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My family have always been hoarders.
There were only a few of us and it surprising how quickly a quirk becomes an anchor.
I spent a five or six years looking after my parents and after that I developed an aversion to dealing with 'stuff'.
Boxes upon boxes of old bank statements, invitations for credit, all kinds of shite.
I just couldn't face it.
This weekend, my wonderful wife, after years and years of nagging concern, helped me get rid of it all:
The hat and gloves my mum wore to marry my dad.
My old Cub jumper.
20 years worth of job offers, credit card offers and phone bills.
Swimming and music certificates.
Old love letters, boxes of manuals for stuff that went to the tip years ago, hundreds of menus and programmes from long forgotten meals and classical concerts.
Cards from my birth to my teenage years, long forgotten leaving cards from jobs I can barely remember, birthdays, Christmases, Valentines, funerals.
We burned the bastard lot.
I've kept a few bits and bobs - the photos mainly, some of my mums jewellery, but everything else has gone.
Finally.
Not being able to deal with this has kept me awake at night for years. A nagging sense of failure and shame.
And we now have room for more bikes. 🙂
Reborn, it's a new dawn.
And no one's doing my head in, Catatonia fans.
Love to all.
Pete.
I can totally relate to that Rusty. I bet many can.
Amazing that stuff/possessions (and the memories some of them hold) can end up possessing you.
I'm yet to get to my moment of similar catharsis however. It has to happen one day though...
Well done mate,I bet it's such a weight gone from your shoulders.
I always think that with the stuff in my house or my mums place. Stuff that has a value but I never get around to selling or stuff that is kept just in case. 26 inch inner tubes and tyres, dulux paint years past it’s best, roof rack for a car long gone, clothing that’ll never fit, trinkets I’ve bought on a whim whilst on holiday. Old birthday cards, boxes for electronics just in case I sell it, cookery books from tv shows I liked.
Honestly if I ever win some money I’ll take a small bag my bike and my car and start again.
We have similar amounts of crap, literally piles of stuff to go to charity and get sold, that's this weeks job. Also have the piles of junk, some of it is useful but there is a fair amount of rubbish in there we could afford to lose.
Read about Chris Evans from R2. As he had to wake up so early he had a different room to his wife. He hired some kind room designer who said unless you need it and or it makes you happy get rid. He end up with a bed, bedside table, lamp, book, cupboard and painting.
We have a loft full of stuff for a car boot sale, and a garage full of stuff for a cycle jumble which has been delayed due to Covid. Otherwise just clutter, most of which isn't mine!
Would love to have a similar empty house and move into it item by item with just the things we use, and see what gets left behind. Not sure the wife and kids would make the cut! 🤔🤣
Good timing this post. We've just had some building work done and ordered a skip that would be bigger than that required to get rid of the related rubble, wood etc so that we could dump some of our hoarded rubbish.
We've just started going through our "stuff".Our son came round yesterday and dummped a load of his "stuff" that he had left at our house when he moved out, so that was good start... we'd been moaning at him for ages.
I've got loads of garage stuff that will go. Old motorcycle helmets, old cables etc.
The hard part is some of my mum and dad's things that we've had stored for ages, ornaments, glassware etc.
The photos are a no-brainer, I'll keep them. The thing that made it harder was that on the top of the first box I opened up was my dad's card sent to my mum on their Golden Wedding Anniversary. When I read it it broke me up all over again to read what he had written to her. That will definitely be kept.
when I see the collar of my first dog that I keep in a dusty drawer it brings a year to my eye. My first taste of mortality as a kid. Some things should be kept.
Good move Rusty.
Try living with a teacher for having random boxes of crap... We've a couple of decades of lesson plans and 'maybe I'll use it one day'.
Having moved too often, and now living in a small house for the 5 of us, we've actually got rid of most crap. Which reminds me, I need to get rid of all the little kid outdoor gear, wetsuits etc this week.
I did something similar when I moved to Sweden. Went from living in a 4 bed house to sharing a two bed flat and moved here with about 30 moving boxes and a bed. I recycled so much stuff that I was on first name terms with the blokes at the HWRC and, by the end, i was just throwing stuff I did not want. The hardest part was getting rid of the books.
Now I still have an odd problem with buying things that are duplicates or that I think are luxuries. I keep thinking I might have to move again. That part is strange.
my wife and i are pretty bad hoarders - lockdown and a few other recent life events have made me realise we need to do something about it..
Having moved too often
This.
Managed to get rid of loads of stuff every time we moved, been in this house over 10 years now, and have been in the loft once just to check out the roof, no intention of going back up.
3 of us in a 2 bed mid terrace, most folk I know live in houses that are way too big for their needs, and fill them with stuff they don't need, my family included.
Great post, we downsized from a fairly large property to a moderate sized family home, guess what, all our shit came with us, we have three rooms we never use so have decided to downsize again but this time the stuff has to go.
I have an extensive range of tools for every job and materials to match, this is going to be tough.😬
I take my hat off to you Sir.
Try living with a teacher for having random boxes of crap… We’ve a couple of decades of lesson plans and ‘maybe I’ll use it one day’.
Ha! Been there, got the t-shirt! Although to be fair, she carries a much smaller stock than she used to.
We have a garage day once a year where anything that hasn't been used (excepting tools etc.) gets chucked. It is very cathartic. I'm speccing up a new desk for my home office and as it's quite a bit bigger than my current one a mini clear out is on the cards.
My wife is a hoarder, I spent all my time trying to persuade here to get rid of stuff, then just binning / recycling it when she's not looking.
Well done Rusty! I used to have more of a hoarding problem, when I had a bigger house - especially magazines, years and years of mtb mags, NMEs going back to the 70s...
Kept a few, in the loft.
But, whenever I chuck stuff I seem to go looking for it years later, 'now where's that NME with PJ Harvey on the cover' etc. My worst thing now is video tapes. Plans to convert to digital... would take me the rest of my life full time I reckon. Stupid, but I can't part with them.
Nice reminder of a favourite Genesis track.
I've been trying to whittle away at my excess crap, still plenty there tho.
Marie Curie told me my donations raised £27 for them last year too, better than nothing.
I spent the day working in a hoarder house last week. Not the desperate newspaper and box stacking type, but a 'tidy' version focusing mainly on vases and cushions.
Nice folks, but there's something really quite tragic and thoroughly depressing about the place.
I found it quite stressful being among it all, almost angry.
It's like heavy drinking I suppose. They know their life would be better without it, but are trapped in some way.
A friend at work still has her dad's house full of a lifetime hoarder's "treasure".
Her dad died years ago, the door was locked and its been there ever since, her sister won't let anyone touch it, they just pay the bills and forget its there.
Read about Chris Evans from R2. As he had to wake up so early he had a different room to his wife. He hired some kind room designer who said unless you need it and or it makes you happy get rid. He end up with a bed, bedside table, lamp, book, cupboard and painting.
And a walk in wardrobe or two elsewhere in the house, and a large collection of incredibly expensive classic Ferraris. I bet they make him happy, though!
Good post, thanks. I've just moved to a smaller house and have loved the process of getting rid of stuff and having empty house.
Now I really need to work hard to resist the urge to fill it with crap.
If you haven't touched it in the last 2 years it goes in the skip, fire, charity shop.
Best way, keep some token momentos, i have my grandads horse brasses but everything else just builds up
Paper is my bad thing, i have stacks of bills, statements, letters that i will probably never read but they accumulate quietly in the corner
Going to get a 2 drawer filing cabinet to help with the clutter
International moves are good for limiting crap. Even though we took a half-container (mostly to fit a few tandems in).
Still leaves us with about 4 houses full of parents’ crap that they never bothered sorting out, a good chunk of it inherited from their parents in turn...my life is dealing with other people’s’ junk and estates, it will probably fill up a decade of my life getting through it.
If only I could. If only.
We moved out for building work a while ago and had an epic clear out. I struggled with getting rid of outdoor gear just in case I needed it again. I opened a bank account and whenever I sold anything the money went in that account. It now sits there waiting to find anything that I may need in the future I found this approach made it much easier to get rid of stuff
I accept that things are much more difficult for a lot of people with bigger problems.
If I'm actually selling, its ebay, into paypal, then use it to buy different things.
Hoarding is a failure to prioritize possessions. If everything is important, then nothing is important. A house full of stuff is not as livable in as an empty house with carefully chosen reminders. I'm not sentimental, but my MIL is a hoarder. It's come to haunt them now that infirmity has descended on the house.
When we marketed our house early this summer we made four trips to the dump with the car loaded with crap. We've packed everything now and the removal guys are coming tomorrow. In the garage and the front room must be over 60 cardboard boxes and 30 litre plastic B&Q bins stuffed with yet more crap, the contents of a 4 bedroom house and a garage. There are still boxes of old school work and cuddly toys, when we unpack at the new house I'm getting a skip and chucking away everything I've forgotten about, meaning most of it.
We've recently moved from a 4 bedroom detached house with large attic, garage and workshop to a small, 2 bedroom cottage after 27 years. We're having a new house built but it won't be ready until next year so we got rid of more than half our stuff including most of our furniture, so we have about a quarter of our stuff in the house, and the rest in storage. I can still see quite a lot of that going when we move. We're going to have lots of built-in storage in the new house, so if there's no room for it, it ain't staying. I'd say I could get by on only 20% of the stuff I used to have - the only exception being bicycles!
eBay
Gumtree / Shplock
Local Facebook Group
Local Charity shops
FreeCycle / Freegle
Recycle Bin
Local Tip / Black Bin
..in that order.
The thing is recognising there's a hoarding problem and responding to it as it takes time to sell on eBay.
So today I got rid of....
1 pair Silverline Saw Horses (they were shit and have better ones)
1 carbon seatpost (came with new bike and swapped out straight away for a better one lying about)
4 full camping gas cycliners (not camped in 10 years)
all via FB marketplace....
my MIL is a hoarder. It’s come to haunt them now that infirmity has descended on the house.
That's about to come to haunt you.
I emptied my mum's house last year. 3 bed bog standard bungalow. I filled 3 of the largest domestic sized skips you can get.
Similar story when my mil passed away 3 years ago. Boxes of climbing magazines in the attic that hadn't been touched for 30 years.
I'm desperately trying to avoid laying similar onto my kids.
A house full of stuff is not as livable in as an empty house with carefully chosen reminders.
I'm going to have that embroidered onto a tea towel Tucker's Law stylee 🙂
Wow.
I'm a forces brat, we moved every couple of years. My brother and I could eventually get our joint worldly possessions into a crate that was about 3x3x4 (our clothes and wot-not would be allowed to be outside that allowance) It does mean that 1. I don't really get sentimental about houses, they are just places to live in, and 2. I don't have a background of crap that I drag about with me. When I moved to my current 2 bed cottage, I half filled a 7.5tonne Luton, and that included furniture.
I spent a whole summer sorting a house following my mum dying, itself full of 3 houses worth of dead relatives stuff. With my Dad hovering trying to stop me. Heartbreaking but had to be done as he was moving to a more manageable place. Still gives me a chill thinking of all the stuff we had no time to sort of donate, just dumped!
To counter this, if avdave’s friend hasn’t kept all that stuff we’d have been deprived of a great thread.
Going through this now. Finally getting rid of my flat post our wedding. In all honesty it had become a dumping/storage ground.
Numerous trips to the recycle centre. Bags and bags of nick nacks and to my shame, unworn labelled clothes and shoes, to charity shops (not easy with covid).
A disgusting amount still had to be binned. I'm determined not to get into that position again.
It was fun reading all my primary and high school reports and looking at my art work.......
What amazes me about the stuff we are moving is the sheer uselessness of most of it. Mrs GTi and GTi Junior acquire clothes relentlessly, we even half filled a van taking him back to uni yesterday.
When I spent my student year abroad I travelled with a rucksack and two suitcases and that was far too much.
When my MIL died we acquired boxes and boxes of her crap, just for old time's sake.
I struggle with this.
I'm currently moving house. For the first time. I have 40+ years of accumulated crap in here.
None of it is actual crap, or very little at least, I don't have decades of bank statements as Rusty suggests or a collection of pizza boxes. But I have lots of things that "have a value." I can't bring myself to just throw away, as a random example, my laserdisc player. But I suddenly realised a couple of weeks ago that if it's sitting in a cupboard neither being used nor being sold then it doesn't "have a value" at all, it's just taking up space.
I took a load of retro consoles and games to CeX last week, from PS1 era to current. Pricing on some stuff took the piss but the alternative is selling it all individually which realistically isn't going to happen. I still came away several hundred quid up and with a newly empty cupboard. Next up is DVDs and CDs, long obsolesced by Netflix / Plex / Spotify.
I've mostly planned where the rest is going aside from a few sticking points. Rusty might be interested to hear that one of those is a cupboard full of power kites. There's a couple of bikes I discussed on a previous thread, and huge family tents which is probably £600 quid's worth of kit and has been used twice. Not a scooby what I'm going to do with those.
I'm quite the opposite to be fair, I've massively pissed off the wife by just chucking stuff because I'm a miserable non sentimental husk of a man.
Kids drawings, old school books, clothes, all of her parents trinkets...chuck em.
Casually just binned all of my bank statements and payslips as soon as I got them..... Then had a frikkin nightmare when we got our mortgage as I had nothing...she produced everything from the day she was born...she never lets me forget that.
Basically I'm merciless and if it's not bolted down or something decent of MINE I just bin it. Only today I found some random old first teeth from one of the kids in a bag in a draw and was about to drop it in the bin and was caught in the act. Back they went to be left for another few years or until she makes a necklace of them.
Casually just binned all of my bank statements and payslips as soon as I got them….. Then had a frikkin nightmare when we got our mortgage as I had nothing…she produced everything from the day she was born…she never lets me forget that.
You're both wrong. Move it online, both problems solved. We shouldn't be defaulting to shoving bits of paper in envelopes in 2020, a concept I'm currently trying to get into the skulls of estate agents and solicitors. "We've posted you... " - "why, is your email server down?"
I can't remember the last time I had a bank statement, pay slip or utility bill through the post, it's been years if not decades.
Our problem is Lego. Thanks to lockdown it’s been heavily used by our 2 kids and you can’t go anywhere in the house without finding some. We’ve been the beneficiaries of others clear outs - we were given 4 large boxes by a work colleague (who received two of them and added to them before passing to us). By the time we have a clear our of kids stuff we’ll probably have an additional box to give away... Kids in general create huge amounts of stuff to move on.
Occasionally some things do increase in value - thinking of parts of my record collection, and the chap on the news who had £40k of whisky to sell (all given over decades as birthday presents).
+1 on moving away paper statements. If it's on paper and important I scan it then shred/chuck. So much easier than dealing with a big pile twice a year.
Moving house is a fantastic hobby, it really helps you streamline. That said I've just filled a sprinter with a load of old stuff from the garage to move to our new place. Lack of time to sort more than anything. I'm sure that bead breaker thingy and three odd bicycle tyres will be useful again one day...
EDIT: Kids, lego, you're right. Tons of the stuff!
Our problem is Lego.
Hiya.
Kids, lego, you’re right.
Wait, kids? No, you've lost me.