How it began, kind of

Never being one with much talent to make a long story short, this blog thing is right up my alley. And have I got a story for you. It's about how our house evolved into having 3-foot pathways throughout, to going through all the stuff and reclaiming living space. It's about being the boarder of a hoarder, it's about being a borderline hoarder, it's about stuff. Lots and lots of stuff.

First of all, when I say hoarder, I am referring to a mass accumulation of things - just like the definition of the word says, and I in no means mean any disrespect or negative connotation with what I am writing about here. It's really simple - my parents have traveled the world a few times and brought home some very nice things from far away places. They once had three homes in which to spread it about, and they no longer do. So, an accumulation of stuff - without a doubt. Lacking space in which to keep it - most definitely. Indecisive on what to do with it - You betcha. That's what I mean by the word hoarder.

Secondly, and not to bore you with the details, a little history here on why we are in this situation - how we got here. It's not like anyone decided they couldn't throw away or give to charity, that's not it at all. Although I can see that we all have an issue with minimalist living, as in we seem to be the complete opposite, that is not how hoarding become evident to me. No, this is how it came to be...

My parents bought a place out in the sticks in the mid-1980's to come on vacation, which we did several times a year. I married a man who had grown up not too far from this place and although he had longed to go back, I said, "No way!" In fact, when I met him, that was his plan but I convinced him to stay. Then my dad got transferred kind of close to this place and my parents moved. I reconsidered. I hated being 1,500 miles away from my mom and dad, so exactly a year after they had done it in 1995, we packed up our stuff and two children and went that way too. Their vacation spot was too far for my dad to commute and it just so happens that the very place I hated as a teenager is the same distance between where my parents would be living and where my in-laws lived. So we worked out a deal with my parents and sold our house. We loaded up our furnishings from our first home and three years of marriage and headed south, to what would be our second home in life together, and a home that was also already furnished. In addition, my parents went from a five-bedroom house with an attic and a basement (where I grew up) to a two-bedroom condo in a high-rise, so of course they had more stuff than they knew what to do with twenty years ago.

Then, (almost done with the boring history part), after ten years of living in the house belonging to my parents, we built a house. A brand-new house has to have brand-new stuff, and why not when everyone is just dying to give you the credit to get it! I know now why not - we lost that house five years later when the economy crumbled. I actually don't know if we can attribute our losses to that or to my husband's accident resulting in him loosing an eye; they both happened at the exact same time - February 2008. At any rate, it happened, and we returned to the unoccupied house in June, 2010 with, you guessed it, our "new" stuff from our "new" house. In the meantime, my parents had also felt their finances tighten and since my dad was now retired, they decided to put their condo up for sale. The first thing their Realtor suggested was to de-clutter a bit, so out to the "spare house" went more stuff. So, at this point, we have the contents of about four homes in this one, twenty-five hundred square feet house. And then the bombshell - the condo sold and no, they were not reinvesting in real estate, so what to do with all this stuff became the burning question.

And burn some stuff we did, but nothing that would harm the environment, or our sensitive souls.

My parents had planned to head out west to the town where they grew up, became high-school sweethearts and got married over fifty years prior. They moved into yet another home they had, also furnished and brimming with stuff, an abundance of which had just been inherited from my grandparents passing. They kept a lot of stuff too. My mom mentioned looking into a storage unit for a lot of their stuff here and asked if I would help her find one that I would be willing to look after. The more I looked, the less it made sense to pay for a place to store stuff you really don't need to hold on to anyway. I mean, who needs three households of stuff when you only have one house? So we said, "Bring it here, we'll help you figure out what to do with everything!"

Four years later, well, let's just say I have learned a lot about hoarding and what a horrible decision-maker I have been. More importantly, I am learning to make decisions now, and not later. And perhaps most importantly, I would like to share what I am learning as well as my experience in case I can help another suffering from the same excessive saving of stuff syndrome as me.

"Because you just never know when you might need a wheel!" Anyone else see that Dr. Phil episode? I can totally identify.