No Steps Forward, Ten Steps Back

Something horrible has happened to me these past few months, and that's why I haven't been making any updates about my progress.
It's not because I've given up on this project, I'm not abandoning my hopes for a less cluttered life.  Far from it, these past few weeks have made me more determined than ever to get rid of all the crap messing up my home and my life.
Shortly after my last post I became sick.  It started as a normal cold, or so I thought.  By the end of February  was really sick.  The beginning of March I found myself on the way to the hospital and ended up being admitted for a very serious illness that is in no way related to the disarray around my house.
Because of this illness I was not only unable to continue my cleaning around the house, I was not able to deter my family from undoing what I had actually accomplished and I now find myself having to start all over again.

I've decided that I'm going to try and enlist the entire family in this project, it's too big for one person to undertake on my own.

No Perfect Jobs

I was watching an episode of Hoarders a while back and the guy in was having trouble with his cleaning and his organizer told him that it was because he was too much of a perfectionist and I realized that I may have a similar problem.
When I clean my kitchen I don't just do the dishes, wipe the counters and appliances down and wash the floor.  I also hit the cupboards and clean them down, I must organize the contents of those cupboards and wipe them all down as well.
It's sick!

Bad Times

This past week hasn't been a good one for me, for a few different reasons and because of that I just haven't been able to reach this weeks goal and as a matter of fact I've backtracked quite a bit.
My bedroom is looking close to what it did before I even started this whole project.  I'm not happy with this, but I'm not going to let it set me back.
I'm just going to start up again next week like this past week never happened.
Of course there is still today, so perhaps I will still be able to get into the computer area and tackle some of the stuff that has been stashed there.  If so, there could be another entry today or later this weekend.

The Clutter Corner

I'm told that in many homes folks have a clutter drawer, a place to put things that don't seem to have a home or perhaps stuff is just put into the drawer temporarily until the person has time to put it away properly.

In my home it's a table or perhaps it would be better to say an entire corner of my dining room.  I started the whole thing with putting stuff on the table but my kids made it grow until it was the entire corner.

The Clutter Corner

As you can see, it's just a mish mash of so many different things, and I don't even have a clue as to what exactly is in that corner.  Under the table are my daughter's computer which is supposed to be hooked up in her bedrooom as soon as she's cleaned and organized it (whenever that may happen), a crate for recylcing newpapers, a box holding my 3 in 1 grill.  Cases of pop, a train set for my youngest son and anything else that doesn't seem to have a place to be put at the moment.

The Clutter Table

As you can see, up close the table is quite a disorgainzed mess.  It's just a big pile of boxes on top of boxes on top of boxes.  The large blue box that's front and centre are tongue depressers for crafts, which was bought for a school project about seven years ago and I can't get my kids to do anyithing else with them.  On the bottom of the pile on the left hand side of the picture is a large plastic tub holding paints and other arts and crafts supplies, again I can't get my kids to do a thing with them.  In the clementine crate at the top is where I keep all my hand creams.  In the Airwalk box on the right hand side of the picture is where all of my and the daughters hair accesseries are kept, brushes, elastics, head bands and clips.  It's just a huge mess, and this is the week that I'm going to sort it all out. 

I was going to keep working on larger projects but I'm having a very bad week health wise so I figure this would do fine enough.  Plus I'm having friends over this weekend and this will make my dining room cleaner and thus I won't be as embarrassed.

Work in progress.

As you can see everything is off the table, the garbage is getting tossed out and everything is being sorted by where it goes.  That means there is a pile for the bathroom, my bedroom, the boys room, my daughters room, etc.

The Table is Cleaned Off

All sorted and put away into proper places and not just stashed or stored somewhere until I can deal with it at a later date.  That right there is a very big accomplishment.

The Clutter Corner is Finished

I've finished cleaning and organizing the Clutter Corner and Table.  Everything has a place, a home and has been put there.  There are still a few boxes under the table, but they are things that need to be kept there.  My youngest son's train set won't go to his room because it's a therapeutic toy and needs to get used almost daily.  The white box to the side goes with the train set, it's full of switches and adapters that make him able to use devices.  He is disabled and needs adaptive technology and the switches in that box are just that.

All in all, I'm pretty proud of what I got done this week.

Now I've just got to keep the kids and myself from dumping stuff there and it'll stay clean and organzied.

Not Tonight is Alright

Last Friday I invited some friends to come over and hang out at my house, now this is a big deal because normally nobody comes over to my house. Years ago my house was the hang out, everybody came and had coffee, tea and whatever baked goods I had on hand. I had people over to my house every Friday night for dinners and Sundays people came over to just hang out. That was our regular routine.
But then as the years past and friends got married, had children and became 'grown ups' their priorities changed and they no longer came to my house for these events. Perhaps that's one of the reasons that I gave up. I was hurt that they stopped coming by. I was especially hurt when I found out that friends that I'd invited to my house for dinners were having their own social dinners and I was not invited to one of them. That was a real kick in the teeth, it made me feel pretty bad when not one but a few of my friends did this to me. That could be why I hold on to my stuff, because that box full of crap will never turn around and do the same thing to me as my 'friends' did.

So last Friday when a group of friends said that they were coming over I became excited. Then the week came and I began to start to try and get rid of some of my stuff. Yesterday I looked at my house and thought to myself that I had a lot of stuff to get rid of before tonight. But I was ok because I knew that my Husband, Mr. Hoarder and two of my children would be out of the house last night, and that meant that once I put theLittlest Hoarder to bed that I could rip into the mess and sort it and either put it away or get rid of it.
But then my daughter, Miss Hoarder came home and said that I needed to go to the meeting last night with her and her brother and that put my plans on cleaning out the window.
So I was feeling very angsty last night as I sat in that meeting thinking about all the stuff I had to do. I came home and Mr. Hoarder told me that the friends had a conflict with other social commitments and that meant that they could not come by tonight,but that we'd be getting together next week. Instead of feeling disapointed that I wouldn't be hanging with them tonight I actually felt ok with it. It was like it happened for a reason, like the fates were giving me a nod and saying "You're trying but not quite ready yet. So we'll give you some more time."

It's true, I do need more time, and that extra week will mean a lot to me. They came over last week and I know they were looking at some of the clutter that I wasn't able to hide and it kind of embarrassed me. Hopefully by the next time they come over that clutter will be gone and I won't feel bad about a thing and be able to just enjoy the night with them.

The First Twenty

I thought about it, and I thought about it and finally I say to myself "Hoarder, you've got to stop thinking about it, and just get down to it!"
And that's when I created my 20 minute system.

Armed with a timer, a garbage bag and a lot of determination, I entered my bedroom and got right to work.  Sadly I forgot to take a picture before I got started.  I guess I was just in the moment of getting myself to really get into it.  But after the timer went off and I had to stop, well that's when I remembered and so I grabbed my trusty camera and snapped away.

In front of my closet.  My dresser with the bottom drawer open and stuff just getting shoved inside it.  Boxes of old movies cassettes (VHS and I don't even own a VCR anymore) and some DVD's because I just didn't have anywhere to put them.  Blankets and a grey defunct recycling bin that I've been tossing skates and old shoes into.  And although you probably can't see them all, you can see one of my grey speakers lying facedown on the floor.  I have another grey speaker in that pile as well as two more black ones.  They aren't hooked up to anything, and I honestly don't even know if the grey ones work.  They were given to me about a year ago and I've never even tested them.

This is one of my two dressers, the other one is inside the closet because I thought that would create more space in the room and less clutter.  lol
On top of the dresser is a pile of my husbands clothing mostly, a broken alarm clock that hasn't worked in about half a year and a stereo that died about three months ago.    There is also a pile of books on the dressers, I'm not talking about the books that I've placed on the shelves, those are sort of put away.  No, I'm talking about the stack of books beside the broke down stereo.  Those are there because they wouldn't fit on the little shelves of the dresser and I just didn't think to put them anywhere else.  Beside the dresser is a stack of those VHS tapes that I mentioned above and you can also see one of the black stereo speakers that I talked about. 

This is my bookshelf.  I moved it in from my son's room about two years ago with the intention of putting up shelves in his room and moving the books that they actually enjoy into their room, the rest to pack up for donation.  I never did it.  Those books are still for babies and toddlers with a few ones geared to older kids and a couple adult ones thrown in.  Whenever I look at that bookshelf I tell myself that I really should get to work and sort out those books but then I tell myself that'd be easier to do once the room is clean and so I go and do something else, waiting until that unforeseen day in the future when I will be able to get to that shelf.

As you can see it's pretty bad.  The reason for so much laundry piling up is that one of our dresers is inside the closet and with all of that stuff piled up in front of the doors, I just couldn't get to the dresser to put the stuff away.  That enormous pile of cloting in front of the bookshelf is just one of my many baskets of dirty laundry that needs to be washed.  Sadly that's my life, washing laundry.  I do about a million loads every day and never seem to come near to the bottom of the basket.  As I finish one there is always another very full basket waiting to take it's place.

How To Start

It's hard to know where to start .  It's a huge house, and there are more than a few places that need to be purged. 
Where do you start, the place where the biggest mess is or a smaller less imposing area?
The place where the biggest mess is would certainly be a good place to start because you could really get a lot accomplished in there.  But it could also be overwhelming and bog you down.
If you start in a less imposing area, you won't get as much done but chances are you will get it done.

My bedroom, the main bedroom, has been used for storage, well ever since I got married.  At first it was done because our apartment was tiny, and there just wasn't anywhere else to store the stuff.  But then we moved into a large place, and we had a room mate and there were children.  Somehow the kitchen area, a room hardly utilized, became the storage area.  There were cases upon cases of drinks, food stuffs and so much more stashed under the table, on the table, under chairs and anywhere we could fit them.
Then we moved again, this new place had a garage where we could store stuff, and yet it still piled up in the main bedroom.  One entire wall was filled with boxes of crap.
We moved again, into a smaller place but we paid for a storage locker in that place.  Still it piled up, this time in the laundry/furnace/storage room.  The fire department had to come out because our carbon monoxide detector was going off and they warned me that I couldn't have the stuff piled up like that. If there was a fire it would make it hard to fighit, as well as being a difficult area to access.

We moved again, we got rid of the storage locker and figured since we'd just purged prior to moving that we'd be fine.  Five years later and I'm so ashamed of my main bedroom.  It's never been this bad.
I can't even walk in that room.  Sleeping in there is hard for me to do because the mess in there nags at me, telling me to do something about it.  But what?

This week, I have to do something.  I can't live like this anymore.  I watch Hoarders and see myself in some of those people.  I see some of my items in theirs and I know that if I don't get this in hand I'll end up on that show one day with my children hanging their heads in shame.

Even worse, when I go into my daughters room I see her exhibting some of the same 'hoarding' tendancies that I had at her age.  I have to stop this for her.   I have to make certain that my daughter doesn't go down the same path that I have.

My mother is a hoarder.  As a child I could hardly follow the very tiny path through the mountain of boxes she had in her basement.  I remember my Dad trying to get her to get rid of some of her stuff and my Mom almost crying about a box of crayon nubs (the tiny little left over pieces of crayon that you can no longer hold onto because it's just too tiny) and telling my Dad she can't throw them out because her children created art with those.  My Mom still has every single jacket that I ever owned hanging in a closet in the basement.  It's the same for my brothers and my Dad.  She says that she's holding onto them in case one of her grandchildren may want them one day, only when I've asked to borrow one of them in the past for one of her grandkids, she tells me that she can't because she's keeping it safe.

Now my Mom was getting a lot better, the last time I was there her basement is actually looking like a basement again.  The mountains of boxes are gone.  She still is holding on to some things, but at least it's not as bad as it was.

Is hoarding a possible side effect of ADD like I'm reading?  Both the daughter and I have ADD.  Is hoarding genetic or is it something learned from a hoarding parent?  There isn't a lot of literature out there on it, as far as I can see.  It seems to be a relatively new mental illness, in that it's only recently been classified as one and therefore there just hasn't been that much work done on it.

As I'm writing this, in the back of my head I've been thinking about my initial problem, of where to start. 
I think I'll start with the smaller, easier project first.  If I get that done I'll feel so much better, like I've accomplished something finally and that might give me a boost to start tackling the harder, larger messes.

It Begins

Hello, I am The Hoarder. This blog is my attempt at therapeutically treating and documenting myself as I try to stop being such a chronically disorganized person.
Everytime someone tells me that they are coming to my home to visit I go into panic mode and begin to fly around the house trying to hide all the crap that I've got sitting around the home.
I think that my friends know about my problem, but they don't know how bad it is because I hide the bulk of my stuff in rooms where they don't go.

But as of today I'm going to start to try to get rid of all of this stuff, and I'm going to photograph or video tape it all and post it here in a hope that somebody else who may be suffering from this will see it and realize that they need to get help and overcome this problem before they aren't able to anymore.