Hoarding has its problems

Clean the junk out of your house now, or realize others will be grumbling at you later

Date published: 11/5/2006

FOR THOSE of you out there who are pack rats, and have your basements and attics bulging with every possession you've ever had, I have news.

Get rid of the junk now or know that others will one day have to fight through it.

That's the truth I took away from a day helping relatives clean out the house of a family member who passed away awhile back.This is the second or third one of these house-cleanings I've done in recent years--all for houses of people who either grew up in the Depression or heard about it from those who did.

The result of living through or being constantly told about that period when abject poverty was felt by so many is, apparently, a concern that those days will come back.

With that possibility in mind, many of those children of the Depression developed a preservation methodology known as hoarding.

Quite simply, they just never threw anything away.

This became clear to me that Saturday morning as several of us took to the basement of this sweet, departed relative.

Our task: throw away everything that couldn't be sold by an estate-auction company.

Since almost everything in this world can bring a price from those at an auction, that wouldn't seem to leave much to be thrown away.

Let's just say we filled up an industrial-sized dump truck--twice--and there was still half a houseful left inside.

The scope of our work became clear when several of us began popping open a set of cabinets in the basement.

There, stacked three high and 10 deep on several sets of shelves, were nearly every jar the couple who owned the house had used over a lifetime.

Not fancy, solid canning jars that would bring a price at auction.

No, I'm talking about every jar that had once held coffee, mayonnaise, jelly or pickles.

To say that there were a few hundred jars in there would be a considerable understatement.

There were more than 1,000, all of which we loaded into bags and tossed into the truck for disposal.

The same was repeated for canned goods that looked to have been in the cabinet for more than a decade.

Those were tossed along with nine or 10 broken coffee pots, four toaster ovens that no longer toasted, hundreds of pieces of clothing that hadn't seen daylight since the '60s and enough extra potholders, kitchen magnets and rusted tools to require hundreds of trips to the truck.

And that's not even counting the long-forgotten contents of a frosted-over freezer, knickknacks that stacked five across, and enough plastic food containers to give everyone in Fredericksburg one.And that's not even mentioning the dozen stacks of material upstairs that will keep an entire church of quilters busy for the next decade.

While it took the 10 of us an entire day to go through the things accumulated over a lifetime, it wasn't nearly the challenge encountered at the home of some other relatives recently.

At that one, not only were there jars, plastic containers and the like, there was also every bread wrapper ever used in the home--washed, dried and folded up--and stacks and stacks of used and washed paper towels, dating back decades.

In other house cleanups, the problem hasn't been a wave of hoarded things, but simply a lifetime of mementos that needed sorting out and distributing, either to the dump or to a family member who wanted a keepsake.

The lesson all of this has taught me: keep your house relatively clean while you're in it.

Or realize, with some chagrin, that the people you leave behind will have to face every junky closet and stuffed attic, wishing to themselves that you'd done a better job of it when you had the chance.

To reach ROB HEDELT: 540/374-5415
Email: rhedelt@freelancestar.com

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