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Hoarders

There is a very enjoyable art / hoarder project by Stuart Brisley here:
http://dump.ordure.org/www.ordure.org/r.y.sirb/viable.html

He captures the hoarder lifestyle nicely:
At first sight the collection looked like a huge heap of junk, impressive nonetheless. He said he has been considering building a few paths on the top of it all, as a second layer. There is is still a lot of unused space up there towards the ceiling, and he is an enthusiastic mountain walker having been well taught by a `klettern hexe`, i.e. a climbing witch. Building another layer on the top would be a pleasurable task for him. he said that he has already travelled across the top surface several times looking for missing objects.
An interesting read in it's entirety.
 
Dingo667 said:
I loved this post about his hoarder ebay mum:
Incredible 50 pictures and hilarious comments, hours of fun:

http://www.randomthink.net/misc/ebay/

I have no idea how anybody could live like that deliberately. It's what made me move away from my parents and buy my own place. Living at my parents' place was getting too crowded, with all the boxes of stuff stacked up to the ceiling in my room.

That woman needs to have yard sales. Lots of them!
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Citizen Kane without Xanadu! :shock:

Sorry James, please explain - not sure I know what you mean.
 
Charles Foster Kane hoarded stuff, meaningless stuff, things in boxes that were never opened. He had the castle Xanadu to keep it in, though.

The theme is taken up in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where the meaningless acquisitions of Big Daddy are shored up around him in a cellar as he confronts terminal illness.

Consciously or not, Andy Warhol took Kane for a rôle-model and had a warehouse filled with industrial-type shelving, where he stored the mainly unexamined loot of his shopping trips.

Probably the urge to collect things should have some relationship to the time we have left to enjoy them. Materialism screws things up terribly! :?
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Probably the urge to collect things should have some relationship to the time we have left to enjoy them. Materialism screws things up terribly! :?
Yep. I have reached the age when collecting stuff seems pointless. Apart from food, drink and essential clothes, I hardly buy anything nowadays.

And even what little stuff I own prompts me to think "Do I really need this any more?"

I have books I will never read or study anymore, a few technical knick-knacks I'll never use anymore.... etc.

(If G. Brown thinks that encouraging people to spend more will haul us out of depression, he'll be very disappointed by people like me! :twisted: )
 
Buried alive under a mound of rubbish: Elderly U.S. couple missing for three weeks found by horrified paramedics
By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 10:35 AM on 26th May 2010

An elderly US couple missing for three weeks were found alive buried under mounds of rubbish in their crammed apartment.
Chicago police said their home on the city's South Side was 'packed from floor to ceiling' with garbage and may have to be condemned.
Rodents had attacked the couple, believed to be a 76-year-old-woman and 79-year-old man, as they lay immobile under the piles of rubbish.

'The debris included clothing, trash, papers, food, appliances, even tires,' Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford told reporters.
'They were in it,' he said. 'I'm not sure how they got in it [but] they were in it and they couldn't get up and get out.'
He described the debris in the apartment as 'front to back, floor to ceiling.'
A police spokesman described the couple as 'hoarders'.

'That was the term being used,' he said.

Neighbours who had not seen the couple in some time phoned police, worried about their welfare.

But when police arrived, the stench from the flat - all three floors of it - was so overpowering that they had to call the Chicago Fire Department.
Fire crews had to don special hazardous materials before breaking down the door of the flat on Monday night.

They were hit with the unbelievable smell, piles of rotting food waste, and trash.
'It's kind of an unbelievable sight,' Langford said. 'They've been in there for a long time and there's just a lot of stuff in there.'

A Fire Department spokesman said the man and woman were taken to Jackson Park Hospital in critical condition.
A hospital spokesman said the two were admitted and remained listed in critical condition at noon Tuesday.

An 83-year-old neighbour, Hattie Fields, said the couple had lived in the building for years. Police declined to identify the couple.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldne ... z0p1yxGKq1
 
Serial 'hoarder’ found buried under piles of rubbish at home after four months
A four month search for a missing woman in the US had ended after she was found buried under piles of rubbish at her home.
By Paul Thompson
Published: 11:54PM BST 29 Aug 2010

Billie Jean James was found by her husband who had been living in the same house as his wife’s corpse.

He spotted one of her feet sticking out from underneath the mountain of rubbish and clutter that littered their Las Vegas home.

Police had searched the house several times while looking for the 67-year-old who was known to be a compulsive hoarder.

Sniffer dogs had been sent into the property but were unable to locate the body amid floor to ceiling piles of clothes, rubbish, empty food boxes and other goods that Mrs James had stored. Officials believe rotting food and other pungent smells stopped the dogs from working properly.

“For our dogs to go through that house and not find something should be indicative of the tremendous environmental challenges they faced,” said Las Vegas police spokesman Bill Cassell.

Friends said Mrs James was compulsive hoarder who spent her weekends buying goods at car boot sales.

She also frequented thrift shops and refused to allow anyone into her house because she was so ashamed of the mess.

Police said small pathways had been forged through the clutter to allow the couple to move around the house.

Her husband Bill James, 68, first reported his wife missing in April.

He feared she might have suffered a stroke and become disorientated.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... onths.html
 
rynner2 said:
Serial 'hoarder’ found buried under piles of rubbish at home after four months
A four month search for a missing woman in the US had ended after she was found buried under piles of rubbish at her home.
By Paul Thompson
Published: 11:54PM BST 29 Aug 2010

It wouldn't have been rubbish to her though...
 
Our family's hidden shame
As a child, Jessie Sholl conspired to hide her family's secret, tidying the garden so no one would guess the horrors that lay inside the house. Only recently could she finally confront her mother's problem – and walk away
Kira Cochrane The Guardian, Saturday 5 February 2011

Sholl's mother, Helen, was always messy, always disorganised, but 13 years ago her behaviour shifted into a more compulsive, disturbing realm. Roger, her long-term partner, had died, and on visiting her afterwards, Sholl says she found "everything about her house was different".

On one memorable trip to her mother's house, "The scene was just pathological," she says. "I could tell she wasn't able to cook, because the stove was piled high with pans and dishes, so I said: 'What's going on? Why haven't you cleaned?' And she just said: 'I don't have time to clean.'"

Sholl describes the details of that scene in her gripping memoir, Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding. There were "plates full of hard-as-a-rock spaghetti," she writes, "containers of motor oil, calculators and flashlights and key chains still in their packaging, knitting needles, magazines, bunches of brown bananas, and fast-food soda cups bleeding brown stickiness".

She and her husband resolved to clean up and, with Helen fighting them all the way, they gathered a mound of rubbish bags and seven car loads of possessions for recycling. Still the house was a mess.

...

In fact, hoarding is so common that Sholl found online support groups for children of hoarders, people expressing shame and sadness at the conditions they had grown up in, and terrified that if something happened to their parents the emergency services would not be able to get inside the house. "I was so shocked at those messageboards – I had no idea there were so many of us", says Sholl. Before discovering the support groups, she had only confided in her husband about her mother, never to friends. She was too terrified of their reaction. But since confessing all, she has been surprised by the number of positive, open-minded responses. Many of those she has told have experienced something similar.

etc...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... sica-sholl
 
My father is like this. I do not know what to do with him.

I have talked to him about the immense pleasures of Ebay...but no.

I will admit Im pretty bad too, but you can get into all my rooms
 
My dining room has been piled up with junk for quite a few months while I have alteratons done. I realised recently that I'm used to the mess now and don't miss the space any more.

So when I read this article I got straight in there and sorted it out. I now have loads of bags of rubbish for the tip tomorrow. :lol:
 
One of my friends moved back in with her Mum a while ago (because she lost her job), and she ended up having to throw out bags and boxes of rubbish. She had to hire a skip. It took her weeks, and she uncovered dead mice, rats etc buried under the mounds of rubbish.
Just recently, she found a rat's nest that she missed the first time round.
Her mother fought the cleaning process all the way, so my friend ended up doing it all by herself.
Her Mum isn't senile, she just seems to have given up.

My own parents are hoarders too, but they know when to throw stuff out. My Mum is a pretty zealous 'clean freak'.
 
My next door neighbour is like that, he never let anyone into his house and when he had a stroke the year before last, he was lucky enough to be found by someone from his church and it was the first time anyone had seen inside his house.

Front room was 4' deep in garbage, sort of a mix of shopping that had been there for years including food, bric-a-brac tpe stuff he bought and just plain rubbish. His daughter told me there was a chair, sofa and telly in there somewhere but I couldn;t see them.

Took them about 5 trips to the dump with a hatchback before they gave up and hired a skip, then they filled it and hired a 2nd skip, took them about a week just to get all the crap out with his family and church people working shifts. It was nasty.

Thankfully I can get in now to clean up for him, even if he's tricky about it, so it doesn;t get chance for stuff to start accumulating.
 
My niece's partner is a house-clearer; he clears out houses where the occupant has died, or 'done a runner' as he puts it. He has some amazing stories to tell. Recently he cleaned out the house of a so-called 'dirty hoarder'- the house was full of adult nappies, among other things. I saw the photos- not nice.

This used to be done by the council in the old days, but nowadays it's done by contractors, apparently.
 
With my move overseas coming up in two weeks I have finally taken to the task of chucking stuff out, it is actually a very rewarding process to see the clutter disappear and to realise that you don't actually need half of this stuff. Still the odd curio creeping through the net and Mum's loft will be getting a few extra additions before I go!

Amazing though when you look at some of the stuff you hang on to and keep...
 
I find it difficult to part with books. Probably comes from the time when the brits didn't allow catholics to be literate. Teaching literacy to catholics was a hanging offence under the Penal Laws.
 
ramonmercado said:
I find it difficult to part with books. Probably comes from the time when the brits didn't allow catholics to be literate. Teaching literacy to catholics was a hanging offence under the Penal Laws.

Yeh, books and magazines are the hard bit. Films and music collections can easily be digitised and compacted, books though... there is something about having them in your hand and on a shelf that just doesn't translate to a kindle for me.
 
The kindle technology offers a whole new type of book-hoarding, though. :D

I've downloaded dozens of books that I've never dreamed I could own, all for free, to read on my various pooters and iPhone.

I don't own a Kindle but I may buy one just to put these wondeful books on, partly because it'd be worth it anyway and partly because I read so fast that the phone and pooter screens can't keep up.

What are they now, £111? It'd be rude not to. ;)
 
I was quite reluctant to give up on CDs with their nice little inlay cards etc... but didn't take long to ditch buying them in favour of downloads.

Can see the benefit of online books/magazines. Just finding it harder to make the break with this medium.

Although surveying the mass of books/mags and the space they take up I'd pay a hefty fee to have them all magically put into digital format!
 
I'm a hoarder, I just can't help it. "I'll need that one day" is my motto, and it is true, I swear, the week after I ditch something, I'll need it. Sadly for me, I have a bloody great big warehouse to keep my crap in. There's a Jaguar in there somewhere, last seen about 5 years ago. One of these days I'm going to get her out....

I also hoard um, "art pamphlets" for some unknown reason. Possibly in case the Interwebs go down forever, I know I'll have some smut to look at. The Web is part of the problem, once in a while I decide I'm having a clearout, then find a corner of the web where someone is waxing lyrical about some gem I have in my collection, and I decide I'll hang on to it. Some old smut is worth a fortune these days, especially "specialist" stuff. Cough. (Not talking about anything illegal, I mean stuff that could be bought in newsagents. Spanking magazines etc.) One day I'll flog it all and be loaded. One day.

There are piece-of-shit H&H amplifiers in my warehouse which should by rights have been tipped years ago, but thanks to some geek on a forum somewhere, I'm hanging onto them, just because he says they were the best amplifiers ever built. I'll never use them, my next of kin will probably end up having to dispose of them.

Which brings me to another point. A friend had a next door neighbour like the one above (thankfully, no adult nappies), with rat runs in his rooms stacked high with old tat. When it came time to go into a nursing home, my mate was asked to help clear the place - into a skip. He could keep anything he wanted, and ended up with loads of rare Jazz LPs (nothing like my Jazz Mags), which he flogged for a fair few quid. Also in there was an old Hofner guitar and a Vox Teardrop - both worth a pretty penny. The neighbour's family let him keep the lot, they'd not been near the place, or the old guy, for years, my mate had been the one keeping an eye on him, so they said he'd earned it. (I think the old chap was hard work!)

Anyway, all the while he's sifting through tat and finding gems, other people are filling a skip. My mate sees an old amplifier, takes it home and phones a dealer who tells him that the amp was very rare, especially if the little mixer which came with it was intact. That'd be the mixer he'd seen in the skip....
He never did get the mixer back! That's why I'm a hoarder.
 
My solution to the hoarding is Freecycle. Anything that I've hung onto without using can be passed on to a grateful fellow citizen. :D

I kept a bag of exotic seashells for about 12 years until Freecycle came along. They're now adorning someone's Caribbean-themed bathroom. Someone else had my old Dunlop steel-toecapped wellies at the weekend, after I bought posh new ones.

All my daughter's old Goth frocks were snapped up at Halloween. Even a really HUGE bridesmaid dress, about a size 24, which I was given a few years ago, was eagerly collected to force onto an unsuspecting local chap for his surprise 30th birthday costume party in Blackpool. His delighted girlfriend says it was a perfect fit. :lol:

Local charities are always looking for stock so I send off books to them. Not sure they'd fancy those vintage jazz mags, though. ;)
 
I tend to keep assorted small random things in case they're ever needed as props for my drama group :oops: I've got several boxes in my room that are filled with odds and sods, just because one day we might be doing some play that happens to need something that I've kept hold of for 10 years. The group does have a couple of garages that a lot of their stuff is stored in, but I always suspect that if these things "that might be useful one day" got put in there, we'd never be able to find them when we needed them
 
*nods* Yup, I've spent all day sorting out the bags of junk that've collected like flotsam during my ongoing renovations. I've decided not to keep any more nice pieces of card to use as bookmarks* because I'll soon have a Kindle and the card can go in the recycling bin so it won't be wasted. ;)

Found a lovely rigid vanity case which I've filled with all the in-car phone and ipod chargers that were lying around, so I can stick it in the boot ready to produce with a flourish next time a passenger has let their gadget run down.

*Just keeping the one piece of card, from a skull-patterned pencil case I had for Xmas. :lol:
 
Yesterday I sorted out my "work" room and threw away junk, sent away unneeded books, put stuff in the garage. Somehow sorting out stuff always absorbs a lot of my mental energy. Much more than just cleaning the house. Could this have something to do with entropy and the second law :?

The concept of entropy is defined by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of a closed system always increases or remains constant.

So that sorting out stuff (reducing chaos and entropy) takes much more energy than other household tasks?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
 
uair01 said:
So that sorting out stuff (reducing chaos and entropy) takes much more energy than other household tasks?
Yep! Well, sort of. You reduce chaos, but increase entropy because of the energy expended. Entropy always increases....
 
escargot1 said:
My solution to the hoarding is Freecycle. Anything that I've hung onto without using can be passed on to a grateful fellow citizen. :D

Someone else had my old Dunlop steel-toecapped wellies at the weekend, after I bought posh new ones.

I get guilt pangs if I take anything to the local tip (sorry "recycling and waste management station") but used to come away with more than I took as well, which annoyed the wife. Free Cycle is a boon to me coz it gives me a guilt free way of getting rid of stuff that doesn't go on ebay.

If it wasn't a combination of free cycle and ebay I'd be a massive hoarder!

@Escargot: Posh wellies? What did you get? I got a pair of Hunters last for Xmas 2009 and I was a bit unhappy with the image they tend to convey (I've also inherited a labrador and a Barbour so I'm screwed really, but it's not my fault!) BUT I've got to say they are truly excellent wellies.
 
My new wellies're Karrimor ones with straps to adjust the tops. They fit my shapely calves better than the old ones.
The old'uns were perfectly sound but these ones fit better. They were £20, down from about £40.

If not for Freecycle the old ones'd be under the stairs as a 'spare' pair! :lol:
 
I think this fits here:

Police called to settle extraordinary village 'tank' row
Residents in a quiet village are embroiled in an extraordinary neighbourhood row after a military enthusiast bought a £10,000 tank and parked it outside his home.
By Andrew Hough 4:00PM GMT 23 Feb 2011

The huge green tanklike crane, designed to carry out battlefield repairs, has been sitting in a lay-by since new owner Nicholas Kravchenko drove it there last week.
Residents living in the normally tranquil area of Wolvercote, near Oxford, Oxon, have branded the machine an ''eyesore''.
Police have now been called in to settle the "neighbourhood dispute" amid claims the £10,000 tank was intimidating locals.

The enthusiast bought the former Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) armoured vehicle second-hand to drive it for his own pleasure to display it at shows and charity events.
Mr Kravchenko, a retired army engineer, is now refusing to move the four-tonne camouflaged vehicle, which came complete with caterpillar tracks and take up three-and-a-half normal parking spaces.
''I can go out and drive it any time I like. There's no law to stop anyone having 10 tanks," he said.

''The council have not said it's anti-social and the police would have been straight on to me if it was parked illegally.
''It's not intimidating, because it's a square box with a Rolls-Royce engine in it and it doesn't stick out in the road.''
Mr Kravchenko, who calls himself "Tank Man", claimed he was the victim.
"I'm fed up with it," he said.

He has told neighbours he spent more than £10,000 on the ex-Cold War armoured military crane.
He said that the tank-tracked vehicle was used by the British Army during the 1960s and was "very rare".
Mr Kravchenko, who lives with his wife and son on St Peter's Road, claims the vehicle has a top speed of 20mph.

Neighbours said he was ruining their street.
They appealed to Oxford City Council to take action but the authority said it was powerless to act.

Paul Harvey, who lives three doors away from Mr Kravchenko, said: ''The whole situation is unbelievable.
''There's a limited number of spaces on the street and this tank is taking up a number of them.
''It's so incredibly anti-social.''

Another neighbour Debbie Tyson, who lives opposite the tank, added: ''I have to look at that thing every morning.
''It's a disgrace. I can't believe there's nothing that the authorities can do.''

Another woman, who did not want to be named, feared her neighbour would leave it there permanently.
''It's an eyesore and is upsetting and scares the little kids," she said.
"One toddler asked her mum if we were in a war. It's not right."

Mr Kravchenko bought the decommissioned military vehicle from the MoD and told neighbours he planned to display it at military shows.

Town hall chiefs said there were no parking restrictions on the road and the vehicle is roadworthy and taxed.
Council officers have promised to meet with Mr Kravchencko this week in an attempt to persuade him to move the vehicle.
''We're now working with the local community and police as well as our Crime and Nuisance Action Team to see if we can help with this dispute," a spokeswoman said.

It is not the first time Mr Kravchenko has been criticised for his vehicle collecting passion.
Last September, the council was forced to remove a convoy of Mr Kravchenko's vehicles including five trailers, a Ford Sierra, a Land Rover and some scrap metal after declaring them abandoned.
But Mr Kravchenko successfully appealed the ruling and earlier this month, Oxford County Court ordered the council return the vehicles to him.


Neighbour Alan Cotmore said: ''It's a lovely area but it's becoming a personal scrapyard.''
War veteran David Bedford, 85, added: ''It's heartbreaking living where I do.
'I have to look at his cars every time I leave my house and it's really getting me down.
''I don't know what to do any more.''

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... k-row.html
 
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