a hoarder.
 

i cant believe i moved out of my house, fixed a bunch of stuff..and didnt have to do a single dump run. no household hazmat drop-offs..nothing.

i kept putting the goodwill/hazmat/garbage dump piles into the backyard and it kept getting smaller and smaller. i thought my wife got the handiman to take it to the perspective drop off sites. nope. guy is taking it all home.

it is wild.

i had some good stuff..like a gallon of Windex. :) all i have left is house paint. i'll do some touch up, and run it to the hazmat drop off.. heck it might be gone already..hope not.

i know a few hoarders, and i dont understand it. it is clearly a "thing". me, i go to great lengths to be an anti-hoarder.

Hoarders collect crap because they believe at some point, they might need it, and they don't want to have to spend the money buying it.

I have eliminated alot of stuff, that has been sitting on shelves unused for 10+ years around my house. I also made a new rule for myself, If I haven't used something in the last year, and don't see me using it in the next year, I either sell it, recycle it, or toss it, or give it away.

As I get older, I am trying to pare down stuff that is sitting around while I still have the energy, and desire to work on things.

Another non-hoarder here, my wife as well. We very much follow the "if you haven't used it in a year" rule, lots of stuff around here goes to charity. Somewhat disturbing when we sit things out for the trash, how frequently they aren't there in the morning. Makes you wonder what sort of people cruise through neighborhoods at night.

<snip>
Hoarding is considered an offshoot of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), but recently this categorization is being reevaluated. It’s estimated that about one in four people with OCD also are compulsive hoarders. It is possible that some time in the future hoarding will become its own distinct category. In the meantime, it’s very real, and more and more people are opening up about the difficulty hoarding presents in their lives.

Without exception, hoarding is always accompanied by varying levels of anxiety and sometime develops alongside other mental illnesses such as dementia and schizophrenia. Recent neuroimaging (link is external) reveals peculiar commonalities among hoarders including severe emotional attachment to inanimate objects and extreme anxiety when making decisions.

Hoarding both relieves anxiety and produces it (link is external). The more hoarders accumulate, the more insulated they feel from the world and its dangers. Of course, the more they accumulate, the more isolated they become from the world, including family and friends. Even the thought of discarding or cleaning out hoarded items produces extreme feelings of panic and discomfort.

<snip>

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hope-relationships/201409/the-psychology-behind-hoarding

I watched a show about hoarders once and could never watch another one... I couldn't even make it through over 20 minutes of the hour show. It is something I cannot understand at all. I am more than a little OCD myself - but on the other end of the spectrum.

I was friends with Grady Clay - he was a hoarder, eventually I couldn't go over to his house any more... the piles got bigger and the paths got smaller...

Took me a long time, but I finally reeled in our household. I just get pissed off and out the door it goes, she can moan and complain all she wants, but I will never let it happen. Once I see the pile has not moved for a few months, I make it dissapear. Half the time she never notices it gone .
"I was going to use that " b.s. you did not even know where it was at for the last 10 years, now it is moldy and ruined , in a box buirried under 10 other boxes, that in a lifetime, you will never ever look in or attempt to move or organize .
I am the anit hoarder Nazi at home
Our place was nothing like the hoarders show, but we have 4 bedrooms, and when it was just the 2 of us, 3 of those rooms, plus an extra family room were full and not useable .
She agrees that our home is much nice now that it is all cleaned up.

i didnt know that about Grady. RIP.

i have a friend. never been in her house. her dad is a hoarder

That one year "Use it or dispose of it" is a bit overboard for a lot of stuff. I have some tools and equipment I only need once every 5 or 10 years. My sledgehammer had sat unused for a decade. It was nice to go put my hand on it and uses it and put it back up. I have a chain saw that goes for a few years between uses. I have had it for 30 years. It still works fine. I needed it all day after the ice storm we had this winter.

I for sure have some crap in the attic than is ready for the landfill. "someday" I will get up there and fill up a few trash bags to be removed. Maybe next year....

There is a large farm/everything-under-the-sun auction run by the Amish here every November. It draws about three thousand buyers over the course of the day.

Every year as I work through my farm weekends and days I invariably reach the "dump or auction" fork in the road.

Over the last 20 years I went from making a dump run (or recycle run) five or six times a year to once a year: Everything else goes to the auction. I keep a separate bin and shelving for items going to auction. Or I shoot it then recycle it.

My "ah ha" moment came a year or so after we bought the farm. At our suburban place we had one of those smaller, wheeled metal Sears dump trailers for loading stuff up behind a small yard tractor. We brought it with us to the farm and frankly abused the poor thing.

New, I paid $80.00 in 1993. I took the battered, still functional hulk to the auction and it sold for $60.00 in 1997. I became addicted to unhoarding.

I rarely buy anything at the auction btw: I have gotten all of our barn cats the last 20 years for free. We get them spayed and they live the dream.

Talked to the firemen after a fire in our neighborhood, a lot of them get started with a short or battery issue under piles of crap. Everything is burning good before anyone notices, then it's too late

A true friend would have never shared that particular observation. YMMV.

words to live by. unfortunately i don't. have several thousand books, and a garage full of motorcycle parts. i'm good at taking out the trash, but every time i look at the carb for the buell i sold ten years ago something stops me.

I have a hard time discarding old cables. Coaxial, power cables, hdmi, VGA, USB, Ethernet etc

Ive also purchased too many long cables and not enough short!

Oh gawwwdddd... I have hundreds of old cables. I think I hang onto them because back in the day they cost a fortune. Wonder how many ethernet patch cables I have... LOL. Gotta start tossing them this spring.

Besides cables, I only horde parts for collectible motorcycles. I buy good stuff when I get a chance. I plan on keeping busy in my old age sorting and selling the stuff to enthusiasts. Would be great to be a part of various restoration projects. I have thousands of motorcycle parts - mainly for two strokes.

True, dat. That comment kind of stung a bit.

^^^This.

I think that is what you call a Faux Pas

i tell myself this too.

but far more likely that the wife and kid will sell all this stuff by the pound before my body is even cold. i've seen it happen to too many guys. i have vowed to finish the cafe bike this year, or it's getting sold. and the year after i'm vowing to finish the next basket case bike or it's gone.

and i'm probably never going to own a vincent rapide, so that box of parts is going on ebay.



but the book situation is hopeless.

Magazines!!!! UGH!!!! What am I saving them for? For the most unlikely chance that I will ever refer back to one for something!?!? I just need to bundle them up and take to a medical office waiting room (sans address label)! Other than that, I like to get rid of stuff...hate clutter.

One thing I have noticed is that eventually the windows get closed and covered up with something so no light penetrates the house. Notice that with my old neighbor and another old guy I know. Some of you remembered that I posted about trying to help this old guy out. They never let anyone throw any of that crap out. My old neighbor's house finally burned to the ground due to the amount of clothing, newspapers and magazines stacked chest high with no room to walked through the house.

I had a room downstairs that runs almost the entire length of my house. When my girlfriend moved in, (now wife) she brought in a bunch of her crap and it was stored there as that room was not used at the time. I was stress out when ever I walked by just looking at all that crap. I finally turned it into a Master nth. Done, all that crap got pitched into the dumpster.