Clutter or Hoarding – Am I In Trouble?

Clutter or Hoarding?

You can often look around your home and think there is just too much clutter. The kitchen worktops are full of packets, pans or china. Your bedroom has clothes laying around instead of having been put back in the closet.

The living room has newspapers, magazines, toys abandoned by your children and your bathroom is a mess. This is clutter, and in a couple of days, you could have your home looking great again.

But, if you are looking around your home and your kitchen is unusable, you cannot even sit on your sofa or sleep in your bed, and just walking around your home is a problem, then you could be on the road to becoming a hoarder.

Hoarding usually occurs when you have experienced maybe the loss of a beloved partner or child, a traumatic divorce, or even mental illness. Sometimes the hoarding comes about because you just cannot cope with the home and so everything from newspapers to clothes just piles up in rooms. But in other incidents of hoarding, things are brought into the home that the hoarder thinks they must have or feel should not be thrown away.

A typical home of a hoarder will have huge piles of newspapers, magazines, books, bills, empty packaging, clothes, and so much more. Some hoarders also collect dogs or cats! A room will become full, and then another room will be filled up, until the whole house is unusable. Sometimes it will overflow into the garage, yard, basement or loft.

There is a high risk of fire, along with rodent infestation and of course, the home will smell. The hoarder can run the risk of being literally crushed by their own debris. The hoarder will fall into ill health because they cannot prepare food properly for themselves, and be unable to use the bathroom. They become reclusive, as they know one will want to visit them, and depression sets in.

If you talk to many hoarders, they do not want to live like this any more, but do not know how to change their lives for the better. It takes a huge amount of patience and understanding to help a hoarder and often needs a professional to start the process. The worst thing you can do to a hoarder is to just start clearing thing out, especially in secret. They will get very upset and probably just replace what you have taken out of the home.

It is important to realize that it has probably taken years to make the home so full, and it is not going to take just a couple of days to clear and clean. Patience is the key to helping a person who hoards, and to understand why it started. It is too easy to judge a person, but a lot harder to truly help them in their time of need.

So, if you know someone who you think could be on the road from clutter to hoarding, then try and help them at the clutter stage. They will thank you one day!

Hi. I’m Jo Tempest. Do you need help to short circuit potential hoarding? Before it can get started, interrupt the path to becoming a hoarder with a workable system and cut the danger of hoarding at the root. Click here to begin to bring order out of chaos and gently organize room by room .