The Secret Lives of Hoarders_ True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter - Matt Paxton [15]
▶ The Trash Master Compactor
Although Margaret is primarily an animal hoarder, she also hoarded trash. She was so overwhelmed that she never got around to taking all the junk to the dump. (Living as she did in a rural community, there was no regular trash pickup even if she’d had the wherewithal to get garbage to the curb.) Instead, the bags piled up around the house or got tossed out into the backyard. For longer than one cared to imagine, food wrappers and a lot of the other trash had just been tossed on the floor and walked on until it became a thick layer of sticky brown muck.
Margaret never consciously decided to save trash. She just fell behind in dealing with it—then got to the point where she gave up caring. Trash hoarding is usually a side effect of hoarding something else.
Information hoarders like Rick can also look like they are hoarding trash, because much of what they hang on to is junk mail or old newspapers. But to Rick, those items have value. Also, hoarders often keep items like paper towel tubes or plastic bags to donate or recycle, and big collections of these can look like trash to non-hoarders.
As we’ve discovered before, a trash hoarder’s piles are as revealing as an archaeological dig. At the bottom are the possessions that may at one time have had some value: clothing, books, toys, household items, and collectibles. Then there are the junk mail, old magazines, and other printed papers that date the point when the hoarder gave up. The top layer is just trash of every sort.
Where Hoarders Hoard
JIM WAS A preacher who started out storing family heirlooms and church artifacts in the garage. He saved boxes of old photographs, knickknacks, and other family items that he felt someone would want someday. He also kept years’ worth of church bulletins, linens, and discarded service accessories like candles and offering plates. He even had an original copy of Playboy, which may seem strange for a preacher, but maybe he thought it was a collector’s item that would have future value.
After Jim filled up the garage, the collection began to creep into the house. First he filled up the utility room, then the family room. And when Jim’s wife died, he filled up the house. We never met Jim, only his children. They organized a cleanup of the house after Jim died.
Hoarding is partly about what the hoarder is collecting, but also sometimes about where. People may not recognize a hoarder who has a clean house because they don’t see the attic or garage filled to capacity. The hoarder who has the space—the attic, basement, garage, and outbuildings—can stave off the consequences of his or her hoarding for a long time. But eventually the creep takes over and starts invading the hoarder’s living space
Once the garage is filled, of course, many hoarders have to park their cars outside. And for many, a car is just another place to store stuff. In the next chapter, we’ll meet Ben, the pizza man, whose car was filled with so many empty pizza boxes—and had become so disgusting—that he had to buy another car to get around.
Backyard junkyards (or in some cases, front-yard junkyards) are popular hoarding locations. This is where you’ll find the big stuff—old appliances, cars, lawn care equipment, furniture (outdoor and indoor). Often the backyard hoarder will claim that the value of the scrap metal makes it worth keeping lots of this stuff. I once found an entire barn filled with aluminum cans, probably worth about $10,000. We didn’t cash them in because we ran out of time on the cleanup. That hoarder is still working on taking his cans to the recycling facility, one bag at a time.
Much to the consternation of their neighbors,