If you think you have seen everything,

[Christiern]

You have never seen a thread like this!

[wesbed]

Damn. This makes my house look uncluttered and well-organized.

I'll admit to having some unopened Mosaics laying around my house.

Edited March 14, 2004 by wesbed

[Big Al]

Reminds me of various people I helped move when I was in college.....

[Jazzmoose]

What? What's wrong; I don't get it!

Actually, my place looked very similar to parts of this place after I closed my business and until I was able to liquidate all of my stock at comic book conventions and such...what a mess! Had little "pathways" through each room...

[Alexander]

My maternal grandmother was like that, and on a similar scale. Her house was FULL to the top with worthless crap that she ordered off of late-night tv ads (You know, Franklin Mint stuff). She was also into crafts, so her house was full of raw materials and little dioramas she made. She had several dogs, and their ashes were kept in shoe boxes in her over-stuffed basement. My great-grandmother used to live upstairs from my grandmother until she (my great-grandmother) died (in 1971, I believe). When my grandmother moved to a nursing home (in 1995), I went up into my great-grandmother's old apartment. Not only had my grandmother not removed any of her mother's furniture or clothing, but SHE DIDN'T EVEN CLEAN OUT THE FRIDGE. That's right. When we went up there, we opened the fridge to find TWENTY-FOUR YEAR OLD FOOD rotting away. Needless to say, the whole fridge had to be thrown out. No way to save that thing.

My mother rented a dumpster, and just threw everything away. A pipe had burst in the basement, and there were years and YEARS worth of degraded and rotted stuff on the floor creating something not unlike a swamp. My mom's boyfriend and my younger brother (I begged off because - well - I'm not STUPID) had to shovel this glop out of the basement. I start gagging just thinking about it.

My mother, as much as it would kill her to admit this, has inherited much of this same madness. She too is a packrat, and although her house is neat and orderly, it's still filled with a lot of useless chotchkes. I have a bit of it too, of course. Nearly every room of my house is full of CDs and books, but at least there's a method to my madness. I don't think my grandmother enjoyed the things she bought, at least not the way I enjoy music or literature. Maybe she did, frankly I stopped talking to her after I turned 16 and my parents split up. At the time of her death, I hadn't seen her in years. My wife is kind of freaked out that she went to my grandmother's funeral, but has never even seen a PICTURE of this woman, much less met her.

There's another aspect to my grandmother's story. My mother has an older sister who suffered a debilitating stroke when she was just 17 years old. She's still alive (in the same home my grandmother died in), but is currently dying of cancer. For years, she lived in my grandmother's house, receiving in-home care. Nearly everyone in my family is convinced that had my aunt been put in proper care from the start, she wouldn't be in the shape she's in today (she's been a vegetable for as long as I've known her). Visits my grandmother's house as a child were NIGHTMARES. Imagine it: My grandmother's house, full of rotting junk; she smoked like a demon, which irritated my eyes; my aunt would be propped up in a living room chair moaning and drooling (and she kicked if you sat too close to her); my grandmother always had a vicious dog which had to be locked up in another room, lest in bite me or my brother (it sometimes got out, and chased us around, snarling). You can see why I stopped going there when I got old enough...

[Christiern]

Thanks for that nightmare, Alexander. I think this sort of mania--and there must be a word for it, other than "pack rat"--is more prevalent than most of us realize. Also, it is not limited to the elderly (although age does often seem to bring it on or make it get out of hand).

My mother was the victim of Reader's Digest, Publisher's Clearinghouse, Time-Life, a multitude of phony charities, and, of course, late night TV offerings. She kept her apartment clean but cluttered with all this crap, including boxes of "free gifts," i.e. the useless plastic crap (usually made in China) that these companies use as lures. When she was hospitalized, I and a friend flew to Seattle and fillled the dumpster several times witth all of this. I must add that she sanctioned it, realizing the abnormality of having 3 Bissell rug cleaners, a collection of vacuum cleaners, numerous shredders, etc., most still in their original, sealed boxes.

My upstairs neighbor, who is in his 40s and maintains a professional job in the broadcasting field has this compulsion. It has reached such excess that he can't get into his apartment, so he has been known to sleep in the hallway. There was a leak in his apartment a few months ago and it took the super and one other man 3 hours to reach the kitchen, which is about 24 feet from the front door. As they worked on the leak (which reached my apartment), I took a look from his front door and what I saw was absolutely amazing. Except for the new, narrow passageway to the kitchen, one cannot see the floor, it is covered with hundreds of books, unopened DVDs and tapes and packages. Visible only from the waist up, an eight-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty stands in the entrance to the living room. Beyond it, poking through the mountains of books, are two replicas of the Empire State Building, one of them about seven feet tall.

The coop committee took a look and told him that he would have to put that stuff in storage, but, instead of doing that, he just keeps ordering more stuff--last week, according to the doorman, he received 16 rather large packages!

This is obviously a fire hazard, but I also have to wonder how much that floor can take before my apartment becomes a library annex! The situation right now is that the co-op board is taking him to court, but they tell me that he might just win. In the meantime, an inspector is scheduled to check out the apartment. I hope he is winged or that he has mastered levitation!

[Jim Alfredson]

I saw this somewhere... trying to think where... another forum linked to it.

My personal story: When my family moved from our farm house in Mason, MI to Okemos, MI during the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school, we moved into a rental house of a co-worker of my sister. It was his family home and his mother had lived there since they built it in the 1950s, but she had to be put in a home. He agreed to give my dad a deal on rent if we would help him clean out the house and hold a yard sale.

I have never seen so much shit in my life. It was a lot like those photos except nothing was in boxes and it was all old. There were tiny pathways throughout the entire house and every other square inch was taken up with miscellaneous junk. The worst part is that 90% of the junk was not the old lady's. It was her CHILDREN'S!!! They had filled their poor mother's house with all their crap. Old clothes from their high school days, reel-to-reel decks, books, magazines, lawn mowers, pots, knick knacks, records (no good ones), etc etc. Incredible! We just hauled it all outside and sorted through it all. Anything decent we put up for sale and everything else we threw away. They made almost $2000 by selling stuff for 5 and 10 cents a piece. It was crazy.