My mother's home is about to be condemned... Need encouragement and ways to shake the shame!
She was a class 5 hoarder, with trash 4+ feet throughout the house and so full she could no longer get in. We rescued her 8 months ago, got her cancer surgery, and established in a memory care unit near our home. Her house was like this for at least the last 30-40+ years.
The town she lives in just gave us 2 weeks to move the cars off her house lot, and the inspector found two more in the bushes, total 3. There is one very poor man whom I paid to mow the grass all fall, so I have left him a message to see if he wants anything he can haul off on the outside, including the cars.
I have a lot of shame because I grew up there and was blamed by narcissistic mom for the mess. I know in my heart that was not true, because I have 6 children, 5 at home and who are home schooled, and I live on a small farm with all that entails, and my house is clean.
I am embarrassed I have not been able to get the place cleaned up even just on the outside. I plan to hire a hoarding specialist in June, the first oppty I have to spend significant time 5 hours away from home.
I could use significant amounts of encouragement at this time!
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Honey, I want you to print that up, hang it on your fridge, your bathroom mirror, the computer screen, and wherever else you might be paused. You did not do this. It was a life your mother chose, NOT YOU.
I am so sorry that you are stuck with this mess; is there anyway of getting out of it? It sounds to me like you already have enough on your plate. How is the house Your responsibility? Do you want this house?
I think hoarding must be a type of mental illness--I am not diagnosing it, it just seems that from those I have experienced who do it, there is usually the other crappola that goes along with it: Fear, paranoia, and too much self-awareness.
I would not be "surprised" if they never flushed their toilets. ( I do not mean to be gross, just illustrating my point:)
They want to hang on to everything that is "all about them," because they are empty, shallow souls who cannot get out of their own way. It is a sad phenomenon, but it is a crazy world anymore, and people seem to develop strange behaviors as coping mechanisms.
Instead of reaching out to others in a helping, giving, productive way, they retreat and gather garbage. How can that be healthy or normal?
It's a shame and it is embarrassing, but it's not how you are. Those who are sick never think there is anything wrong with them.
Surprise, you are fine. Take deep breaths ( but not around your Mother's house) and focus on the task at hand, knowing you are handling the situation out of duty, not shame. I'l bet we could eat off the floor of your lovely home:) Take care, xo
My mom's place was OK for an estate sale company to come in and do most of it. I still had a fair amount to prepare and pick up afterwards. My cousin, whom I admire, did most of her mom's place herself, but she had only lost housekeeping ability and become a hoarder for the last 7-10 years. I came up and helped with the bathrooms and she had some friends help too. It was not done overnight. There were hundreds of full trash bags (the big kind) involved, she had to divvy it up and not put them all out at once.
Maybe you could donate the excess cars? There are a lot of charities who want cars, and even if they are just parts for scrap it could be of some help.
Hoarding is classified as an obsessive-compulsive disorder. There seems to be a genetic component, but if it hasn't shown up yet in you, it probably won't. I have the opposite tendency -- I often donate or trash things before I should. The idea of clutter is terrible to me. It is probably because of what I saw with my mother.
I hope the cleanup goes quickly, surprise. And I hope you find some good things amongst all the clutter.
Christmas stayed all year, just got moved to my old bedroom for most of the year. We had to plow a path to get through the bedrooms. Now there is only one room that is hoarded. It has my mother's old clothes -- racks and racks of awful, worn out things. She won't let me touch them, though. I guess they are who she is, so I leave this room alone.
Printing....
Thankfully, my mother is no longer living in the home, and it is the only house on the block, without even across the street neighbors.
I feel a lot of anger at many of the "leading families" in town, all who live within a couple of blocks, who simply turned away from the problem especially when I was a child living there. Now that she is out of town, they finally want something done, and now. It seems like it would have been more helpful a few decades earlier!
When we rescued mother, hubby took her to the doc and I walked around the house taking pix for our guardianship case. The bushes are completely grown up 20+ feet high, so no one can see into her private retreat from the world. She had a couple of brown kiddy pools full of mosquito larva, broken plastic chairs all over, garbage bags she changed her mind on throwing away, full (!!) bottles of ?? and empty food wrappers, you name it. She even had a little storage building for tools, but then the lawn mower was pushed under a porch. I also found one of her dogs she had lost and had been looking for, under a tarp where she covered it when it died. The car(s?) is/are full up to the windows, and there were mouse feces on the dash. Ew.
I will gladly pay someone well who can clean this up for me so when I hire that professional hoarding cleanup this summer, I won't have to see the garbage on the outside!
I guess I don't like being told I have to, NOW, since we have the high school state science fair this week, and Holy Week next. I will not be able to be there - maybe that is better. I completely understand about the town wanting it cleaned up, and now is probably better than when the mosquitoes start again.
Christina, you are right about the toilets. Ooh bad memories deleted here!!!
He would get one room cleaned out and find another door that had been blocked with packages.
He was 70ish, himself and the job was over whelming.
They had 3 days of sales just from one house. He kept saying 'Why did my sister do this to me?" Yikes. I think that I would have tried to sell the house "As is" and you get what is inside. The $$ he made, wasn't worth the clean up.
I think that I would refuse to take ownership of a home, even if it was left to me.
She suggested she could go live in her mother's house (also full, but I don't know how bad yet). I said we would have to get a certificate of occupancy to get the power turned back on since she had it turned off after that fire. She remembers nothing about a fire, and that was about 1985, so I minimized that.
I said did not know what would be required for the inspection. We would need to have it treated for termites though. Well, she had this done already! :) Why, when the fat man went under the house to do it, he had to pull out all the heating vents. She "had him stack up the junk pipe in the parking lot because she was going to put it back under there herself, then it got grown up with weeds and she gave it to somebody for scrap because she forgot what it was for." That was about 1980, she is living 30 years in the past!
I praised her to the highest, that was great, we needed to change the pipes and get a new heat pump with a/c, and get rid of that old oil furnace! This was really starting to bother her now, since I was talking about "real money," and she decided maybe she did not want to encourage me anymore in fixing up a house for her. :D
Now, you didn't say; did you want the house? Because if it were me I'd just walk away and flip off the city. All those people who never even Tried to help? Let them deal with it. It seems like a whole lot of work and a TON of money just to clean it, never mind bringing it up to code. And you have to wonder, once you clean it, can you even get all those nasty smells out? Probably better to bulldoze it to the ground and sterilize the earth somehow.
Yeah, these boots were made for walking. . . *grin*
There are 3 places where there might be things of interest. A curio, with my baby photos and school pix from childhood; a "wardrobe", with boxes packed in 1972 from her move; and the special room I was never allowed in, and which was cut off from dog traffic too, that contains all my father's "stuff" from his office etc. He was stricken with a stroke in 1968, and I never knew him, nor was allowed to see anything. Now that I am in charge, I am going to get that stuff and look at what was protected more than me.
I hope the fire department will agree to burn it. Otherwise, I plan to sit in the parking lot and cheer when the bulldozer comes in. But first, I have to clear the yard to even have a place for a dumpster. I guess that will go where the better car is in the driveway. She had been pottying back there when she could not get into the house, so it would be a good place for a dump-ster. Just don't tell the clean up crew! :p
It is sad, because still to this day I can't clean the house. I tackled some of the closets and got them orderly, but some of them are so jam packed I don't know what to do with the stuff. And the whole house is filled with big furniture. Her solution to needing more storage room was not to get rid of the old, but to buy another piece of furniture for storage. I would love to paint the house and clean it until it shined, but I can't work with all this big furniture covering the floors and walls. Hoarding is frustrating for everyone around but the hoarder.
There is no shame for you. Just be sure to keep your mask on. Big hugs as you work through this.
My mother bought enough "antique" furniture (old, dilapidated) to fill up one side and the entire upstairs, plus a tenant house she had moved to the back I forgot about, and I suspect her mother's house is full too. She always said that when I grew up I could have my choice of furniture, but she would only part with the worst furniture when I got my first apartment.
I talked to the lawn mowing man tonight, and he asked if he could have one of the 5 doors he moved into grandmother's house last year! Doors, for crying out loud!! I said NO- one thing at a time. He is taking ALL three cars Saturday, and I am joyful!
I have talked to so many people today trying to figure this out, and I was so hoping this man would come through. I do not mind him benefiting from this at all - he is a sharecropper on 30 ac, and grows a 10 ac market patch. That is his income plus the odd jobs. If he can be blessed by those nasty cars, I am all for it!
I would not have gotten through the day without you ladies helping me. Thank you. Now I have a concrete plan!
I REALLY need to think of how this can be a blessing, because it has never felt like one before. I love FLYlady, she is who taught me to look for the blessing, and I just have to take babysteps!
Placed. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
Placed. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
My concern is when my in-laws pass my MIL's 2 daughters and my husband (immediate family) will need to go through all the "stuff" and one of the sisters has already stated that there isn't a need to go through things quickly. My concern is that an empty house is not a good situation. Also, the sisters live only a few minutes from in-laws house where we live an hour away. Any suggestions?
Sadly, Grandmother had beautiful real antique furniture that my mother ruined. Mother locked a big dog up in the house, and fed it and let it run in the yard about once a month for a few years while Grandmother was alive. That was to "protect the house," but all it did was to ruin what was there and to abuse another dog.
My only reason for even looking in that house is to find a photo of my grandmother. I have none, and I consider her my "real" mommy. I barely remember what her face looked like, but I remember her hands clearly. :)
Don Aslett is a great cleaning guru, and somewhere in his writing says that storage units are used to store junk. Anything that has not been needed long enough to go in the unit is really not needed. In college, I thought I was supposed to keep everything. When I read Aslett, it gave me permission to let those things GO!!
There are shows on TV about the auctions of the contents of storage units when renters don't pay. Your MIL may feel overwhelmed by the prospect of going through the stuff. You could ask if there was anything specific the heirs needed to know about in the unit. That thing might need to be rescued before dementia sets in and they forget to pay, causing the junk to be sold.