apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Frightening and depressing.

Looks like a classic case of hoarding. There's treatment for this. Seriously.

OCD/hoarding.

How come the shirts are so perfectly folded in the midst of all that crazy?

Can't something be done? - if nothing else, it's clearly a fire hazard.

It's actually the outcroppings of order within the madness that I find most disturbing. It first hit me in the glass paperweights photo. (Interesting that you'd pick the same one.) But also in the cassette tapes lined up on the rolltop desk, the line of South Park refrigerator magnets, etc.

She's not insane, and I'm not a medical professional, but from what I've read it's clear she has an extremely serious and advanced incapacitating case of OCD with hoarding behaviors and needs immediate intervention for her own health and safety and sanity (and that of those around her). Behaviour modification therapy is definitely in order, even if someone tried to help her clean out and organize like on Mission Organization or Clean Sweep, that wouldn't get at her underlying problem, it's way too serious. But these pictures are definitely an inspiration to clear some of my own clutter... this is so sad.

okay now i KNOW i have no clutter!!!

Prozac usually ends compulsive collecting. Seriously.

I forwarded this to my brothers. I'm horrified by how much I identified with this post. My grandmother's house was like this and her 4 daughters (including my mother) have shadings of this compulsivity. I'm sure that's why I get so uncomfortable around clutter and have found apartment living pretty liberating because I can't over-collect. There are no extra rooms that I can stack crap to the ceiling in like at my parents' house.

The weird thing to me is the bathroom. There was NOTHING on the counter above the toilet, or on the walls. Not even a calendar;)

welcome to teh internets. dude that was mefi'd and slashdotted sixty years ago (no literally)

um... what?

This is really my secret fear, right there, that I'm gonna turn into the crazy old woman who's killed by a stack of newspapers. My only hope is that I do actually get frustrated by clutter and feel very pleased when there are big bags of trash going out the door.

It's the dark side of eBay.

Oh, and Max, it's w-e-i-r-d. Just call me a spelling snob, I can take it.

Okay, at first I laughed. Then I was scared by this post.

Did you see all the postal tape? The boxes? The TV next to the computer so that she can do two things at once?

What if eBay has quietly done this to thousands of homes across the country? It could be an epidemic that no one has even noticed - people who have harnessed the power of eBay to feed their packrat gene. If enough people ended up like this lady, eBay could end up being a main contributor to our increased fuel and resource consumption - just for the sake of getting a bunch of tshatshkes from point A to point B.

By the way, was that really a cucumber? It looked different - I think I have seen something like that in the asian food markets. It has an extremely bitter taste and the outside texture of a melting candle. Supposed to be packed with vitamins, though...

I need to go home right now and do a 27,000 fling boogie (flylady-dot-net). And dust. And never, ever, even look at Ebay again. Except to see if I won the etching I was bidding on....

Translating optimus-talk for Mike the site geek.

"This series of pictures was posted and discussed on slashdot.org and metafilter.org a long time ago. The folks on this site are painfully uncool to have discovered it this late in the day".

Eh. I'm having the same thought as Matt - what an insane use of resources, starting with the lady's money and on to paper, gas, etc. Painful waste all around. I need some time on simpleliving-dot-com just to cleanse my brain.

While he/she seems to know that this is not "okay," he/she seems doomed to repeating her tragedy....

I do most of my hoarding on my computers, work and home, in the form of "bookmarks" and "favorites" and saved articles. The saved articles have really cut down on the paper in my apartment.

Also, I'm very fortunate never to have spent the time figuring out how to buy something on Ebay. I'm sure that day will come.

Did anyone else notice that despite all the junk in the house, there were stark contrasts in that the kitchen countertops SHINED, the bathroom was IMMACULATE, and there were fresh vacuum marks on the carpets? Also notice the order that the boxes were stacked, the arrangement of the magnets and other ornaments, etc. It is clearly a sign of OCD, hopefully this woman can get some help.

Here are my questions--

1. Where does this woman get all the money to buy all this junk?
2. Where the heck did all those printer paper boxes come from?

I cannot tell a lie. I sorta understand because I am a victim of the love that cannot speak its name. To wit, I have a large number of stuffed animals and other toys which, in rotation, share my space.

I know this crime against good taste and interior will make you sneer in disdain but I must be honest above all else. While it is true that most of these disreputable objects reside on one closet shelf and I have not (yet)j reached the stage when the fire marshall will need to be called, nevertheless, it is a collection.

help. me. please. help. me

hideous filth. that woman is seriously ill. i'd love to see those two ladies from that show, 'how clean is your house' get their hands on this woman.

im sure that place is just totally infested with rats and mice.

DAMN.

Maybe I'm the one who needs medication. When I was looking through the pictures, all I could think was how much fun it would be to play this family in The Sims...

there is a character in the movie "Mumford" (199) who has this compulsive shopping/hoarding disorder. House looks quite similar but full of mailing parcels from Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, etc.

By the way its a very clever movie.

I was laughing my head off at first... the dust on the chair being disturbed by mom's fall was pretty hilarious. The guy's writing (and I think it's a guy) was great also... but then everything took this horrifying turn, I'm not sure where... and the fun stopped. The desolate backyard bummed me out, but the interior landscaping was truly mailroom junkyard baroque. Should Ebay be held responsible for enabling this woman to destroy herself? She's clearly mortified at her own behavior, as we can see by the cardboard in the windows... Or is it a fascination with cardboard and the wonderful things you can do with it?

What is it like to have a home made of solid matter?

Good Lord, is this home to the messiest closet contest what Marlon's home was to the smallest, coolest apartment? Ouch.

and P.S., make no mistake, this stuff was all bought second-hand.

Forget the OCD stuff... This isn't a cry for an intervention, it's a design opportunity.

This woman needs a whacked landscaper/burnout folk artist to take every item out of her home and build some fascinating kind of tower of babel in the backyard, and maybe the front as well... and the sidewalk and, yeah, down the street... to make something as organinc as the ground cover growing into the driveway... Something like that hideous mosaic circling Grant's Tomb or something that tells a story like those monumental columns in Rome. Then she could charge admission to this growing thing and it could feed into her ebay craze, which, by the way, easily suports the economies of a few municipalities, and the artwork could thereby continue to blister and grow as more purchases are made.

She's just a frustrated artist.

And this blog would become an epic poem of the 21st century...

Yikes -- I have eBay open in another window. Can my Russel Wright "habit" be just the beginning?!?!?!?

ebrown--
Key indicators-- "in rotation" and "one shelf".
You do not have a problem. You have a soul.

Frank--
As long as you are buying dinnerware, and not trying to buy his remains, I am guessing you are still fine. ;)

Patrick (too), good point. If you think that you're inclined to begin your own collection of EVERYthing, don't worry so much. The fact that you organize (store your "paper" on computer, worry about collecting specific items,) is a sign that this will never happen to you.
What this woman has is not the same as living in clutter. If a space is cleared and cleaned, more will just take it's place, regardless of ebay. My mom is like this lady. When I lived home, I would throw out bags and bags of trash (50 boxes of expired oatmeal bought on clearence, dozens of packs of halloween makeup, 10 gallon tubs of industrial paint that had congealed beyond use 4 years before, on sale...I could go on, but it would take far too long.)She wouldn't notice. When I would come home from college for a weekend, it was worse--the windows were gone. Any time you entered a doorway, you had to push your way through and twist your way in. Bags, boxes, furniture (two dressers, two couches, two tv's,a piano, and china cabinet, just in the living room--yay for garage sales!) groceries bought and forgotten in rooms other than the kitchen. Once, after climbing over all this, I forced my way into my old bedroom, only to be overpowered by an unbelievable stench. Under a pile of new quilts on my bed, I found a soggy bag. Inside was mould. I could vaguely make out "mushrooms, "clearence," and an expo about 2 months prior to the date of my stay. Her explination--a few weeks before, she had gone food shopping, but forgot where she put that grocery bag. I used to try and clean. Now I just take benedryl and stay for less than 2 days. I pack a lunch, and a dinner, since the food is inedible (no matter how many times she tells me that she just bought the food last week, the experation dates tell me different--she can't throw it out, even if it's been there for 5 years.) She's the lady to give free stuff to, because she always has a purpous for everything she takes, but it only ends up piled in the house. Every year or so, there's an intervention. She, her friends, and family spend a week's vacation throwing out hundreds of $$ worth of crap from the dollar store, but it always ends up accumulating within months.
Sorry I went on, but I need to stress--no matter how much you clean and organize, and make nice spaces to keep the really nice things, it all ends up buried in crap when you have a problem like this. Even the garbage is valuable. Unless you think that 17 packs of Christmas plates from Wal-mart are just as valuable as Grandma's china, you don't have too much to worry about.

And she never shops on ebay. It's too expensive.

This is really pretty old....

I think it was sent to me via a goon.

I just thought the entire thing so horribly sad.

Some people however just refused to be helped becouse they don't see a problem. (sad sad sad)

I also question the offspring's careful and thorough documentation and public posting of the sad state of the house...

Sometimes we have to draw lines, just to say "this is not me". Particularly with our parents, who we love but with whom we can become enmeshed if their problems become ours. I think he was trying to draw a line.

I love how you call him "The offspring."

Well, he's definitely crafted a telling tale of the state of his life and his ma's... and he definitely thought it all out. At first he was just like, with a mad grin, saying, "oh, yeah, come over to my place and I'll show some weird stuff my mom has going on... and he really was amusing at first... but then his words and images just become a complete assault.

This blog was written with a huge amount of emotion behind it all. He's protesting the quality of life he sees, he's angry, he's laughing at whole theater of the absurd, and he's going to go to sleep and see it all and his ma the very next day.

The postal and delivery service people must go absolutely crazy at this place. I hear that in an office building, it's the mailroom people who know everything about you... it must be the same for residential deliveries.

I don't get how the son lives there without investigating what's inside the stacks upon stacks of boxes. He said mom buys on ebay and often doesn't even bother opening the packages. I'm all about opening the packages. But I suppose he knows it's all crap. If the woman had taste it could be fun, even exciting, and would be a good bonding experience. But, yeah, I guess it's pretty clear that mom is shooting for quantity and not quality. I sell stuff on ebay. I wonder if one of those boxes is from me. yikes!

I gotta say--it ain't about ebay, and it ain't about taste. It's pathology. he could open boxes all day and never reach the bottom.

She's paranoid. She refuses to throw away expired Rx's because the Folsom prison convicts will see the labels. And she's covered up the windows with cardboard.

Then again, my own father recently yelled at me for throwing away old Rx's--some dating all the way back to the 1970's--because, as he put it, "that's private!" How his last withered amoxycillin pill from 1979 connects to privacy I don't know, but it does.

Of course we can joke about it, but this is a serious illness. Big difference between collecting and hoarding (I'm quite interested in why some people are collectors and others are not, as I'm not a collector, but that's another topic.) Anyone who wants more info can easily google "hoarding OCD", or similar. I read a newspaper article on this with several case studies and the person who does this type of thing is not in control, often in danger (health hazards, fires) and neglectful of personal needs, such as not having a proper sleeping place, as is the case in this example. The article talked about interventions where someone came in and cleaned the place out while the person was gone and they get very upset and then just fill the place up again. Another type of hoarding is collecting animals, which puts other live beings at risk. Those are cases you read about in the news. My opinion based on my reading is that such a person desperately needs psychiatric help. I'm wondering why this person chose to post this here. Also, is optimus saying that this identical item was posted elsewhere? Or just something similar?

Pixie -- I found the link on screenhead.com the other day. They noted that it had been making the rounds for some time, but that they'd never posted it before. After reading through it and getting sucked into the increasingly disturbing narrative, I thought I'd send it to AT, though, at the time, words were escaping me.

My mother must have a very much milder form of the disorder. Although you'd never know it by walking through her house -- which looks surprisingly normal -- she's got old newspapers, paperwork, and catalogs shoved into every closet, under every bed, and in the attic and basement. She claims that she just hasn't had time to go through it. Once, I took two days and consolidated all of it in one place, to help move the process along. But it was no use, as newspapers, paperwork and catalogs must be migratory animals, as they were soon back under the beds and in the closets again. I try to burn one boxfull every time I visit when she's not looking, just to maintain my own sanity. If I were to throw any of them away and she were to find them, they'd be back in the house in no time.

Thanks for the clarification Doug.
That's very interesting about your mother's version of this.

She also keeps a tote bag filled with my grandfather's old work shirt, my grandmother's linen napkins, and an old jacket of my fathers' in the trunk of her car... every car she has had since about 1979. (My father's still alive by the way, so I totally can't figure that one out. Neither can he.)

Needless to say, in my own apartment, if it's not nailed down, I throw it away.

I just added this to my blog on Friday, I think it was. Truly frightening - mainly because my mother had a milder version of this problem. She was just better at hiding all of the crap she bought...

Joey -

1) She has a job.

2) She brings home the Xerox boxes from work.

There is another website out there where the son answers questions on a message board.

Smitty-where is that website where the son answers questions?

My mom has that to some degree... she's got so much cookware and Tupperware for one person and noplace to store it all. Thankfully, when she sends me care packages and fudge and things,she says "keep the container!" so that whittles it down. This is nothing like the hoarder in the link, though.

When I was a child, I had OCD, which I have outgrown, but it made me much neater than other people.

Now that I'm "cured", I'm not compulsively tidy anymore, but I do put everything back in exactly the same place when I clean. Not crippling, though.

It's not eBay's fault... if not for eBay it would be thrift shops, country kitsch from antiques fairs or dollar store finds.

My former roommate has a mildly milder version of this. She is a compulsive overeater, but our tiny kitchen was stacked floor to ceiling with giant containers of cereal she never ate. She had her own fridge, where the other two people shared another one, and we had constant fights with her to keep her from storing food in our fridge. There were bins and bins of never-used-tupperware, her fridge was stacked solid with stuff, there were mystery containers of mystery stuff everywhere, nothing was ever bought in non-bulk amounts, and whenever anyone asked for more storage space, she freaked out.

I don't know how I kept from murdering the woman.
Now I'm in my own space and it's so clutter free and cart-wheelable. Phew. And I'm still editing and throwing stuff out.

Trauma, I tells you.

I say move Crazy eBay Mom in with the Craiglist guy in LA who was looking for a roommate who would allow him his monthly museum-quality upholstering time.

Or heck, move CEM's son in with the crazy LA guy. If "the offspring" can put up with his mom's living habits, he can apparently endure anything.

And for anyone else looking for the message board thread on Crazy eBay Mom, it's here -

http[insert colon mark here]//doiop.com/k76501

I can't believe how many people say their own moms have the same tendencies. mine too. she also had six kids, which I honestly think is a symptom of the same hoarding problem. her brother's a hoarder too, and he has nine kids. it must be somewhat genetic. my sister kept a 6-foot stack of old newspapers for a couple years, but the fact that she lived in a studio eventually cured her.

Therapy should include moving patient to a studio apartment in NYC.

My OCD is causing me to shake. I can't look at the pictures anymore.

its fascinating how many people see their owm mom in crazy ebay later. I know that was said earlier but I've been kind of fascinating. My mother is nothing like that but she is very messy. What is interesting though is that it seems many people with mom's with crazy lady tendencies have great taste and love decorating or you wouldnt be checking out this website. hmmmmm

i have OCD, really, not the pretend,"i wash my hands 5 times a day so that means i have ocd" mine can get really bad sometimes...but nothing like that.