Ugh
We have a family friend who is one of those compulsive hoarders you see sometimes on TV; she has a beautiful 3 story brownstone and lives entirely in the front room on the ground floor, as every other room is packed to the ceiling with rubbish. As I and my brother were unemployed we were volunteered by our mother to help her clear some space and reclaim a few rooms.

There were all the usual horrors that one would find in a hoarder's tomb: magazines from 1993, dollar-store ornaments, jars of paint, all thickly coated with a literal inch of caked dust and dog hair from her enormous St. Bernard. Among the most vile were a dessicated mouse that had been under a pile of rubbish so heavy for so long that it had been flattened to the thickness of a bookmark, and a full-blown mouse nest that was in the middle of the bedroom floor underneath a pile of clothes that had been reduced to rags at its core. Like all hoarders, our friend seizes the stinking, filthy, disease-riddled shredded items and puts them aside for later use.

Probably the most surreal part of this dungeon delve was the discovery that, for at least ten years, she had been compulsively purchasing fabric. ENTIRE BOLTS of fabric, from wholesalers and ordering them online. We pulled out as many as we could find, hundreds of yards in every color and texture imaginable, almost all of them filthy and sodden. What she was planning on doing with them, we'll never know.

Sorry there's no punchline, it was just a series of sickening and weird discoveries that I'd rather not dwell upon.
(Galemp makes FreeSpace better, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 21:57, 2 replies)

Ooh
I live with family friends in their nice house.
Half my room is filled with bits of old computer and random technical things that must be ancient.

The dining room is inaccessible; it's mainly filled with stacks of paper. (Old bank statements, newspapers, letters, magazines.) and throughout the house there are more stacks of paper and really odd bits and bobs.

Their bedroom is basically a big pile of clothes.

The hoarder's wife tries to clear up now and again and the threat 'I'm going to get a skip, and get rid of it all.' doesn't seem to work. If she wasn't there I think it would be a lot worse...eek.
(Lalalalou, Mon 29 Mar 2010, 12:08, closed)

My mother was a hoarder...
Not as bad as the people mentioned above but nonetheless. Her thing tended to be broken clocks and CB equipment. She blamed me and my brother for the constant mess. Until we moved out and then she had no excuse. After my father passed away, it got even worse. Often when we would visit, there would be nowhere to sit or sleep.

The thing is, it was always her who would be saying about getting the skip but she was the cause.

I'm fighting the same tendencies in myself. I'm pretty good about throwing away genuine rubbish. The thing is though, when you're a computer nerd, you're never quite sure you're not going to need that graphics card or centronics interface lead somewhere down the line, y'know...
(Richy_T hundreds if not thousands of dollars, Wed 31 Mar 2010, 22:14, closed)