Anybody else watch American Pickers. Those junk collectors are a closely related species. Some of these guys (because it's almost invariably men who do this) make me wonder where they get the money to indulge their collecting. The ones that have building after building after building FILLED with stuff. How do they even afford the all those buildings? Sure, it takes them decades to amass that much, but the sheer volume of stuff they collect can be staggering.
Yeah, junk picking is the manly word for hoarding. My dad's fellow teachers at his former school called him "The Junkyard King" because he'd take anything off anybody if it was free. I still have a desk he rescued from the landfill in 1966 and a solid pine bookcase that was going to be thrown out because a couple of the shelves were warped. (Go to the lumberyard and buy new shelves, mother bitches.) Once he brought home three boxes of white 8.5x11 printer paper because it was labeled "too old to be used in copier." What the what?
But yeah, he has more salvaged parts and building materials than he will ever use. They're renovating what will probably be their last house, and Dad whipped out some light switch cover plates that they removed from thir first house, which was old when they renovated it back in '65. (Pressed tin, these things are seriously vintage.) He's got a 4-car garage brimming with tools and equipment, coffee cans full of nails, screws, and bolts, old light fixtures, leaky hoses he hasn't got round to fixing, and perfectly good faucet assemblies that didn't suit my mother's sense of aesthetics. I know that's nothing compared to some of these guys, but the fact that he's actually used the majority of what he's collected is mind-boggling when you see what's left.
I can get rid of stuff if I feel like it's going someplace where it will be used and enjoyed. I have a hard time just throwing things away, though. The thought of it rotting in a landfill when there's someone out there that might have benefited from it saddens me. I just gave away a huge desk to a young couple setting up their first apartment together, and I donated four 14-gallon plastic bins' worth of Little People toys to my kids' speech therapist's practice last month, which she has thanked me for about six times. That's the best cure for my kind of hoarding -- realizing that anything that's potentially useful to me in the future is probably also useful to someone else right now.
On the other hand, I did just put a bunch of kitchen stuff in my attic to save for my BFF when she moves out of her parents' house next year. Her ex is keeping all their pots and pans, and since Mom just bought me a new set (for no discernible reason) I thought she might like my old ones. She said she'd love to have them if I didn't mind storing them for her until she's ready, and since I do have the space, I agreed. But technically, I still have them, so although they're dealt with, they're not really gone.
The people that freak me out the most are the animal hoarders. Those homes are the worst, and the eventual fate of the poor cats (it's almost always cats) is horrible.
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Topic: 17th November 2009 - Are you a hoarder? (Time Magazine) (Read 5844 times)