I've been married to a serious hoarder for 26 years, during which his
hoarding has only worsened.  He is an otherwise wonderful man who
becomes terribly upset and angry if I even suggest that any of the useless,
often broken, dirty, and worn-out things he saves or brings home from
garage sales, etc. to save should be thrown out.  My biggest secret to
handling his problem is endless boxes. Here is how I handle it:..

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This form was submitted:  Sep 10 2007 / 12:08:21

feedback = Handling my husband's hoarding.

I've been married to a serious hoarder for 26 years, during which his
hoarding has only worsened.  He is an otherwise wonderful man who
becomes terribly upset and angry if I even suggest that any of the useless,
often broken, dirty, and worn-out things he saves or brings home from
garage sales, etc. to save should be thrown out.  My biggest secret to
handling his problem is endless boxes. Here is how I handle it:

1.  I never suggest anything should be thrown out.  I have learned that
it makes him suspicious and increases his vigilance over his "stuff"
(his word for the whole mess).

2.  I have devoted two bedrooms in our house to his stuff, which is a
big loss of space but about the best I can do to keep the mess in check.
  One room is euphemistically termed his "home office" (you can barely
get into it) and the other is "storage for his office," which is all
boxes with a small space for me to get in.  Both rooms are literally
piled to the ceiling with stuff, but I keep as much as of it as I can in
boxes in both rooms.

3.  As much as possible, everything that makes its way out to another
room in the house I move into his office, telling him it needs to be
there so it will "stay nice."  I have a few problem areas, such as his
dresser, which is in the master bedroom but barely has any clothes in it
because it is so full of junk he he feels he has to protect, like
business cards from places he has visted years ago, old mail, "collectibles"
and "memorabilia" like keys to who-knows-what that he has saved for
years, and so on.

4.  Whenever I see him taking anything into his office, I go in behind
him and exclaim how his stuff is getting ruined by just sitting out
where it can get damaged.  Sometimes I elaborate on how the air will make
the clothes moldy, or the magazines could fall and bend their spines,
or whatever.  I tell him "we need to get all these nice "antique"
computer parts / magazines / mail / clothes / paper bags etc. into boxes so
they do not get ruined." 

5.  If I can get him to agree, then I get a "nice storage box" from the
stack I always keep.  (I get book boxes online and they are all the
same size, and can be stored flat.  I spend about $50 a month on boxes.)

6.  Then I make a big show of carefully putting like items "like with
like" into the boxes.  I say things like "Oh look, some of the mail has
fallen over here!  Oh, dear! Let's get it all saved nice!" because of
course he just piles things in heaps with no organization at all.

7.  I then put the lid on the box, which is generally just a mix of
junk mail, old magazines, broken garage-sale stuff, etc. and label it
something like "mail & miscellaneous" to be SAVED (big letters)."

8.  After a while, I take a few of the boxes out of his "office" and
put them into the "storage room."

9.  Whenever he is not around, I take boxes from the storage room and
take them to a commercial dumpster.  If he is gone for a day or more on
business, I take numerous boxes, always from the "storage room,"
somewhere in the mid-back, where he can't get to it easily so he can't tell
it's gone.  Then I move the pile back. 

If he notices anything, I announce that I had to restack the boxes
because I did not want anything to fall over and get damaged.

He's a really smart man, but he never seems to figure out that there is
a consistent 200 or so boxes in each room even though he constantly
adds to his "stuff."  He sometimes goes and looks in his boxes, but not
very often, and only the most recent ones that are by the door of either
room. 

Once in a while he gets unhappy because he can't find something he
remembers having, like a broken heating pad that he thinks he can salvage a
control off of to fix another broken heating pad (even though he
doesn't actually fix anything, ever), but I always tell him "well, let's
save this broken one for now, because sooner or later the other one will
turn up."  He has acquired so much stuff like that that he then usually
forgets about it. 

It is aggravating that I have to spend time and money on this, and they
both add up, but I can't think of any other way to approach it that
will preserve both my marriage and my sanity.

Of course I would like him to be cured, but he thinks that he is
"thrifty" and "sentimental" and doesn't think his saving all this useless,
dirty, worn-out, broken junk is a problem.  He thinks I am the one with
the problem.

When we were first married, he used to tell people that his wife (me)
was trying to "throw out all my stuff" because for "some reason, she's a
thrower-outer" and he would get irritable just mentioning it or
thinking about it.  Now he tells people that "my wife is a compulsive
organizer, she organizes everything to death, they ought to have a therapy
group for someone like her."

Hah! "They" do! This is it!  Anyway, for anyone else who can't stand
living with heaps and heaps of junk everywhere, boxing it up is an
approach that has worked for me. 

If you can't afford to buy boxes, drug stores and grocery stores will
often have boxes to give away - you just have to go there every day or
so to get enough to deal with the constant influx of junk.  You have to
get ones with flaps that can be closed so they can all be stacked
safely. If you can at all afford to buy boxes, though, that is best, because
they are a lot easier to stack and they all look alike which makes it
hard for the hoarder to tell that anything is missing.

I offer my prayers as well for everyone else who is dealing with a
hoarder.