Jolt Country

like the television show but in real life. I spent the morning helping one move out of their house. I don't know if they are hoarders of just slobs with too much stuff. Either way, disgusting. The television show does not give you, the viewer, the smell factor. I have a need to shower and burn my clothes now.


THE
SKEEVED OUT
AARDVARK

(who says that word is only used by old people)

Maybe they're Obsessed and need an Intervention!

My mother-in-law is a hoarder and could stand to be on that program.

Back in the mid-90s, my wife and I lived next door to my mother-in-law and we caught her storing stuff in our shed because her shed and garage were full. It led to one of the biggest fights my wife and I have ever had.

When my father-in-law died, my mother-in-law used the insurance money to buy so much stuff that her house was bursting at the seams. When her parents died, she inherited another house that sits on 100 acres that she insists on referring to as "her ranch". "The Ranch House" was built in the 70s and is about 1,500 square foot and the last time my wife and I went down there, there was so much stuff in the house that there was not enough room for all five of us to be in the house at the same time. There are literally stacks of stuff waist high all the way through the house. What's bizarre is, the garage is full of stuff like broken bicycles and rolls of carpet, but to make room for it she put stuff like boxes full of all the family photos out on the front porch, which promptly got rained on and ruined. To give you an idea on how bad the house is, about six months ago my mother-in-law went down to the Ranch and it took her about half an hour before she realized someone had broken in and stole a bunch of stuff.

Eventually she sold the house my wife grew up in and bought another house nearby (so she owns two now, the one she lives in near us and the Ranch). The one near us has more shit in it than the old one. My wife and daughter stopped by there one time and her mom wouldn't let her inside because it was so bad. My daughter needed to use the bathroom and was informed that the toilet didn't flush and even if it did you couldn't get to the bathroom anyway.

What's odd is, most people with mental illnesses know they are doing weird things, but continue to do them. The MIL got a job at a local auction about a year ago. Now what she does is, when things don't sell, she buys them. She has no place to take them or store them (she had a rental unit but it's full too), so she pays storage to keep the stuff stored at the auction house and then tries to resell it the following week. In case you didn't catch that, let me run it by you again. Let's say there's a vase that should sell for $100. Nobody bids, so she buys it for $100. She leaves it there and pays $10 to store it. The next week, she tries to sell it. Best case scenario, it sells for $100 and she only loses $10. Sometimes the stuff stays there for weeks at a time.

She has also recently started buying cheap jewelry, spending hundreds of dollars, and then renting booths at the local antique mall and trying to sell it. As far as I know she has never come close to breaking even. On a good day, she covers the booth rent.

When my father-in-law died ten years ago, my mother-in-law got almost half a million dollars in insurance money. That money is long gone. What she has now is two houses, both of which are completely trashed. She gets a monthly annuity, but that was never intended to cover a house payment. She has taken out additional mortgages and loans against her current house which she cannot pay. She's about to lose the house, and when she does I have no idea where all that stuff is going to go. The last time I saw "the ranch" the sheet rock was moldy and rotting off the walls, the carpet smelled like mold, and it had been broken into so many times that none of the doors shut properly.

The thing that really terrifies me, and this is sad to say, is that I'm worried what will happen when she dies. My wife is "the responsible one" and will end up having to take care of all of these messes. I'm not worried about the storage units -- fuck 'em, let 'em go back and those people can figure out what to do with a bunch of broken furniture and and VHS tapes that "must be worth something to somebody". The house close to us (if she hasn't lost it by then) will have to be emptied, scrubbed, and partially rebuilt before it can be sold. As for the ranch ... if she had insurance on it, I'd burn it down. We tried talking her into selling it so she put it on the market for a quarter of a million dollars. Yeah, even the Realtor couldn't keep a straight face on that one.

I think lately I have been trying to do just the opposite - I feel like I have way too much crap I don't care about, and I want it all out of here as quickly as possible. I feel like I'm suffocating.

Wow, from reading your book, I thought you were the hoarder, Flack. I guess computer stuff isn't that bad. I feel for you, having to deal with a situation like your mother in law. When I came home yesterday I just wanted to throw everything away and live in empty rooms with bare walls. Well, not really that bad, but I did have a case of the clean-crazies. I went around the house and threw away all the stuff I haven't 'got around' to. Not enough energy left to go through the attic and basement, though. Moving is hard work. I guess that they wouldn't do laundry, instead they would just buy new clothes for the kids. So I had to move fifteen kitchen bags of unwashed kids' clothes up a flight of stairs and into the moving van. That's seven flights of stairs right there. Then, once most the clothes were out of the way we had to cart all the furniture upstairs. Never seen such gross stuff once the couches are moved away from the walls and the cushions come off.



THE
GONNA GO WASH
AGAIN
AAEDVARK

I definitely have hoarding tendencies and tend to jump into hobbies with both feet, especially those that involve collecting things. Back when I was really into Star Wars, I didn't spend hundreds of dollars on collectibles, I spent thousands. When I got into arcade cabinets I didn't buy three, I bought thirty. My console video game collection is out of control as well.

But even though the fact that I have over a thousand DVDs, my stuff still looks neat (overwhelming at times, but neat). I'm not sure how people take that final turn from being someone who "collects a lot of stuff" to "people who shit all over their house and don't throw trash away", but fortunately I've remained in the former category.

The one problem I seem to have is, after I buy all this stuff I can't seem to get rid of it. I am not kidding when I say I probably have $5k worth of Star Wars stuff out in my garage. I don't have enough space to display it all so it' boxed up out in the garage, and I haven't seen it in so long that I've kind of outgrown it. So now what?