The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter

by Matt Paxton;Phaedra Hise

  Recycling the empty boxes opened up a large part of Jackson’s living room and made space for staging items that needed to be sorted through. Then we moved on to making some easy decisions on donating items.

  First, we worked on sorting everything in the house into piles of like items—clothing, collectibles, toiletries, bedding, kitchen equipment, and so forth. Jackson’s plan was to then sort through each of those piles to make “trash,” “keep,” “donate,” “sell,” and “maybe” piles. Although the “maybe” pile grew, we knew he wouldn’t keep all of those items. Jackson was beginning to understand what was important and what wasn’t, and when he went back to the “maybe” pile, we were sure he would realize that some of these things weren’t worth keeping.

  The first morning, we discovered a box of Cher’s doorknobs. Yes, Cher’s doorknobs. Jackson had bought them online, when Cher was renovating her house. They were strange and beautiful—a dragon’s paw, a crystal ball, and other assorted shapes and styles. Jackson agonized over whether or not to keep that box, and then started to panic about his entire house, realizing that he had seven rooms filled with similar items he had to make decisions about.

  The doorknobs went into his “maybe” pile, along with several other things, and finally Jackson began to see that the cleaning process was manageable and that he was able to overcome his fears. When Mike showed up with lunch on the first day, Jackson realized that he had the support he needed, and that Mike wasn’t going away. Jackson’s anxiety went down to almost nothing, and he rolled on through the house.

  During the sorting, we made a rule for Jackson that anything he decided to move out of the house had to leave that day. If he wanted to give a leather coat to a neighbor who had admired it, that was fine, but he had to contact the neighbor and get it to him right away. Otherwise, it went to the donation site at the end of the day. The “donate” and “trash” piles got hauled away daily so that Jackson wouldn’t be tempted to pull items back out later that night. Mike listed the “sell” items on eBay within a day or two. Jackson saved the “maybe” items to sort at the end of the cleaning.

  To keep on track, Jackson reminded himself repeatedly of the goal to sell his house and move in with Mike. Whenever he debated about an item, he asked himself if it fit his goal. The impressive Cher doorknobs were ultimately kept because Mike and Jackson agreed that they could go in their new place—and besides, they were real conversation pieces. But most of Jackson’s clothing and other collectibles did not fit his goal—he had already moved enough clothes to Mike’s house, and they only had room for so much Blondie.

  Three days into the cleanup, Jackson had repeated his new sorting process so many times that it had become his new habit. Without any prompting he was making quick, confident, and accurate decisions about items—whether to keep, sell, donate, or throw away. Because he was so highly motivated, Jackson was able to work independently. We decided that he could finish the last two rooms by himself, and so my crew and I packed up and left Jackson and Mike with the confidence that this was a success story.

  STAGE 3: RICK

  Rick, the retired professor/information hoarder in the suburbs of Washington, DC, whose house was too far gone for him to even consider cleaning it alone, had an additional complication for the cleanup on top of the volume of paper. Physically, there were high levels of mold in the house, and mentally there were signs of dementia. The damage to his house was so extensive that Rick needed a large team that included building inspectors and construction workers, specialists to deal with the mold, a document disposal company with an industrial shredder, and a cleanup crew equipped with respirators and protective clothing. Rick’s deeply ingrained hoarder habits and dementia indicated a slower and potentially more expensive cleaning.

  Layers of paper—old newspapers and junk mail—carpeted the stairs in Rick’s Stage 3 home.

  Rick’s stairway after the cleanup.

  Rick and his sister, who had actually instigated the cleanup, met my cleaning crew at 9:00 a.m. on the agreedupon start date. Rick hadn’t wanted the neighbors to know that a hoarding cleanup company was at his house, so we arrived in an unmarked truck after the neighbors had all left for work.

  Rick’s house was filled with old mail, files, and magazines. There was a two-foot-high paper “carpet” in the living room. In the kitchen, paperwork covered the countertops and flowed off onto the floor. The dishwasher didn’t work, and the oven was filled with books and stock certificates. A mattress was propped up in the hallway, also covered with paperwork. The bedrooms weren’t as full of paper, but clothing and trash littered the floors, and Rick’s mattress smelled like it had been soiled.

  The cleaning crew started in the living room, picking up papers a handful at a time, and sorting through them to put some in boxes to keep and the rest in heavy-duty trash bags to be dumped. They were looking for the items that Rick wanted to save, including the deed to his house, some retirement checks, and family photographs. He wanted those and his academic papers packed into boxes for him to sort through later.

  Rick sat on a stool in the kitchen, picked through boxes of paperwork, and answered questions about what to do with other items the crew found as they worked their way deeper into the house, like the mattress (keep), a second microwave (donate), an exercise machine (donate), and dirty clothing (wash and donate). Just as I did with Jackson, I helped Rick when he got stuck on wanting to keep an old magazine or a piece of junk mail. I reminded him that he had decided that he wanted to sell his house and move in with his sister, and this was the path toward his goal.

  After two hours, Rick was exhausted and overwhelmed. His sister took him out for coffee to give him a change of scenery. With Rick’s permission, the crew kept working. While he was gone, we put aside anything that we felt would require a decision from him.

  Rick, his sister, and the cleaning team worked through the house for three days, taking frequent breaks. The crew made ten trips to the county recycling station to dispose of twentyfour tons of paper. The building inspectors dropped by every other day, checking to make sure we hadn’t uncovered more mold and that the floors and walls were in safe condition.

  During the cleanup Rick was forgetful, often asking what had happened with an item that he had just made a decision on. On the third day, Rick called me in a panic, worried that we had lost the letter from his department head, congratulating him on his retirement. I reminded Rick that he had made decisions on every single piece of academic paperwork, so either he had decided to throw it away or we had saved it. The next day we found it in his filing cabinet.

  Therapy would have been helpful for Rick, as a Stage 3 hoarder, but it was still optional because he would be moving in with his sister, who would help him stay clutter-free. Although Rick hadn’t been diagnosed with dementia, his sister said that the signs had worsened recently and that she would continue to monitor him when they were living together. At the same time, she could really help him control his hoarding with daily reminders and incentives.

  STAGE 4: AIMEE

  Aimee, whose story opened this chapter, was only the second case that I’d ever worked on. We knew that her condo contained human waste and used insulin needles—two toxic substances that needed special handling—but we didn’t know what else we might find. The place also had some structural damage. Late-stage hoarder houses have more potential for accidents and noxious hazards, which can put a cleanup crew at high risk for injury and sickness. With these dangers, and the legal issues about disposing of hazardous waste, a professional crew is pretty much required at this stage.

  Shoes, purses, clothes, and unopened packages hid the feces and food that spilled out into the hallway from the adjacent rooms in Aimee’s Stage 4 house.

  After Aimee’s cleanup, there were just a few cartons of things to be taken away.

  For advanced hoarders, trust is hugely important. On the first day, cleanup helpers asked Aimee for permission every time they started to work on a pile of stuff and
whenever they wanted to enter a room. They asked her to look at and approve every item they threw away. It was slow going at first.

  Aimee was well enough to work with us for about an hour at a time before she needed to go lie down on her bed for a rest. At first she wanted all of the workers in the same room, so that she could keep an eye on them, and she asked that the cleaning stop when she took a break. After a few days, she trusted the crew enough to allow a team to work independently in the bedroom while she stayed with the main crew in the kitchen. Everyone kept working during her breaks.

  She realized that the cleaning crew wasn’t going to do anything behind her back, and she knew that they were searching for important items, which included tax documents, checks, and her mother’s pearl necklace. Aimee knew exactly where the necklace was. She pointed to a pile in the bathroom—clothing, towels, and newspaper, all soaking wet and moldy from the leaky sink. The next day the crew found it within two inches of where Aimee said it was, still in its original box, in perfect condition.

  Aimee wanted to keep all of her purses and shoes, and most of her clothing. I reminded her of her goal—to stay in her house—and that she could either keep all her clothing or keep her house. So together we chose a closet just for her shoes and purses, and that space would set the limit of her hoarding. She was allowed to keep as many clothing and accessory items as she could fit into that closet, and no more. Because Aimee was learning to set her own limits, she was more agreeable when it came to making choices.

  Because of the stress, a late-stage hoarder is usually unable to clean for more than a day or two. With Aimee, we scheduled two days of cleaning followed by an off day. We took her trash to the dump each day so that she wouldn’t go back and pull items out of the Dumpster at night (a common hoarder problem). But Aimee’s main issue was that during her non-cleaning days, she would go through her “maybe” pile and move a lot to her “keep” section. Every time the crew returned, they had to spend half a day redoing that work.

  The later the hoarding stage, the more team members are usually involved to cope with the physical and emotional issues. Aimee’s team included a social worker, a building inspector, and six cleanup helpers. Her cleanup took three months, with lots of days off.

  The big challenge with Aimee was her emotional attachment to much of her stuff. Her “keep” items consisted mostly of things that had belonged to her late mother, who had been her closest friend and a major source of support during a difficult divorce from an abusive man. Aimee came to realize that the trauma of losing her mother had, in fact, triggered her hoarding.

  Aimee’s self-image had become extremely poor. It was particularly hard for her to recognize the glamorous model that she once had been. But the cleaning was an opportunity to build a new, positive attitude. One day, one of the cleanup guys found a magazine with a gorgeous, much younger Aimee on the cover. He knew it was Aimee, but he asked her who the “hot babe” was, to encourage her to embrace her former beautiful non-hoarder self. Aimee blushed and smiled; as if that was the first time she had received a compliment from a man in years. After weeks of positive reinforcement about her appearance and decision-making ability, Aimee’s behavior changed. She began to smile, share stories, and became much more confident and relaxed. She began to remember her old self, before hoarding, and she enjoyed rediscovering that person.

  STAGE 5: MARGARET

  Margaret had been hoarding so many years that her possessions had started to decompose at the bottom of her five-foot piles. Everything in her double-wide trailer home was either broken, rotting, or chewed or peed on by the fifty or so dogs that had free run of the place. There was extensive water damage from broken pipes, with walls and ceilings split and falling down in spots. The house stank, it was hot, and the air was thick with dust. Cobwebs waved from the ceiling and flies buzzed at all of the windows.

  In the kitchen, spoiled food stank up the refrigerator, and dirty dishes were molding in the sink. Cockroaches scattered whenever items were moved. The narrow walkways between the piles were swimming in a thick brown muck that actually sucked one of Margaret’s clogs off her foot as she walked through the kitchen on cleanup day. She ignored it and kept walking.

  In this house the hoarding had been going on for so long that everything was rotting, even the building. Once her house was condemned, Margaret moved in with one of her adult daughters who lived nearby. On cleaning day, Margaret’s daughter drove her to the house to meet the cleaning crew, building inspector, animal control officer, and social worker.

  With a cleanup this aggressive, it’s mostly about damage control, because this stage of hoarder house will never be perfect. The building inspector told Margaret that we might get the house clean only to discover that it wasn’t salvageable and had to be bulldozed. Animal control warned Margaret that the house had to pass inspection for some of her dogs to be returned.

  It was hard for Margaret to say good-bye to her pets, because some of them she would never see again. In fact, getting the house clean enough for animal control to return six of the dogs became her main goal, and it motivated her through a cleanup that she really had no desire to do.

  The dogs aside, the main problem for Margaret was accepting the trash in the house for what it was: just junk. The dogs and that stuff were all that Margaret had. Most of her friends and family had abandoned her and she truly looked to the things in her house as friends. As soon as the crew started touching empty food wrappers in the kitchen and asking her if they could throw them away, Margaret’s anxiety level skyrocketed and she got angry. She grabbed an empty toilet paper roll out of a worker’s hands and put it in her sweater pocket, yelling at him not to handle her things. Every item they touched provoked an equally angry reaction.

  I kept calm, reminded Margaret that her goal was to get her pets back, and offered to hold the trash bag open and let her choose what to throw away. This was slowgoing because Margaret didn’t want to part with anything. Each item she touched had an argument attached to it about why she needed to keep it. Every time Margaret actually put an item in the bag, I congratulated her on making a really difficult move toward helping her pets. Then I told her that she only had the crew for five days, and we had to speed up the work if we were going to reach her goal.

  Margaret took a day and a half to make it through the kitchen, but then the crew hit an unexpected snag. As we started cleaning out the mudroom, the crew found a massive rat’s nest, nearly eight feet wide and two feet tall. We halted the cleanup until pest control could come the next day and check for rats. Fortunately, the rats were long gone and they hadn’t left much damage behind except for the giant nest.

  Because advanced hoarder houses always have surprises like this, the cleanup plan needs to accommodate the occasional setback and added expense. It is not at all unusual to uncover termite damage, feces, dead animals, and cracks in the foundations in a Stage 5 hoarder house.

  Like Aimee, Margaret had to take frequent breaks, mostly due to the mental exhaustion of working in a constant state of anxiety and anger. She would blow up and then need to walk away to calm down. Stage 4 and 5 hoarding cleanups are massive—both physically and emotionally. Margaret had to make decisions about her possessions for the first time in more than ten years, and at her age learning a new skill was a big challenge.

  The crew needed breaks too. The house was hot and the air was bad. They were working in oppressive conditions, dressed in long pants and long-sleeve shirts, with gloves, respirators, and Tyvek protective suits.

  We spent five days on Margaret’s house, during which time we gave her constant encouragement. By the end of the job, the only things that we were able to salvage were two bed frames, a microwave with the door held closed by duct tape, a scratched kitchen table, a few wobbly wooden chairs, and some clothing. We scrubbed everything, but the floors and walls were permanently dirty. We replaced the missing and broken ceiling tiles (which made some white and some brown), and Margaret planned to have her son-in-law
fix the holes in her drywall. The floors were gouged, uneven, and permanently stained with urine, and the bottom halves of most of the doors were still missing because they had been chewed up by the dogs. The windows were dirty and there were no curtains. Her daughter planned to take her shopping to buy some new furniture and linens. Although Margaret was still angry about the cleanup and would never admit it, this was success.

  THE CLEANUP PLAN

  No matter how large or small the team, it’s important that everyone shares the same vision and goals, especially the hoarder. The written plan, developed beforehand, gives everyone something to refer to if things get tense or arguments break out. It also gives the hoarder a black-and-white reminder of what everyone agreed to. When the pressure is on and a hoarder is panicking, everyone can take a step back, calm down, and refer to the plan to get back on track.

  Because cleanups are unpredictable, plans need to be flexible to account for surprises like finding structural damage in a house, or the realization that meeting a predetermined deadline will be impossible. But everyone should agree together on changes and work on implementing the updated plan.

  ▶ Team Members

  Even if it’s a small team, take the time to introduce everyone. Especially with extreme hoarding jobs, not all of the team members may be present at the outset. But the team leader should, at the least, have a list of everyone who will be involved. Knowing the players is most important for anxious hoarders whose suspicions may still be high at this early stage of the cleanup.