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Rick didn’t have many outside interests. As a retired professor, he occasionally attended university events, but his sister realized that even these outings would start to taper off as his dementia worsened. Given his mental status, it would have been highly likely that Rick would revert to his hoarding habits except that he was able to live with his sister. She not only kept a clean house but also encouraged him to maintain a social life of sorts by staying in touch with other retired professors and friends from his university community.

JACKSON

I wish I could say that every hoarder turns out like Jackson. Jackson definitely had a few struggles after we cleaned his house, and he will probably have a few more in his future, but he ultimately had a happy ending. After working with Jackson for most of a week, we left him to de-clutter the rest of his house on his own. His partner, Mike, reported that Jackson made progress for the first few months. But six months after the cleaning, we got a call from Mike saying that Jackson had stalled. He wasn’t bringing new items into the house, which was terrific news. But he’d had a setback when someone broke into the house. While nothing valuable was taken, it took Jackson a few weeks to process the event.

Much to everyone’s relief, Jackson took the violation as a challenge. He decided to use it to push through, finish the job, and redefine himself as someone who was no longer a hoarder. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t tempted to withdraw into his comfort behavior. But Jackson had Mike to talk through that with him and offer support and understanding. It was hard and emotionally risky for Jackson, but he chose the right path instead.

Mike called me later to report that Jackson had finally finished cleaning out the house on his own and put it on the market. He kept some of his most important Blondie collectibles to display, including signed record album covers. As an early-stage hoarder with lots of support, he was able to weather many of the challenges that he faced. Today, the two of them are living happily together in Mike’s house, complete with Cher’s doorknobs, and Jackson is learning to control his hoarding tendencies.

KATRINA

Katrina got most of her Stage 3 house clean in four days working alongside us and was seeing her therapist for depression. The house looked a little like what it must have when she first moved in, a decade earlier, with its streamlined white kitchen, pale carpets, and modern living room.

Katrina hoped that her daughter and son-in-law would bring their two girls for a weekend visit soon, but they wanted her to finish the two remaining bedrooms that were still cluttered with all of her legal documents, relating to her law school education and her divorce, and the boxes of her skin care products and catalogs.

Katrina wanted to get those rooms done, but she struggled. For a month after the cleaning, one of our crew went to help Katrina for a few hours one day a week. When they worked together, she was able to get through a few boxes, but that didn’t make much headway into the two full rooms. After our visits stopped, Katrina slipped more deeply into her depression. She stopped seeing her therapist, and she gave up on finishing the de-cluttering.

Without therapy, Katrina lost a critical pillar of support. And although her daughter was loving and offered encouragement to finish the cleanup, she lived too far away to give her mother the kind of regular support she needed. Katrina didn’t have much involvement in outside activities, and most of her friends had drifted away when her hoarding increased.

Despite all those strikes against her, Katrina managed to keep her house clean. In her favor, she still had a fulfilling job and a very supportive boss who gave her time off to do her cleanup. Six months after we worked with her, she still had full use of her kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom. Katrina wasn’t bringing new stuff into the house, not even into the two full “storage” rooms.

Katrina had made tremendous progress and