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First off most of the crap is not mine...so for everyone to part with their "stuff", it's always an arguement.
Second, if there isn't any REAL deadline, it never gets done. My husband has said "put it in a pile and I'll toss it all in the truck and take it over"...and the reality is the pile sits there for weeks and everyone picks their crap out of the pile.
The last time we moved we rented a dumpster. We had a lot of extra building supplies in our basement that we needed to get rid of and I started tossing whatever I could find in there as well.
At our former residence I would keep stuff for an indefinite period and would clean house on occasion. The criteria was: useable stuff to Goodwill, stuff I recognize wasn't ever going to be used went to the trash, stuff I couldn't remember what it was for went to the trash.
My kids laugh at me because we have bins and bins labled "memories,do not open" in our garage and attic!I tell them when we start to find dead cats in our house then we'll talk!! I can't part with any of their baby stuff and early childhood drawings etc.!!
My ex- had this "disease" before it was fashionable - one of the reasons she's my ex-.
So we are renovating our kids bathroom and there is the giant, builders-grade mirror sitting in the hallway. When we took it down he said "do you want to put this in the attic?"
WTF for???
I can understand keeping a tile or two just in case we crack one and have to replace but a big fat NO to the mirror!
We have boxes of old playboys, baseball cards, little die cast army men, trains...etc. I'm not sure WHY he feels the need to keep these things...he never even looks at them!
I toss/freecycle most everything. I did keep my kids outfits that they wore home from the hospital but that's all I have from them. A few pieces of artwork as well...IF they spent a good amount of time on it we keep it...if it's a piece of paper they had to color...it gets tossed. I hate crap and I cannot stand clutter and papers!
So we are renovating our kids bathroom and there is the giant, builders-grade mirror sitting in the hallway. When we took it down he said "do you want to put this in the attic?"
WTF for???
I can understand keeping a tile or two just in case we crack one and have to replace but a big fat NO to the mirror!
We have boxes of old playboys, baseball cards, little die cast army men, trains...etc. I'm not sure WHY he feels the need to keep these things...he never even looks at them!
I toss/freecycle most everything. I did keep my kids outfits that they wore home from the hospital but that's all I have from them. A few pieces of artwork as well...IF they spent a good amount of time on it we keep it...if it's a piece of paper they had to color...it gets tossed. I hate crap and I cannot stand clutter and papers!
A lot of times hoarders will share certain triggers - they've usually had someone leave them, either through abandonment or death; they're susceptible to depression; or, as some psychologists postulate, it's simply a matter of "a natural and adaptive instinct gone bad".
It used to be lumped into a general OCD diagnosis, but now the "experts" have given it its own category.
The A&E show "Hoarders" brings back lots of bad memories for me; in fact, some of the cases shown don't seem as bad as the one I lived through. What I don't understand is why they allow the hoarder to stay on-site during the clean-up process. It isn't as if that helps them - in fact, it always leads to emotional break-downs, broken trusts and tearful scenes.
Of course, it probably increases the ratings also.
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