that were moldy and counters loaded up with junk. The people who hoard pets had a real health issue going, not only for themselves, but for their animals.

I agree Bob, being a hoarder would drive your relatives nuts.
 
SeaBreeze said:
When my husband's parents became elderly and sickly, and he had a major stroke, we move them into our home to live with us. My mother in law saved a lot of stuff too, lots of bags, rubber bands, multiple copies of photos, and she had lots of clothes that she never wore, like coats, but didn't really want to part with.

With some patience I worked through everything with her, one box for donating, another for trash. Their neighbors took a few of her things for themselves. I had to go through the remainder of their things in my own home as they both passed on. Pretty much everything was donated (or trashed), one of their wheelchairs was donated to a nearby nursing home, a woman wanted it for her father who also had a bad stroke.

I save some stuff too, junk drawers overflowing. I've seen those hoarder shows on TV, and I'm truly amazed that people can have clothes and other stuff, some they never used, just sprawled all over with barely a path to walk through the house. Some of the hoarders had really dirty homes too, dishes piled up in the sink that were moldy and counters loaded up with junk. The people who hoard pets had a real health issue going, not only for themselves, but for their animals.

I agree Bob, being a hoarder would drive your relatives nuts.
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....yes, or a spouse. :rolleyes:
 
Ruth n Jersey said:
Glad you are slowly getting there. I helped my sister in law clean out her mother's home. We all took a room. I ended up with the living room that had a very large entertainment center and coffee table with big drawers. They were stuffed with old greeting cards. Each had to be opened because through the years many people sent her money in the cards. I ended up with quite a sum of money that would have been thrown out. I also found two,twenty dollar bills under an ancient snake plant!
Click to expand...

My MIL has made remarks in the past about hiding money. Now she'd never remember where it is, so we have to go through every nook and cranny.
 
You know what I do save though? Cards and letters. I'll bet I have every card or letter my wife ever gave me and I know she has mine. Letters we wrote to each other when we were college students living apart fill a container, but it's clearly marked so someone will know what it is. Last year I bit the bullet and went through the years worth of cords, cables and assorted electronic junk that had been accumulated over the years. Saved just some basic cables, some coax and ethernet and through the rest away.
 
I go through my house twice a year and get rid of things I don't use frequently or seasonally. At this point, the one thing I save is toys. I have less then 10% of my kids' former toys here, and wish I could have kept them all, but we don't have the space here. We had two large play rooms when our kids were growing up, and I wasted a lot of money on great toys for them. I didn't see it at the time -- instead, I bemoaned the fact that I could not buy more. People would visit and call our house either "the library" or "Toys R Us" because we had so many books and toys.

I just flippantly said my kids were lucky because I love toys so much. The ones I saved are for my future grandchildren to play with. They are organized and stored in four Rubbermaid containers. It will not be difficult for the kids or my husband to just take the containers to Goodwill if they don't want the toys.

I just spent two afternoons going through the toys and organizing them. Then I spent a few hours looking for missing pieces on the internet before I came to my senses. Tomorrow, they will go back into their storage containers and I will stop daydreaming about having a spare room to use for toy display. Within a couple of days, knowing myself, they will be out of sight, out of mind. This has been an enjoyable interlude, though.

Otherwise, I don't collect anything. I hate clutter, so that is helpful. We have enough stuff here just for daily life with a family of six adults (our kids are in college).

However, one thing I have noted is that my mother's home is beautifully decorated. She has that talent, and I do not have even a smidgen of it. So I looked around, hoping to learn something during my last visit. She has lots of decorative stuff and plants that have the purpose of adding to the beauty of her home. To achieve that, I'd have to acquire lots of beautiful stuff and before you know it, I would be in Clutterviile. My beautiful stuff would look great individually, but would not form a cohesive decorating scheme once it got to my house because I wouldn't know what to do with it.

I do have a Red Sox gnome on my mantel as my only knick knack. It's up there so the dog can't knock it over and break it.
 
It'll get better.....A distant relative had none but us to watch and make sure she was in a good nursing home. That part was a breeze she had the money to stay at one of the finest. To look at her little bungalow you wouldn't think she had two dimes to her name. She also said, she had money hidden, and was right about it. We found like hundreds of bills, in the hem of a pair of heavy drapes. Glass jars hidden in the floorboards & baseboards. Bills rolled up. She wasn't tight with money, just plain stingy. After being invited for tea and uses a teabag that was set out to dry a few times. The one relative did so much for her and never paid. After seeing all this money, dad told her to keep it. Mums the word..She had like three bank accounts as it was.:love_heart:
 
With the extreme heat we had here earlier in the week, I took several hours to go through and shred old credit card statements, tax records, bank statements, investment statements, etc. By the time I was done I had filled seven or eight shopping bags with paper. The decluttering continues. Felt so good to get rid of so much excess paper. Not the most exciting thing in the world, but a necessary task. Got a decent shredder at Costco last year and we've put it to good use.
 

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