Particularly when you live with a for-real hoarder.

No fun whatsoever.

My Mom is a hoarder. I mean like TV show worthy hoarding.

All I can say is I'm sorry. Perhaps the enormity of the move would allow you to "reset" some of the hoarding to a lower baseline.

After moving in 1995, I decided my next house will be a funeral home.

I feel your pain. Started the process on July 1st which also happened to be my first day of retirement. After 26 years in a house, one seems to accumulate quite a bit of stuff. And the icing on the cake is I'm moving from Arizona and the garage is about 130 and humid with the rain we've had. Oh well. This too shall pass.

Our house in Montana is for sale after 20 years. We have moved 5 times in our 48 years of marriage. Each move has been paid by the bank. This included packing all our stuff. This move will be on us. We’re trying to sell our place with most of our furniture/floor tools/mower/tractor/junk included so hopefully a large Uhaul will do it. We’re about half packed and now just waiting for a buyer. We’re looking at Saddlebrooke in Tucson.

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We’re looking at Saddlebrooke in Tucson.

Nice development north of Tucson and far away from big city problems. (Democrat City Mayor and Council)

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Originally posted by ajensen:
I feel your pain. Started the process on July 1st which also happened to be my first day of retirement. After 26 years in a house, one seems to accumulate quite a bit of stuff. And the icing on the cake is I'm moving from Arizona and the garage is about 130 and humid with the rain we've had. Oh well. This too shall pass.

I hear you. We have heat and humidity approaching the high 90 degree mark, and thunderstorms predicted through the move period.

Yep. I moved at the end of July last year. Mid-summer, and in the South, so it was crazy hot and humid.

Luckily, it was just me, so I didn't have to deal with someone else's stuff too.

And it was a good opportunity to really examine everything I owned, decide what I really needed, and downsize the rest.

The last time I moved was 23 years ago. What really sucked besides mostly doing it all by myself was that I reload ammo. I figure I must have moved about 500+ pounds of bullets and brass. Not to mention having to build a whole new reloading bench. I think I will sell damn near every thing before I move again!

I've lived in 9 States, some of them up to 4 different times with at least a year out of state before coming back.

My last move was 16 years ago and I told Mrs. Flash I'd rather burn the place down than move again.

Well, the movers just refused to touch our stuff, claiming it was too much clutter for them to handle. Back to zero after two months of planning and packing.

I hate moving.

When I was kid, we moved a lot because of my dad's job. It was a major oil company, so they paid for for first class movers. But it turned my mom into the opposite of a hoarder. She threw stuff away that I still wish I had 45 years later.

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Originally posted by kidcop:
Well, the movers just refused to touch our stuff, claiming it was too much clutter for them to handle. Back to zero after two months of planning and packing.

Did the significance of that make an impression on your wife?

I hear ya. We moved into our home we just built this last February, in the snow.

We had lived in our old home for 16 years. I have no clue how we fit all that stuff in that old house that was half the size of our new one.

I couldn't imagine moving a hoarder situation! My kiddo's stuff was bad enough!

My last move was in 1987 from Georgia to Tennessee because of a work transfer of locomotive maintenance…the railroad paid 100% and used their own moving company to make the move…but it was a clusterfuck to say the least and I had already thinned my “flotsam and jetsam” of collected unneeded/unused stuff to make the move go as smooth as possible…yeah right … fast forward to 2021…more stuff ie. Power tools, guns, gun stuff, safes, and reloading benches/equipment/supplies…and a dog . Comparing my last move in 1987 to what my move today in 2021 would be like today makes me certain that I would rather take a beating with a shitty bus station restroom mop than to move again …I’m now to old for this shit!

We live in a two story house and, as we get older, enjoy the stairs less and less. There is a single story house across the street that is really nice. It also backs to a lake so the view from the porch is really nice. We use to joke if it ever came up for sale, we'd buy it in a heart beat.

A few years ago they were ready to sell and offered it to us at a very favorable price (quick sale, no real estate commissions,etc.) My wife and I looked at each other and decided that even moving across the street was too much effort. LOL

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Originally posted by jhe888:
Did the significance of that make an impression on your wife?

One would hope, but I just don't know. I've actually discussed her situation with a friend whose a psychiatrist. She explained that hoarding was actually pretty complex, and usually rooted in unresolved grief and fear of loss.

All I know is that it's a huge pain in the ass.

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Originally posted by jhe888:

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Originally posted by kidcop:
Well, the movers just refused to touch our stuff, claiming it was too much clutter for them to handle. Back to zero after two months of planning and packing.

Did the significance of that make an impression on your wife?

I can tell you from dealing with my mom, this would leave zero impression on a hoarder. They would just see it as the movers being unreasonable and everybody is out to get them.

You could have the health department condemn the premises, the FD call it a fire hazard, or a judge order them removed. It would not make one bit of an impression. Hoarding is a mental condition, and like most mental diseases, you cannot just order them, or reason with them, to stop being ill. It requires mental health treatment to deal with the underlying issues (fear, abandonment, loss). Even then, it will only work if the person truly wants to change. IMO, that seems rare.

My mother would rather live out her days lonely and secluded than to give up hoarding. She has alienated herself physically from her whole family. Whenever there has been outside mental help, she has just manipulated the mental health professional into accusing the rest of us as being the unreasonable bunch. If there ever is a psychiatrist who looks like he can help, Mom dumps him and shops around for another that she can use as a tool against myself and my siblings. There's really no hope at this point other than to wait until she is old enough so she physically cannot continue to hoard.

Sorry to hijack your moving thread. Hoarding is a subject that hits close to home, and I know how hard it is to be a hoarder's loved one. My dad was a saint until the day he passed away.

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Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
You could have the health department condemn the premises, the FD call it a fire hazard, or a judge order them removed. It would not make one bit of an impression. Hoarding is a mental condition, and like most mental diseases, you cannot just order them, or reason with them, to stop being ill. It requires mental health treatment to deal with the underlying issues (fear, abandonment, loss). Even then, it will only work if the person truly wants to change. IMO, that seems rare.

My mother-in-law lived with her eldest son who was a hoarder...has to do with his father having a stroke and having to care for him in the home.

When she had her fatal heart attack, the FD had a hard time getting in...so they reported the house to the health department/fire inspector. They came out and gave him a time period to either clear the house or they would condemn it.

Even taking into consideration the additional loss of his mother, he just didn't get it. He was ready to load up his FAL and fight off the eviction.

It finally took a younger brother and sister renting a dumpster and actually going in to throw stuff out...and he would still try to rescue things from the dumpster

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Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
Sorry to hijack your moving thread. Hoarding is a subject that hits close to home, and I know how hard it is to be a hoarder's loved one. My dad was a saint until the day he passed away.

Not at all. Moving is one of those things I both wanted and dreaded. We've split up the new place so that she'll have her space and I'll have mine, to do with as we see fit. The common spaces are small, so I'm hoping we can more easily control what goes there.

I knew when I met her 32 years ago that she had a problem. Therapy and medication haven't helped, so I'm hoping against hope that at least in the new place we can limit her behavior a little better.

The amount of trash the move has generated has been unreal. A lot of it has been stuff that just was aged out, damaged by moisture or otherwise ruined and worthless. What's bizarre is that someone has been stealing our trash. It's been removed long before the scheduled pickup. Now I have to worry if anything sensitive got thrown out, that might contain a SSN or anything. I'm religious about making certain my private info stays that way, but something may have gotten through.