This weekend’s trip to the hoarder house is turning into a disaster. Not only did we not accomplish nearly enough, but my mom is flipping out today. There’s way too many emotions involved right now and I don’t want her going back for awhile but I don’t want to go alone either. She doesn’t have the patience necessary to help her friend.
For some reason or another, I have an abundance of patience for working on this house but she doesn’t. Yesterday was her breaking point.
I guess I just assumed that her friend would start filling up the sun room since there’s no place else to go in her house so that’s what my expectation was.
My mom on the other hand, thought that her friend would try to keep the stuff out so when she saw all those things in there, she lost it. This process will take a little longer so she needs to have more patience that we’ll get there.
Please don’t call it junk!
I knew we were in trouble right from the start. As I was working on clearing the kitchen, I could hear her yelling at her friend about all the “junk” that she has. I’ve told her multiple times to not refer to her friend’s stuff as junk and that’s the first thing she did. Yes, to us it is a bunch of junk, but that’s not what it is to her friend.
Sometimes my mom’s yelling is necessary to keep everyone moving and I appreciate it but this wasn’t the right time or place for it. I think it slowed things down this time. Her friend wasn’t letting a single thing go.
Now that I’ve had today to think about it, we at least need to help her finish up her kitchen.
The kitchen is the HEART of that house.
I’ll decide about going any further later. Right now, it’s all about the kitchen and making it accessible.
She might appreciate a suggestion of a few things she can do to help while we’re not there. I think a simple, quick thing she can do is dust off all the magnets on the refrigerator. I’m terribly allergic to dust so this would really help me if she did it. I think that’s a great place to start helping a hoarder regain a sense of control over the mess.
Not only is there a lot of magnets, there’s a lot of dust!
So far, the dust has been the worst thing I’ve found in the kitchen. Thank goodness. There’s some very old food but nothing that is rotten or disgusting. I think the oldest thing we’ve found has been some pasta from 2004. Not much happens to noodles so we just threw it away without a problem. She’s good about letting the old food go.
on a positive – at least the house isn’t full of dog excrement!
I think that often! Thank goodness she doesn’t have any pets! So far there hasn’t been anything gross like unwashed dishes or anything. The worst so far has been the 1/2” dust build up in the kitchen. It’s terrible. The smell of musty magazines in the sun room was pretty bad too.