I went to Westchester yesterday with my mom and sister to deal with 80 years of accumulation in an adorable tudor home that has seen better days. It was our first visit, after the funeral. We needed to assess the scope of the problem (mouse turds in the basement/several tons of old clothes/important papers mixed in with garbage), marking items that we need for our own homes, and making plans for an estate sale.
We filled up ten trash bags of the obvious garbage, so we could get a better look at the job ahead. Medical supplies, spools of thread that were stashed everywhere, phone directories. I made stacks of magazines that date back to the 50s. When my mom wasn't looking, I threw away all the tattered bibles that littered the place.
Once the doilies were stacked in a pile and the boxes of rubber gloves were gone, we divorced ourselves from the grimness of our task and ruthlessly cleaned.
Today, I'm still coughing up mold, animal poop, and dust, while I'm tackling my own cluttered basement.
My children will thank me later.
Apt. 11d 
My students are analyzing/writing on this poem today: http://daisy101.xanga.com/45611771/item/
Seems apropos.
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The old people we got our house kept bird seed in a leaky plastic bag and used natural jute mats as “insulation” in the basement (around the sill plate). The mouse war lasted seven years. They still get into the garage, but I can’t really stop that.
Anyway, a shop vac sounds like a good idea. They make small ones.
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“Today, I’m coughing up mold, animal poop, and dust, while I’m tackling my own cluttered basement.”
Be careful, Laura!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/health/hantavirus.html
http://bluecollarphilosophy.com/2012/09/up-to-10000-at-risk-for-hantavirus-after-camping-at-yellowstone/
“My children will thank me later.”
Or they should!
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Hate to say this, but some of the magazines might be collectors’ items.
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If I don’t get back to our house in Israel, my children are going to get a sealed room that will be a snapshot of when they were 3 and 6 years old — 15 years ago — when we packed up for a short stay in the States. Kind of hard to imagine what I saved that I thought we might want a some point in the future.
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Yeah, when I realized that the magazines dated back that far, I stopped putting them in the recycle bin. The estate sale people can sell them off.
Didn’t mean to imply that my own basement was full of mice poop and mold. Luckily, our basement is dry and I gave it a fresh coat of paint when we moved in. Aunt Theresa’s basement is a horror. I might have to hire professionals to do that work.
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When my aunt the hoarder died ten years ago, and my mom had to clean out her house, that was the time my mom realized she needed to toss nearly everything that was stored in the attic of her home, so that we kids wouldn’t have to do it.
BTW, I would totally buy that dresser/bureau/chest of drawers in the lower left picture. That is a wonderful piece.
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“When my aunt the hoarder died ten years ago, and my mom had to clean out her house, that was the time my mom realized she needed to toss nearly everything that was stored in the attic of her home, so that we kids wouldn’t have to do it.”
Yeah. If the item is so special and necessary, what is it doing up in the attic, anyway? (We’re going to have an attic in the house we’re buying next spring, and I’m going to try to reserve that space for seasonal items and baby stuff.)
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My MiL died last month. We and my daughters went up and took everything we thought we’d need (it all fitted in a minivan with the seats folded). I called the apartment management and asked them how much they’d charge to clean out the apartment. They said nothing, except we’ll charge to deinstall the airconditioners and to take up the fitted carpet. I said go ahead; I’ll mail you the keys. Rent-stabilized apartment, of course. They had incentives.
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Have cleaned out after two grandmothers, one mother in law, and my two best friends. I try to give stuff away constantly. My current house is 3000 square feet. My next will be less than 2000, mostly so I have to give away more.
I hate stuff. Wish I’d quit buying it.
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PS As cleaning out the house of people under the age of 50 has shown me. If you have things that you wouldn’t want your mom or kids to see, be sure you tell your best friend where your unmentionables of all sorts are hidden. Seriously. You and your spouse could be in a car wreck tomorrow.
I was grateful to clean out my friends’ bedside table before their two grieving mothers came across the contents.
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The dresser with the marble top is Victorian, but it’s very beat up. Tasha, if you’re in NYC area, I can give you a date of the tag sale. Not sure what will be left after all the friends and neighbors take their pickings.
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Both my parents and my husband’s parents are packrats, with my parents probably verging into hoarding territory. Haven’t yet had to clean out a house, but it’s one of the things that occasionally keeps me awake nights. We don’t live near either set of parents, so I’m not entirely sure how one does the sorting through/throwing away without taking weeks off work, etc. Also, there’s some tension with my brother’s family and I can see his wife in particular being unpleasant in this type of scenario, claiming that my mom promised her all these items, etc.
I do, however, remember being taken along to clean out both grandma’s houses as a child, and marveling at the drawers full of ten year old spices, etc. in the kitchen. Luckily, years of military moves have taught us how little you need and why it’s important not to haul tons of crap around with you every time you move. (Been on an organizing kick around here, lately. A place for everything and everything in its place and all that . . . )
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“We don’t live near either set of parents, so I’m not entirely sure how one does the sorting through/throwing away without taking weeks off work, etc. Also, there’s some tension with my brother’s family and I can see his wife in particular being unpleasant in this type of scenario, claiming that my mom promised her all these items, etc.”
If that’s how it goes, it sounds like you’ve found the perfect person to dig the house out. Congratulations!
I think Cranberry has mentioned this before, but one of the contributing factors to becoming a hoarder is having relatives die and keeping too much of their stuff. I know some people who have fallen victim to this particular curse and can’t bear to be separated from great-grandma so-and-so’s stuff. The funny thing is that great-grandma so-and-so got much of her furniture from other people’s trash (and not the good kind, either), so these are not priceless heirlooms.
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Amy P, I watch Antiques Roadshow. The strangest things can be valuable. Don’t fix up Auntie Em’s furniture too much. “Well, if you hadn’t polished the top and replaced the leg, it would have been worth $1 million at auction, but I’m afraid it’s now worth $200.”
My uncle claimed previous generations had sold the chippendale furniture, but kept the heavy Victorian mahogany stuff, because it was obviously more valuable. To top it off, my grandparents stored mattresses in unheated sheds. All sorts of living things like mattresses in unheated sheds. Mold, mildew, squirrels…
Louisa, please write a book about what one really needs.
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Squirrels are fine with mattresses in heated sheds but they rarely get the chance.
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We bought our old victorian contents intact, from a family that couldn’t bear to look thru all their mom’s old stuff. And I tell ya, even as someone who never met the previous owners, going through a lifetime’s worth of memorabilia, I felt like I knew them by the time it was done. It was even hard for *me* to get rid of some of it. I adopted out a lot of it, as it were. The binders of WWII-era letters from Uncle Stan went to a local museum; the giant stacks of 72s to a collector; a big box of diaries written by a teenage girl in ~1972 went to a local performance artist who was into that sort of thing.
Now I just need to find the nerve to throw out *my* box of (not at all G-rated) diaries, dating from college through marriage.
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“If you have things that you wouldn’t want your mom or kids to see, be sure you tell your best friend where your unmentionables of all sorts are hidden. Seriously.”
Yeah, I had the unpleasant experience of coming across my dad’s porn disk when cleaning up his computer stuff. I’m not morally offended on general principle, just … ew … dad.
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Cranberry said:
“All sorts of living things like mattresses in unheated sheds. Mold, mildew, squirrels…”
…mice. Mice LOVE mattresses.
“Louisa, please write a book about what one really needs.”
I’ve sworn off buying new minimalism books.
Wendy said:
“Yeah, I had the unpleasant experience of coming across my dad’s porn disk when cleaning up his computer stuff. I’m not morally offended on general principle, just … ew … dad.”
At least it wasn’t homemade–much, much, much worse. (I recently saw an excellent piece of advice for older folks–label any iffy video materials “Matlock Season Whatever.”)
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“Louisa, please write a book about what one really needs.”
Yes, yes. Though of course, it’s a matter of psychology, not practicality. Was it the NY Times that had an article in praise of “stuff”, written by an author who said the stuff makes her happy (she was, in particular, talking about travel souvenirs).
I’m like Jen, I can imagine that I’d have an impossible time throwing away binders of WWII-era letters or boxes of diaries, and I would also not be organized enough to find the people who might actually preserve and use the stuff. So, there’d be a bottom drawer of the cabinet filled with the memorabilia and I’d tell myself that I planned on scanning it in and saving it (which is a new form of hoarding).
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Cranberry said:
“Amy P, I watch Antiques Roadshow. The strangest things can be valuable.”
Unfortunately, that’s also hoarder-think.
Given the volume of material that often needs to be gone through, I would not encourage too much research along the way.
(I will contribute a story in the other direction, though. Great-uncle so-and-so was the sort of guy who had to be DOING something all the time, even if it wasn’t a good idea. He took down an apple orchard, for no particular reason and then some time later (also for no particular reason), he burned down the large barn that my great-grandfather and grandpa had built (all of this stuff was on the family land he’d inherited). My grandpa (who is a very mild-mannered person) was absolutely sick over the barn burning. This was some years before the whole “reclaimed lumber” craze took off. It eventually occurred to me (as it probably has to other people) that great-uncle so-and-so had destroyed what was probably low five-figures worth of very high-quality, old growth, impossible-to-buy-new-now timbers.)
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Great-uncle so-and-so also took down an 85+-year-old farm house on the property. It might have been a lot more trouble than it was worth, but it was where my grandpa and his siblings grew up and where I spent my first few years. Pretty much every single improvement on the property (the barn, the house, the orchard) except for the fences was taken down.
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