Hoarding...not just on TV

Jettycat

lostinrates wrote: »

Oh, i want another kitten. Or a pair of them. Our cats are eight (sisters) and i really find the idea of being without them unbearable. I know new cats would not be the same, but they would hopefully be the age of purs now ish when that time of ours going seemed nearer.

I just cannot decide whether we should get more or not. My cats are almost human, and we are a very tight bond, so i think it might be hard for new kittens, and indeed for our girls, to accept new ones. Otoh, now a parent lives here we are one cat short at all times, i think it likely new cats would bond with parent, who also adores cats.

We lost one of our cats recently at age 15. The remaining one is 8 and we're thinking about kittens - it would be two as they then have each other to wind up / bounce on / etc. Not sure though as DD is just about to start school so lots of changes going on at the moment ...

Jettycat

Brighton_belle wrote: »

If he also occasionally washes up, he'll outstrip DH so maybe I shouldn't have been so hasty...

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Jettycat

whitewing wrote: »

I was surprised the other day when I saw DH showing DD her albums (which are pretty much up to date). I was surprised because she is so young - toddler - but really enjoyed looking at them. DS is quite a bit older than her, and other than recent photos in frames, none of his younger stuff is accessible to her. I am really, really tempted to hire a storage space for a couple if weeks or a month, take DS' boxes over there, spread it out into piles, and then sort into seasonal categories like 'birthdays', school photos. I am confident that I would only be scrapbooking a small fraction of the stuff, but also confident that I would let go of the rest. My scrapbooking technique has developed over the years so I can be fairly quick and focussed. Hiring storage space for a finite time would mean that I could leave it part finished and take up from where I left off - something we don't have the opportunity to do in our open plan house. That is how I expect a storage facility to be, although I have never been to one in reality. Do they temperature control them or would one freeze to death in winter? Anyway I don't expect this to happen anytime soon so don't hold your breath, but I will keep turning it over in my mind. Again, I think it would help me create something positive out of some bad previous situations.

NB Filling up storage space and hoarding more stuff is not what this is about. It is about enjoying the stuff that you have, and making it accessible to share.

This made me feel sad because I have two boxes and a shelf full of stuff for DS and DD that I have not sorted at all and I'm sure they would both love to look at these things as they often ask about when they were little.
x

Picklepot

Just wanted to say a huge thank you to all on this forum. I have been trying to get my head around addressing my clutter and hoarding tendancies since my dad died 14 years ago. He was not a bad hoarder he confined it to his areas of the house ..the shed , garage, loft, his wardrobes and drawers.Therefore my mum, myself and sister were not affected badly by it. The sadness when he died was that his wardrobe was full of things that he was saving for 'best'. He never threw away anything unless he felt it had some use left in it. When my mum cleared his things there were clothes still with their shop labels on, gifts in their packaging and i always remeber the shirts still in their cellophane with the cardboard around the collar and the pins to hold it in position (yes pins! thats how long they had been there pins havent been used for a long time). At that point i tried to address my own clutter, read all sorts of books, tried any system but non addressed the difficulty of actually getting it off the premises and the feelings that go with it.Since that lightbulb moment the clutter issue has been constantly with me and the frustration of how i can manage it.
Although its really early days i am starting to look at my stuff in a different light thanks to you all, learning to see the items for what they are and trying to make a decision on that rather than the emotion and memory they evoke.
Am taking things slowly as i have lots to achieve but any momentum is better than the stagnant despair i have felt in the past.

Big thank to all . Congrats to all for your achievements so far .
My first step has to been to remove two bin bags of clothes to the CS last week.:j these have been churning round the house so long i cannot even put a time on it. I hope to be posting a lot more success' soon

lostinrates

Well, we have emptied one barn, some de richarded, some shuffled two barns down ( this time three years ago we lived in one room and a couple of storage containers) Next barn should be a couple of hours work, pretty much all rubbish that we have been dealing with.

Our main issues are, like most peoople time and money, with my health neing significant factor too.

Some of the stuff i binned today are throws and dog beds i never got round to cleaning because i was too ill and too busy. It seems to me that we fight fires with dh's resource of time and momey, and i sleep between fires.

Right now dh is chopping wood. We thought we had no plums on the good trees this year, but just saw that there are....its just we cannot reach them because we have not had time to strime the path to them this year.

whitewing

Jettycat wrote: »

This made me feel sad because I have two boxes and a shelf full of stuff for DS and DD that I have not sorted at all and I'm sure they would both love to look at these things as they often ask about when they were little.
x

Don't feel sad, I'm making a choice not to feel sad about it. I know I will be grateful that I kept it until I could sort it.

I googled storage and there is one place in my home town. It would have to be walkable as well as driveable. I may give them a call and see, only trouble is they are open business hours and not at all on Sunday or Bank holiday. That would cut down significantly on the time I could be there because of my work. The other thing I wonder is if there is a limitation on the amount of time you can actually be on site, because I want to sort and store, not just store. It's not a Big Yellow Storage company, like on the hoarding programmes, but they must sort on site for those programmes because they stack all the cds into a pile and so on, don't they? Any Storage Site owners reading this thread who can comment on this, please? (Not that I expect any here).

Brighton_belle

Well, I am recording a complete failure to get anything to the c.s. today, despite my promises of yesterday. I can't believe the procrastination and dithering that goes on for me to get stuff out the house. It is just a ridiculous fear that I know is irrational. I also know that the last thing I took and panicked about, last month, took me about 5 days to stop feeling anxious about and today, I struggled to remember what it even was,lol.
So I know these are 'just' feelings that will pass. But I have to get the things there for this to happen.

However, the items have now been moved nearer the front door, so I will try again tomorrow. I am more likely to go out tomorrow (whereas today would have been a special trip)

On the plus side, I have undercoated the planks I am converting to shelves for books that need a home. This job has been sitting waiting to be done for over a month now. The brackets up already up on the wall.
My clutter free kitchen and bathroom are proving so easy to keep clean and tidy now the new lodger has moved in.
'Everything has a place' works!

And my labelling freezer drawers in to veg/white meat and fish /homemade ready meals/red meat/puddings and fruit/bread last month has transformed my knowing exactly what food I have in there and what needs using up/replacing. If the drawer to full up, nothing more gets bought in that category, I don't care what is on special offer.
After reading your lots experiences with AF, I won't be dipping my toe in that water either:D.

Whitewing - love the things you have leant that you post.

Brighton_belle

whitewing wrote: »

The other thing I wonder is if there is a limitation on the amount of time you can actually be on site, because I want to sort and store, not just store. It's not a Big Yellow Storage company, like on the hoarding programmes, but they must sort on site for those programmes because they stack all the cds into a pile and so on, don't they? Any Storage Site owners reading this thread who can comment on this, please? (Not that I expect any here).

A former lodger had one of these for a while.As I recall, they could visit anytime they wanted (within opening hours)- it was their stuff and they had paid for the 'room'.

givememoney

My husband has hording tendancies but because I live here to it doesn't get out of hand.

It is funny though because he doesn't like the place in a mess and is very tidy around the house. Having said that, places which are his domain i.e. the loft, the garage, the shed are full of stuff.

In some ways I dread buying a new replacement of anything as he wants to hang onto the old one instead of chucking it.

Some how we've managed to co-exist together despite his ways and mine of wanting to clear stuff out for nearly 40 years.

If I buy a new pieces of say kitchen equipment I have to have somewhere for it to go and if there isn't anywhere, I have to throw something out to make room for it.

valk_scot

I am having a busy day today, though not in the declutteing sense. Both kids have been away at Scout camp so I'm being backed into the corner by wet and muddy camping gear, wet and muddy clothes and wet and muddy and hungry children. Oh well, they seem to have had a great weekend!

I've got the decluttering fidgets though so am having a planning and consolidation day. Everything that's currently due to be taken somewhere else (CS, tip etc) is boxed and bagged and labelled ready to go into the car tonight and tomorrow, then tomorrow morning I'll drive to the back door of our biggest CS and dump the bags with them. Can't park there long term so I won't be tempted to go in.

Next on list? To plan what's next on the list! My immediate priority is to finish clearing the dining table of the half dozen pots of paint and all the painting gear that OH left there over the summer as it's blindingly obvious that as far as he's concerned the painting season is over. I didn't mind the dining table being out of action when he was actually doing something constructive of course. But before putting the painting gear away I should have a sort out of the utility room shelves where paint and painting things live, no? Rather than just shoving the table items back on top if the mess. So that's first on the list.

Second is my sewing stuff. I have a corner of the dining room where my main sewing machine (1934 Singer 201k treadle in a 1917 parlour cabinet, since you ask ) lives, my DD's handcrank and my 1959 Singer 320k semi-automatic. There's not enough actual storage space though for fabric etc though and this has been an unsolvable puzzle for a while as there's no room for more next to my huge butler's pantry cupboard which is currently stuffed with food stores and cooking and baking equipment. Until...lightbulb moment this weekend, if I decluttered the six big drawers of duplicate "just in case" equipment I'm sure I could fit it all into four drawers and that would leave me two for sewing stuff, duh. I just hadn't thought of this before because I felt that I needed to keep all the cooking gear. But I don't, do I????!!

It really is developing into an interesting exercise, this. Instead of thinking that "I don't have room for X because the space is full of Y", I'm now starting to think "...so do I need Y? Or so many Ys?" Which previously I wouldn't have even considered becaus Y is useful after all and might come in handy one day. Four Le Creuset pot lids for example, which came as parts of batches of second hand Le Creuset where the base sections were too wrecked to clean or use. The base sections got chucked into the metal recycling but I kept the lids because I might find a base that needs a lid one day, no? Never mind that I passed my massive Le Creuset collection onto a friend when my Rayburn was decommissioned and she got a range cooker. So I don't actually have any Le Creuset left apart from two casserole dishes (with their lids) and four odd lids. Why am I keeping four orphan lids for pots I don't use, fgs? So yes, I've put them in the metal recycling.