My in-laws lived in a 90-year-old house. My FIL was definitely a hoarder. I'm on the fence about whether MIL is, or if she is just a really messy and disorganized person.
In 2009, MIL was offered a job in Florida and moved down there. She just took the bare minimum of stuff she needed and bought all new furniture, etc. down there. FIL was supposed to join her, but he kept continually making excuses for why it would have to be postponed a few months, probably because he didn't want to leave his hoard or clean anything up. He wouldn't allow anyone to remove or clean anything from the hoard and would throw a fit if anyone even tried. Finally by the time he actually moved down there, he was very sick and was diagnosed with terminal cancer (he also refused to see a doctor and ate nothing but junk food) and died two weeks later. My husband and MIL tried many times to get the authorities to intervene, but FIL would always manage to convince them that there was no problem, he didn't need any help, and his family was overreacting.
Well, FIL died in 2013, and the house is still a huge burden. They are insisting on trying to clean up and flip it, because it is a house that they own outright in an area that is now becoming the next hipster neighborhood (it was the ghetto when they bought the house in the 80s). So either somebody could live in it once it's renovated, or it could be turned into a rental property. I'm not saying this is a bad idea in the long run, I just really doubt it will ever come to fruition at the rate things are going.
MIL has come back here a few times to "get the house fixed," but only a small amount of progress has been made in three years. She also wouldn't allow my husband to do anything to the house while she was in Florida (even though technically the house is in his name now). Even if he collected a bag of decluttered items, unless it was straight up trash, he would leave it there for her to go through when she returned.
The entire basement was cleared of items (with the help of contractors, and everything was thrown away due to black mold), and a good amount of items were removed from the ground floor. You can navigate through most of the house now without any difficulty. Also, the backyard is no longer an overgrown raccoon breeding ground, the basement no longer has black mold, and the toilet and sink were replaced. Also there are no longer roaches or mouse droppings scattered everywhere. That's the sum total of what's been done on the house in 3 years. Oh yeah also my husband removed the generator that he bought during Hurricane Sandy, which eventually began leaking gasoline on the carpet (!). And he finally removed the bars from the windows which were making the house into even more of a fire trap, but not before telling me "I'll do it later" a million times and that I was "making a big deal out of nothing" (he seems to have gotten more serious about fire safety after I showed him some of those "burn to learn" videos on Youtube). The whole house was at about a 4.5 on the hoarder scale when they started. Now the main living areas are about a 2.5 and the other areas are at a 3.5 to 4.5. And the basement is clear, as far as I know.
When the house first started being decluttered, I helped MIL out a bit, and I later noticed that she would go through the bags of stuff I collected, remove 90% of it, and put it back. Also there was one incident where I removed a "happy birthday" banner that had been hung on the living room wall literally 25 years prior and threw it away. I got yelled at by both my husband and MIL for half an hour because that banner had been hung by now-deceased FIL. I was forced to take the banner out of the trash and save it. After that, I stopped helping.
MIL recently retired and moved back from Florida a few weeks ago (she does intend to still spend the colder months in Florida because she has a lot of family down there). However, now she is living in this house that I don't think even qualifies as livable, legally speaking. The electricity is messed up (the entire house needs to be rewired, which of course hasn't happened yet) and the circuit breaker is constantly tripping. There is no heat in winter, and electric heaters often can't be used because of the issue with the circuits being easily overloaded. There is also no hot water. And as you might imagine, everything is filthy and broken. All the carpets and even tile floor need to be replaced, the walls and ceiling need to be redone, the whole kitchen and bathroom, everything.
I have raised these issues with my husband a few times, suggesting maybe she should get a short-term rental nearby or something (money is not an issue for her), but he keeps saying "don't worry, it will be fixed soon." But they've been saying that for three years. They also insist on only using this one contractor, then MIL gets pissed if he isn't immediately available on the short notice she wants him on (God forbid they schedule anything in advance). Last year she threw this huge bitch fit when he wasn't returning her calls for a few weeks and it turns out he had been in the hospital... of course she didn't try to find another contractor, she just went back to Florida with nothing having been done.
Also it seems like she's been decluttering a lot (more than she ever has) in the past few weeks. But she bought 10 large plastic bins at Walmart a few weeks ago to store items in, and yesterday she told my husband she needs 10 more bins. So I don't know if she is actually throwing much of anything away, or if she is just putting random items into bins and putting those bins in the basement. Knowing her, I hate to say it, but it's probably the latter.
The horrible part is that I am forced to socially visit MIL there on a regular basis. My husband was always very close to his parents (he's an only child and comes from a family-oriented culture), and plus she doesn't really have that many people around to talk to. But I am a neat freak and I actually also have diagnosed OCD, and it is extremely stressful for me to be in this environment. I have told him this many times and I get accused of "overreacting" or told "we'll only be there for a few minutes." Very rarely she comes over to our place, or we do something outside the house, but often she makes excuses for why she doesn't want to go outside today. Also in her culture, as her daughter-in-law, I am supposed to be like her daughter, so her house is supposed to be my house, in a way. She will get insulted if I go a while without visiting and start telling my husband that I must "secretly hate her."
And also every time we come over, she makes us food, but I don't really want to eat any food she cooked. She is a decent cook and I've never gotten food poisoning from her food before. But remember when I said, I don't think she's a hoarder, just a slob? Well, there was an incident last year where she went to Florida and left all this food in the refrigerator to rot without even telling us it was there. So months later my husband found this VERY expired yogurt, along with some other stuff, and...yeah it was fucking disgusting. After that I do not trust her not to cook with expired ingredients. Also, part of my OCD is that I am very paranoid about getting food poisoning. So I have to come up with some excuse not to eat every time I go there.
My husband also has this weird attachment to the house. Before his dad died, he actually would admit that the situation with the house was horrible and that he wished it wasn't this way. But after his dad died, it's like the hoard became his hoard. He freaks out on me if I even call it a "hoarder house," even though that's factually what it is. If I go out of town, he stays over at that house with her, instead of our nice, clean apartment. There was even a period of time where he was trying to convince me that we should move into the house and work on renovating it while we were living there, because then we would get a free house and not have to pay rent, and he got PISSED at me when I refused and told me that I am "spoiled" and "need everything to be perfect." Even now I think he still resents me on some level for "forcing him" to not live there.
When I got together with him, he was actually living in the hoarder house due to a prolonged period of unemployment, but even after he got a job with a good salary, I had to have many arguments with him before he was finally convinced to move into an apartment with roommates 1/2 mile away. And even then, whenever I wasn't staying over, he would be staying in the hoarder house with his dad (who was still alive at the time). Then it was another series of huge arguments to convince him that we should get our own place instead of living with roommates. When we moved here, we had no furniture, and with every piece of furniture I bought for the apartment, or even obtained for free from family members, he would make snide comments about how it was "unnecessary" and I was "wasting money" and "always need everything to be perfect." Like, he wants "his house" (what he still calls his parents' house) to be a massive hoard, but he literally wanted our apartment to be an empty set of rooms with nothing but metal folding chairs, plastic folding tables, a nasty 15-year-old mattress with broken springs on the floor (it took me 2.5 years to convince him to replace that), computers and other electronics, and Rubbermaid containers for all our belongings. It's like he can't move on. I feel like he sees the hoarder house as his real home, and he sees our apartment as just the place that he pays for to keep me happy. He is usually a kind and reasonable individual, but this is the issue where he really defies all rational logic. (BTW, he is not a hoarder himself, but he is a huge slob. He has gotten much neater and cleaner since living with me, and has even admitted that it has improved his life to be more neat and organized, but things can still get pretty disgusting when left to his own devices.)
Anyway, he's over there right now, spending the better part of his Sunday afternoon helping her manage the hoard. Which he has been doing every weekend since she came here. I don't know when or if this situation will get resolved. I am concerned for her health living in that house. But there's nothing I can do at this point, because nobody will listen to me. If I try to set any boundaries, I get accused of "overreacting" and "needing everything to be perfect."
Submitted April 17, 2016 at 10:35PM by dragthewaters91 http://ift.tt/1SLy5fe hoarding
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