The Clutter...the Clutter...

[anakhouri]

I love my husband. He's a great partner and a wonderful father, and a good person. But sometimes I want to strangle him.

We have a small third bedroom in our house that we use as a computer room. I have a desk, he has a desk, there are three bookcases. And a huge pile of his crap. Rubbermaid bins full of miscellaneous junk, piles of unpainted miniatures, video game cases, receipts from years ago, movie tickets, gaming books, comic books, etc. There is a similar pile in the basement and one in the computer room closet. I pulled the stuff in the basement out of the garage so he could go through it. That was a year ago and it has been untouched since then.

Husband has a very stressful job at the moment that devours most of his life. Because of this I do 99% of the house and yardwork, childcare, and bill-paying, making appointments etc. I am OK with this rather medieval arrangement, because shitty job. So I hate to nag him about getting his clutter cleared up. He always plans to do it some weekend when the kid is with his grandparents, and it never happens because he ends up working and by the time he comes home I hate to nag him about it so he just plays Skyrim or whatever all night. If I do mention it, he becomes depressed about what a terrible husband he is, and he already had anxiety and depression issues that I don't want to make worse right now.

Now, we're going to be moving when his postdoc is done, in about 2 more years or so. I am also pregnant with #2. Our moving timeline roughly coincides with the second kid being about 12-18 months old. Therefore, I want to get this shit cleared out well before we move, because I'm sure 99% of the packing and moving arrangements will also be my responsibility.

So today I got fed up. I dragged all his crap out of the computer room, dusted and swept (which I haven't been able to do in months because of his junk) and put it all back in, in a more compact pile so we could actually walk in there (can't throw anything out, because he's one of those super-sentimental packrats and it would be hell on earth if I got rid of any of his crap). When he called from the lab I told him what I'd done, and he frantically asked what I'd done with one pile of torn-up mail and random paperwork. I told ihm where I'd moved it. Well, apparently that's all our tax paperwork for the year. Integrated into a random pile of old mail and empty envelopes.

When we move I am going to ask for four bedrooms just so his shit can have one all to itself, and I can close the door on the mess.

The other day he mentioned (again) that we need to unload some of books before we move. I laughed, because I've already gotten rid of at least three shelves' worth. Next time he mentions it I'm going to tell him it's all on him now.

[TheHuckster]

Wow. My wife's husband is exactly like your husband!

Yeah, I admit to be a packrat who leaves important stuff like tax documents with 5 year old long-since-expired credit card offer letters and forms, and it's impossible for the untrained eye to tell what is important in my pile and what is not.

I've actually been slowly working on my pile. For me, it's a combination of procrastination, complacency ("It doesn't bother me"), and, yes, I guess some packrat mentality ("I might need this someday" or "Aww, this old plane ticket reminds me of our trip to Florida") where I have a hard time letting go.

I do have no problem with letting go of really stupid junk like old grocery store receipts and expired coupons, though. But that's where the procrastination comes in. The only difference is my office is truly "my" room in the sense that I don't share it with my wife. I know for a fact my wife wouldn't let me do this if I actually shared it with her.

[HYHYBT]

That's the danger of moving someone else's stuff. THEY know what is important (either in general or to them personally) and have a reasonable chance of knowing right where a thing is. Once you move it around, you've broken that. That's *you* messing it up by putting it where they can't find it, not their messing up for remembering where they left it instead of magically knowing where it's gone since.

As for packing: if it's in Rubbermaid tubs, it's already packed, so there's no need to worry about that part even if it's still there when moving time comes.

This is one of those areas where it's reasonable for people to be different and unreasonable to expect them to live as if they were like you. That goes both ways, of course. Keeping it contained to a separate room once you've moved makes good sense; expecting it to be gone in the meantime doesn't.

But the clutter does have to be gone through now and then. Stuff that's sorted and packed up in bins is probably gone through already, but the rest, deliberately-kept stuff and genuine trash tend to collect together.

[anakhouri]

I already feel much more comfortable now that I can see the floor in here and it's confined to a corner. I don't expect him to not be a packrat; he's always been this way. It's the procrastination that gets me. I'm a very efficient person. And now with a new child and a move looming in the future I feel like we are on a (tentative) deadline and need to get this done. And we do not have a big house. If there is clutter somewhere, it's taking up space we could use.

Like I said, I love him more than anything and he's a fantastic person. Just yesterday for some reason it was really getting to me. I just wish I could discuss it with him without sending him into a depression.

Thanks for letting me vent!

[TheHuckster]

I already feel much more comfortable now that I can see the floor in here and it's confined to a corner. I don't expect him to not be a packrat; he's always been this way. It's the procrastination that gets me. I'm a very efficient person. And now with a new child and a move looming in the future I feel like we are on a (tentative) deadline and need to get this done. And we do not have a big house. If there is clutter somewhere, it's taking up space we could use.

Like I said, I love him more than anything and he's a fantastic person. Just yesterday for some reason it was really getting to me. I just wish I could discuss it with him without sending him into a depression.

Thanks for letting me vent!

It's amazing how you and your husband sounds a lot like me and my wife, only with me being on the other side. I swear, she has used the same exact words (almost verbatim) to me, although it's more about a child in the future than an actual child at this point... but we are planning to move sometime this year.

[HYHYBT]

Sorry to have jumped to conclusions.

[Jetfire]

I'm a packrat admittedly, (made worse by living alone), but I'm starting to be better about purging and getting rid of stuff I don't need.

I think one of the biggest things I did this weekend. I gave mom a laundry basket full of softcover books to bring into the school library.

Since I got my Kobo 2-3 years ago, I haven't read a paper book. Even when I want to read a book I have on paper, I've gone and gotten the digital version instead and read that.

So I've decided it's past time to start getting rid of the piles of books and keep the ones I really want (which shouldn't be that many, even for the hardcovers).

Of course while my book collection is going digital, my comic collection keeps growing; but as long as I want to support my local shop, that's not going to change.

[telecom_goddess]

I'm sorry but no I don't put up with that crap. My housemate tends to collect and keep all old junk mail, empty envelopes, old bills that don't need to be around, and mix them in with the important shit. I don't deal with that. I go through and I throw away the trash. If he doesn't like it tough. I put all his important stuff in labeled folders in a desk drawer. Nice and organized. He claims he can't find anything Cause reading a label is so hard.

I don't put up with that clutter bullshit in my house, especially when I pay all the rent, the utilities and do all the housework.

[Greenday]

It's nice of you to think of his feelings by not pushing him, but it's not fair to you at all. Plus it is an illness that won't get better without help. My stepdad is a pack rat. First it started with the garage. Then once it got to the point where we couldn't park in there anymore, it became the basement. Then when that filled up, it became the spare bedroom. Then once that filled up he started on the dining room. That's when my mom forced him to go talk to a therapist about it. You can't confine it to just one room. Once it's full, they'll just move onto another room.

[patiokitty]

I will agree with it being an illness, and it is often a sign of some other sort of mental illness. If you watch enough episodes of Hoarders or similar shows you will see that for many of these folks that the clutter started small and grew large as the result of some sort of mental distress/illness. There is almost always something that triggers it, and without some sort of therapy the behaviour rarely goes away. It's also something that I personally struggle with, and have gotten better at dealing with, thankfully.

[anakhouri]

As I said I know he has depression and anxiety (which he refuses to take medication for because he says he's afraid if he does, he might not worry about things that he should worry about...). I am praying that when he finds his real job and gets out of this toxic work environment his mental state will improve.

I guess I should press harder about clearing out his stuff. I feel guilty doing it but it's true I do 100% of the housework around here (he mows the lawn and does the taxes, that's it) and I hate feeling like his clutter reflects on my mad housekeeping skillz. Although those haven't been so great either lately as I've been spending all the hours my son is at preschool working at the bookstore, trying to stash away a little money before his summer vacation kills my weekday availability.

He still has textbooks from graduate school. Graduate school! He hasn't been in graduate school for 5 years now.

[patiokitty]

I am bi-polar so I deal with depression and anxiety on a regular basis. I take meds daily, one that is a mood stabilizer that also helps with my anxiety and I also have Ativan if my anxiety levels go completely nuts, but I still worry about the important stuff. It's all the other unimportant stuff that I no longer stress over - all that other stuff was what was overwhelming me and keeping me from doing stuff I needed to.

I can tell you this about his tendency towards hoarding - unless he sees it as a problem, nothing you do or say will make him get rid of it. And the more you push, the more he'll dig his feet in and do nothing about clearing it out. It's pretty typical for folks like us to react like this, even if we know deep down that it's true we need to get rid of stuff - it's not logical or rational, it's just the way our brains are wired.

The only reason I manage to keep my hoarding levels down is because I am aware of the fact that I have a problem and I accept that, and I also do not want my home to get out of hand like it has in the past. Watching 'Hoarders' has done a LOT to help me realize that I have a problem, why I have a problem, and how to deal with it.

[fireheart17]

I swear that my partner's parents suffer from shades of hoarding.

Basically, he lives in the parents former house. Parents broke their lease and moved to a house some 20 minutes away. The shed was (up until 2 weekends ago) absolutely FULL of their junk. And I do mean JUNK. We wound up chucking out about 1/2 of the stuff in there into a skip (this was one of the larger ones they could offer to boot!), kept 1/4 of it (some important documents, memories and still-usable objects) and we still have 1/4 of the stuff to go!

Their current house is a little bit better. They can get the car into the garage-sort of. There's still a ton of junk, but some of it has some use (and does get used). Given that they'll possibly be moving back into the house they moved out from, he's made it clear that they are to go through that stuff before they go.

Having said that, my partner's DAD hoards computer parts. -.- My partner is also guilty of this, but I am calling him out on this.