The cleaner: One woman’s mission to help Britain’s hoarders

My wife and I have been helping a friend of the family move and part of it was dealing with the hoarding. The part in the article about "just buying a new umbrella" is so relatable. We where moving our friend and she needed an extension cord, rather than looking through her boxes, her first instinct was to just order a new one (she already have 15, but she didn't want to look for them, in her 40sqm apartment).

Deciding on what to keep and what to get rid of it also mental struggle for those helping. In our case we just watched as kitchen equipment, complete, and expensive, dinner set, furniture, art, family heirlooms and new unworn clothes got de- prioritized in favour of unread magazines, hundreds of VHS tapes, and thousands of DVDs and BluRays with endless recording of talkshows and random TV programs. She has been following a second rate pop duo band since the 1970s and the idea of missing an article or a TV appearance is unthinkable, so tossing valuable belongings is preferable to throwing out 5 years of unopened magazine on the off chance that there might be a nugget of information she didn't have. It's mentally taxing seeing someone basically throwing away their life that way. We know that she'll never look through those magazine or even hook up the VHS player to figure out which tapes to keep. When she dies, all that's left is a ton of junk which her family do not care about and it will all go to the dump.

I have such huge respect for anyone spending their time helping hoarders every day, the mental load is just massive.

I had a couple of thousand books in my flat in london, including about 500 technical computing ones (design, languages, other stuff). I got my nephew to fix up the flat, for sale. He asked me "Which of these books do you want to keep?", my response after a few seconds "None".

It's so easy to hang on to things you really don't need.

I've moved houses 3 times in the last 3 years. The pain of moving all my personal belongings made me realise how much unnecessary stuff I had accumulated. So I made it a point to throw or give away many things that was no longer really needed. It was a revelation and now I am more mindful to storing anything for long-term without thought. I still have more than 2+ decades of stuff in a storage - books, sentimental stuffs, things I thought may be useful or needed in the future etc. Still figuring out how to go through all that.

I’m attempting to do a weekly bite-sized version of decluttering - one problem area, 1-2 hours, once a week.

I am calling it Swedish Death Cleaning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_death_cleaning) to sell it to my spouse. Not sure the marketing is working but we are making progress.

I'm storing small items in numbered bags. I take a photo and have a web UI for easy searching. It also tracks which items are used frequently vs not used at all in years.

Bags are stored in numerical order for quick storage and retrieval.

With this you do your decluttering from the web interface: search for items that haven't moved in years, flag for removal.

For frequently used items the system doesn't make sense - the storage and retrieval overheads are too high. But it pays off for any item you might forget the location of, or forget if you have it at all.

I feel we're overdue to have these types of digital front ends over our household item storage.

I travelled for 3 months out of a backpack with my wife and then 10 months old daughter. Needing to carry all your stuff necessitated a brutal prioritization. The strongest emotion on coming back to my really not all that full apartment was being overwhelmed with all the stuff. It has just become worse with my now two children growing up. My dream as an an empty nester is to emphasize the empty part.

My grandfather was a hoarder. It's impossible to exaggerate how much stuff was in the house, garden and outbuildings when he died. I can say with confidence that most people have never seen anything like it. It took weeks and weeks of daily trips to the dump to clean everything out, and countless fires. A small fraction of the stuff was sold or kept, but not many people want a thousand milk bottle tops.

I was a teenager when he died and it's had quite an affect on me and I think my siblings too. For most of my adult life I've been extremely reluctant to accumulate any "stuff" at all. I've moved 10 times in 10 years and the only way you can do that is having not much stuff.

But I think I went too far. I have a slightly more healthy attitude to stuff now. I have things like pictures on the walls, books, just things I like that aren't necessarily useful or necessary. My partner, though, I think she tends to hoard stuff. But it's hard to know whether she's actually normal and this is just my latent fear of stuff kicking in.

If folk would stop hoarding browser tabs too; the internet would be a tidier place.

If there’s one thing I learned watching those Hoarder reality tv shows it’s that you can clean up after them all you want but that’s just a bandaid.

One of my most guilty indulgences is the various TV programs about hoarders and hoarding. They are of course sensationalized all to shit and they basically provoke mental breakdowns out of their subjects to make good TV. The guilt isn't just that it's bad like all reality TV- you can tell these people, a lot of them anyway, have serious mental difficulties that a TV show showing up with 4 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks and parking them out front of their homes before pulling all their shit out for neighbors to see and then yelling at them for being distressed about it isn't addressing. They offer "therapy" as part of it, after they've traumatized the fuck out of someone already struggling. Woo.

But I watch. I have a mother who's started down the path. Maybe I'm like... training myself for what's probably due in about 15 years. Or maybe I'm just making excuses for indulging in trash TV.

The article is definitely correct: these people need help. They also usually need money. They usually need a lot of both. A lot of those shows take place in dilapidated parts of the world where you can tell, obviously, that the hoarding is certainly an issue but an even more pressing one is poverty. People keep everything when they're broke, far long past the point of reason, because they've found themselves needing... who knows, a tooth brush, a can of food, and had it kept from them by money so many times that they psychologically can't bear to throw one out, ever. Even if it's rotted away.

And what's worse: because throughout any attempt at helping them, anyone, is then a threat. They become animated, angry, and any action that can actually help them is like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in a 6-shooter. They'll tell you with a straight, red face that yes they fucking need the mayo that's been in the diner packets for 10 years because it's still fine and usable. It's hard to feel sympathy for people so insufferable, and it's not even just you, the helper. They're often estranged from family and have no friends because their behaviors strain every relationship beyond repair.

It's... tragic, in every sense of the word.

FWIW, I also watch a lot of YouTubers who do this in a way that isn't evil. But also the content is less engaging because, well, reality TV wouldn't poke people the way it does into acting the way they do if it didn't make fucking good content. But yeah, I feel notably less disgusting consuming that at least.

I have a wise, witty, charming and personable friend who is a complete hoarder. It was a big deal to be allowed into the house. But, after several years of attempting to help, I eventually had to realize that it wasn't the effort required to clean that was the issue. The issue is that she doesn't like the space that's left behind. If I could snap my fingers and make it all clean and tidy, it would not really help anything because it would be back to the old way in a month or so.

I once suggested bins and shelves to help keep it better organized and manageable, and her response (quite negative) was one of the clues that it wasn't the effort of cleaning up that was the issue, and therefore all the help in the world wouldn't make much of an impact. She doesn't like the space left behind after you clean, and feels the need to fill it up with whatever she can find.

Eventually, I had to just accept that this is how she was, and if I wanted to keep her as a friend I had to stop trying to change how she kept her house; if forced to choose between empty space in her house and keeping me as a friend, there was no way she was going to tolerate empty space in her house. Every bit must be filled. (sigh)

And yet, outside of her house, she's great. For example, she loves helping us clean our house.

How do you know when holding on to things you won't use again becomes hoarding? Is it a volume thing? I have a bunch of stuff I keep around for nostalgic reasons. More than the average person I think. But it's pretty contained and doesn't take up any space in living spaces.

Having seem some relative's houses, IMO hoarding is basically undiagnosed or undertreated ADHD.

I’m on standby as my generation, the Millennial cohort, becomes the true “sandwich generation” in the US. Elder care is such a disaster and farce here. There’s a high profile senior citizen who has no business in leadership but apparently the system likes it this way. There’s going to be a mass passing of Boomers and how it looks - probably a lot like this but without public healthcare so even more traumatic - in the US does not seem manageable.

In the US we don’t even test drivers over age 70 for competence because taking away their licenses means we’d have to look out for them or provide alternatives and that’s not happening so here we are.

Confession of a Quasi-Hoarder:

I have a tendency to keep unfinished projects, many of which are at the "collection of supplies needed" stage. During Covid isolation and depression, combined with a mentally ill roommate who added to all of it, it just overwhelmed my life.

I had to evict the roommate, sadly, for my own self-preservation. I am happy to say that, AFAIK, he's in a better place today, and receiving treatment. MOST of his stuff left with him; a small remnant is stashed in corners of my basement and attic, and I throw out a sackful whenever I remember to do so.

The rest... I extended an invite over Thanksgiving to a friend iby a temp job, far from her family. In return, we agreed she would help me clean up. She had learned from her daughter doing the same for her after her husband died, and very thoughtfully did just as I asked. She'd hold up something and say, "Are you going to finish this project?", and I'd say "Yes, someday... No... Throw it." She'd call me over after assembling a pile, and I'd give approval to throwing it.

I had agency, and am certain I agreed to everything that went curbside. IIRC we filled 5 construction trash bags.

For weeks afterwards, I would continue the trend with another half bag or so a week.

It's given me a new trajectory. Someone ITT described a hoarder disliking empty spaces in their house; I have a romantic image in my head of a magician-type of person with a cluttered but ever-useful house. I am now replacing that with a romantic image of a clean, ordered house, with select places for ordered piles of stuff.

I'm typing from my "office", where hundreds of tools sit within well-labeled bins, one bin deep, all readable from the center of the room. Order. Piles. And for the first time in my life, looking for a thing is something I can do in my head: "Go to my office. On the left wall, just below eye level, on the center of the shelf is a bin labeled 'SHARP THINGS'. You can find an exacto blade there." I can tell you where to find envelopes, DVI cables, electrical tape, and magnifying glasses, from memory. The room is the opposite of a heap... even if I have over a dozen screwdrivers in the bin labeled 'SCREWDRIVERS'.

I say I'm a quasi-hoarder, because I've known people at the actual extreme. A friend who owns three houses, all filled to the brim, with only walkways through the stuff.

Anyway... That's my confession. I have a lot of sympathy for those at the extreme end, because the dysfunction agues me as well. But a friend devoting a couple days to helping me really did a lot to empower me on a new direction in life.

I'm not a hoarder like most people imagine, but I have hoarder tendencies as my two storage units can attest. My main challenge has always been that when I have invested the (significant) effort in organizing things in a reasonable way, some life event soon comes along that causes everything to go back into disarray. My "stuff" is almost entirely various types of tools for doing various types of things that I have gained skills in over the years as personal education or hobbies.

My dream, which I'm hoping to soon realize, is to build myself an expansive workshop that has defined spaces for everything so that I can actually do things and make things when I want to, with all the necessary tools present, and without requiring external storage or cluttering my home. Right now most everything I don't use daily is stored neatly in labeled totes which are tracked in a spreadsheet and on shelving units in a storage unit off-site. Certainly not the cluttered mess that most people think of, but at the same time I have many things which are not used every single day that took years to acquire along with the companion skills and I have no intention of getting rid of.

In times gone past, I wouldn't appear as a hoarder because land, housing, workshop space was all massively more affordable and so I would have achieved my dream many many years ago. It's pretty incredible in how disappointing our current timeline is that someone who earns a massively outsized income compared to the average cannot afford to have a designated place to exercise their hobbies, because property pricing is so out of whack with what is reasonable that you need to be a multi-millionaire/billionaire to afford the space to do and have things without it appearing as a mess.

This is a preface to the fact I see these same problems with my older relatives, many of whom are now incapable of ever again participating in some of those hobbies due to physical infirmity. They spent a lifetime learning and collecting the tools to go along with that learning, and in many ways those tools now represent physically the manifestation of their entire life's work, and they cannot give them up, even as they can neither afford the space to keep them organized nor have the physical capability to continue working those skills even as a hobby, so it all just lingers around them as so much clutter and unopened boxes in the attic. This isn't quite the trash bags of magazines level of hoarding that most people think of, but I already know I will be responsible with the mental and physical effort to deal with this situation after my relatives pass, and yet I already find myself in the same situation. Wouldn't it have been so much nicer if they would have been able to pass along the property, the tools, and the skills to the next generation instead of being priced out and it all ending up in a dump eventually?