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Monday 21st 39-49F. Up at 3am. My wife has been very poorly and has finally consented to going into hospital to be stabilized.
Knowing a doctor would be calling at home required "a bit of tidying up." There are no letters large enough to convey what this actually meant. Things did not go well!
We have lived in almost perfect, rural isolation for 25 years. Stuff mounts up in bags and boxes and then slowly takes up living space. I am an incredibly poor tidier. My wife an absolute genius at making things fit into spaces. We are both lifetime hoarders.
Planning decluttering for a pair of hoarders: While trying to make the place more tidy I discovered stuff which hasn't been looked at for literally decades. Hoarding can start from former, economic hardship. Or downsizing a home. Or both in our case. We never moved onto the [almost] affordable farmhouse with an aircraft hanger sized barn!
Emotional attachment to worthless stuff, "just in case it is needed" is, or can be a mental disorder. I'm not talking about stinky household waste up to the ceilings. Just collections of old stuff or clothing we once bought. Collections which no longer have any real meaning. Clothing worn to holes out in the garden or workshop but still "lurking."
Curtains indoors, hanging in front or over "storage areas" are a license for intensive hoarding. I just tried hanging a curtain across my wardrobe. This was to avoid the difficulty of the door blocking access to unwanted items for recycling. The curtain looked absolutely awful and the door went straight back on! Without having thinned out any of the clothing I haven't worn in 25 years!
The Danes are much more informal in dress. Which meant most of my former wardrobe was utterly pointless. Suits? Nope. Tweed jackets and trousers? Seriously? It is all still in there. Crammed in with all the other items I never wear and those I just might. The best clothing storage is open to view. Then there are no excuses.
Many of our "collectable" items have not accumulated value over time as we had hoped. Trying to sell them now proves very difficult except at knock-down prices. Not all of it is worthy of recycling through charity shops. Charity shops seem to have even more of the same stuff and the prices are no higher now. Than back then. When we bought them because they seemed too cheap compared with UK prices. We were utterly wrong!
I have managed to sell several unused bikes and most of my old Hifi. The rest of the [stored] Hifi went to charity shops. Probably to be discarded as outdated. A modest clock collection [of 40!!] was sold. There are many more clocks to "unload." These are only moderately valuable in the right market but impossibly far from that market. The main area of interest is the UK. In Denmark they might as well be scrap!
My vintage, industrial wall clocks are large, very fragile and very heavy. Others are smaller, still heavy and not easily posted. There is no helpful eBay in Denmark. Just small ads websites. Which have rapid turnovers of almost completely worthless items. Making my [supposedly] more valuable stuff quickly lost to page 39 or 40. Moreover, I don't have a mobile phone, payment app which everybody now uses and prefers. Major hurdle! Unless somebody really wants your stuff at giveaway prices!
I think I am now up to six trailer loads taken to the recycling yard so far. This is not a small trailer. It can take an 8x4 sheet of plywood in the bed. The logistics of filling and then re-distributing the contents of the trailer is becoming ever more tiring and tiresome.
I still own 12 boxes of "bike stuff" taking up valuable space in the shed. Scrap bin for recent gear changers and saddles? Or try to move it via the small ads? It cost thousands over time. To accumulate and discard for new and "better" stuff.
The recycling yards are strictly set out for minimum handling for commercial recyclers. Certainly not for the benefit of the public. Staff hang about to point out our mistakes if anything should go in the wrong one of fifty, incredibly badly labelled, industrial containers or bins! They will never help with lifting. Not even for a septuagenarian with a hefty flat screen TV to lift into a container! It stopped working several years ago but we kept it "just in case!"
I have several hoards of wood and timber [in case a project comes up] scattered around. Some of it is worm eaten from contamination by purchased items bought 20 years ago. How to be rid of it all? I planned to recycle some of it through the wood stove. Will this ever happen? I could never afford timber for my grandiose projects in my youth. Now every precious piece must be kept. Really?
So it's a multiple, negative, serial impact of a lifetime hoarder desperately trying to downsize! Choose stuff indoors, carry outside, put in trailer. Drive to recycling yards and unload again, item by item. Often involving 50 yards of walking between identical containers!
I have even driven round the yard several times to reach remote container locations! Physical and mental challenges abound at every single step of this whole process! You couldn't design a worse recycling solution. Except for manic recyclers who actually enjoy the task! They really do need AI robots to unload the car trailers. Not make old ladies [or men] struggle to carry heavy stuff up ladders to the scrap bin! Did I mention that the recycling yards are only open a couple of days a week?
We are both approaching an age where downsizing will be forced upon us. Old people's homes do not have storage. I have seen the "utter garbage" in storage areas for sheltered accommodation. Hoarding insanity writ large in some cases. Stacks of old newspapers, receipts and bills filling the entire space. Several trailer loads required to the recycling yard. Broken furniture. Bits of curtain rail and cracked crockery. It's tragic!
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