You think your house is cluttered.

[texas1928]

GOOD LORD!!!!

This house needs to be condemned.

http://www.idexter.com/the_house/index.html

[GalleryGod]

1. Nip it! Nip it!

I'm puttin' my bullet in,Ange! I ain't goin' in there unarmed!

[Maraya1969]

2. I feel like I should be cleaning right now.

[derby378]

3. There's hope for me, after all!

I'm cluttered. I admit it. Sometimes I look at my piles of clutter and get totally overwhelmed.

But I'm not that bad off. Whew!

[latebloomer]

4. My mom has rooms in her house

that look as bad as some of the rooms in there.

And my mother-in-law is the same way-- I actually felt relieved when I first visited her-- I wasn't going to have to be embarrassed about showing my future husband Mom's place.

[Heidi]

5. That's very sad, and if you'll read through the website

you'll see that growing up in that environment has had a profound impact on the guy who owns the website. In college, I dated a guy who grew up in similar circumstances, and each one of the four kids in that familar was seriously affected by the experience.

[texas1928]

14. Yeah at the beginning he states that he has minimal things in his house.

I am glad my parents were not like this. My granddad was though. He would go out and find stuff to bring home.

[azmouse]

6. It's a mental illness.

My mother-in-law is that way. It's called 'Hoarder's Syndrome'. I've known my husband since 1979 and I've never been in the livingroom of his parents house. There would be nowhere to sit even if we went in there. All she has is a path in between piles of junk that leads to her bedroom. The last time we visited her was 2 yrs ago. She lives in PA and we are in AZ and we don't go back there very often... and that's for a reason. We couldn't even get in the house. The three of us couldn't fit in the kitchen because of the piles. The floor was piled about a foot deep with junk and every other space was filled with useless stuff piled high. She has stuff piled on the kitchen stove burners!! I worry that she'll burn her house down.
It makes me want to pull my hair out when I see that. I don't know what we'll do when she passes away and we have to find a way to clean out the house. I'm for just bulldozing it. And the worst of it is she thinks it's funny that her house is such a mess.

[Midlodemocrat]

7. It is a form of OCD as well. It is really difficult to treat.

I had a patient whose mother had it. Horrible.

[Heidi]

8. How are the children of folks with this form of OCD

typically affected? (I'm not asking for specifics, or medical advice, just your experiences.) :hi:

[Midlodemocrat]

9. In my experience, children are profoundly affected by this.

but it manifests in many ways. I have seen children completely non plussed by the mess, others so affected that they were completely sparse with their own living arrangements...not buying anything decorative at the risk of it being cluttered, and therefore, not feeling 'at home'.

The ones who are affected negatively can also suffer with relationships because of the profound embarassment they feel as well as the shame of 'keeping the family secret'. I have never seen two hoarders who were married, but I know they exist. I have seen many, many marriages come apart because one of the hoarders can't throw anything away and the other partner can't understand the depth of the illness.

Typically, the treatment is prozac, but I have yet to see it really work. I believe that the latest research actually is starting to refer to this syndrome as a form of psychosis.

[Heidi]

11. Thank you.

The guy I dated in college was 26 and had never brought a girl or woman home to meet his family. He was a gifted musician with a degree in music theory, and I remember how sad and embarrassed he was that his parents stacked stuff all around and on top of his piano in the family room. When I visited his home for the first time, I was genuinely shocked. There was canned food that had been stockpiled literally for years, cases of it, and clothing with the tags still on it, drapped over virtually every piece of furniture in the house. There was but a narrow path leading from room to room. Strangely, my friend's room was pretty normal-looking.

Oddly, too, the house didn't seem _dirty_ (no open foodstuffs or obvious dirt) or unsanitary, just packed to the ceiling with _stuff_.

[Midlodemocrat]

13. One of my best friends has it.

Her house is unreal. She can't throw anything away and has actually been hospitalized when trying to do so. It is so tragic. Her husband was on a submarine, of all things, so you can imagine the conflicts tha arise.

[politicat]

17. My ex's parents were both hoarders.

Or, as they put it, collectors of collections.

Both of their children had the same problem.

Depression also ran deep in that family. (That's not why we broke up, but it sure didn't help.)

[azmouse]

12. I think my husband has a mild form of it.

He has a tough time throwing away things he no longer has a need for. But I keep my home neat and he has seen the benefit of keeping spaces neat and organized. I let him have a space for his mess and he knows the mess cannot, under no circumstances, go beyond that place... or I throw the stuff away!

[WCGreen]

10. My Aunt and Grandmother were both like that....

They lived through the depression and I think a lot of their tendency to "hoard" things came from a desire to never be caught empty handed....

I am involved with two "endevours" that naturally accumulate stuff.... Accounting and tax prep brings in tons of paper and political work also seems to bring in mass amounts of stuff...

But nothing like that....

[XemaSab]

15. Was there half a deer carcass blocking the front door?

'Cause they condemned a house in Arcata CA that did.

[politicat]

16. Slashdotted.

Else, he's taken the server offline.

403 Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /the_house/index.html on this server.

Going up to the main domain page gets the same notice.

[neweurope]

18. Got that,too:( And I so much wanted to see a place worse than mine!

:evilgrin:

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