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.