People who are hoarders are usually quite difficult to live with when you try to part them from their things. Hoarding is actually a symptom of obssessive compulsive disorder. I was a case manager for mentally ill people and I had a couple of hoarders on my caseload. For most hoarders the clutter makes them feel secure.
Too bad this lady didn't discover flylady.net. She is the queen of clutter busting.
The FlyLady rocks! lol
I have a neighbor with this condition. There have been several interventions -- on one occasion two large dumpsters worth of trash were removed. In a few months, the situation was almost as bad as before. Parting with her trash causes an anxiety attack, it seems.
OK--I looked at the web site--tell me about your experiences with the flylady...I've heard of this shiny sink thing before.
My sister and I could tell you stories about our father, he is a hoarder. He's not well now, after bacterial meningitis, so all he hoards is candy, but he used to be an attorney used to getting this his way, so we had to live with it.
There were paths in our living room. We used to save garbage bags of stuff to throw out and then take them to the dumpster while he was at work. And one time he had a serious fit when my sister threw out a rubber-bound collection of swizzle sticks from the restaurants he had gone to. It wasn't a serious collection, they were lying in the drawer along with packs of matches from every restaurant, etc...
We would open the hall closet to something for the bathroom and the stacks of towels, toilet paper and soap would often fall onto our heads.
I think he would have loved to be different--it was always a massive undertaking to entertain people, in contrast to the well-kept homes of his partners--but he really could not help himself.
Sweet diane, I pinged you on the earlier thread because I, too, am a Flylady fan. She's great. :)