On holiday visits, families often realize that an aging loved one is drowning in junk. Or maybe you dread moving day to an assisted living community because it means dealing with decades of unsorted stuff.
Coping with someone else's clutter can be as hard emotionally as it is practically. Some help:
Realize that you may be dealing with more than "stuff."
You may already have been aware of a packrat, "saver," or collector, whose love of gathering goods has piled up over the decades. Sometimes an older adult becomes to frail to keep up with stuff. But then there are the hoarders, cases that are either a sudden change or an old habit that's taken a turn for the worse. Hoarding can have many causes, ranging from obsessive compulsive disorder to dementia. Loneliness is another surprising trigger.Draw the line at safety.
Whatever the reason, piles of papers and mail are a fire hazard that shouldn't be ignored. Stuff lining floors and stairs can be a trip-and-fall danger.Start small.
Tackle one project at a time, easiest first, says psychologist Robin Zasio, author of The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life, who appears on the TV show “Hoarders” and directs the Anxiety Treatment Center in Sacramento. Jane Brody of The New York Times calls the book "about the best self-help work I’ve read in my 46 years as a health and science writer" -- which is really saying something!Declutter in a systematic way.
Zazio recommends creating three piles: Keep, Donate, Discard. (And Brody urges avoiding her own fourth pile, Undecided, which only winds up getting shifted from place to place in the home.)Be kind.
Respect is important when helping a loved one downsize. Here's a great tip from a Caring.com member: take a photo of favorite collections.See more tips on how to get rid of junk.
We have a family member who has hoarded everything for 30 years. She has a three bedroom home and it is just her. She still has two rooms full of boxes full of stull she has no idea what is in them. She moved them in this house twenty years ago and never unpacked them. For several years her family has tried to let them clean up and move out the junk so they can fix up the house so she can move into an apartment since she cannot afford to keep the house up. But, she does not clean either. And she has the living and dining room downstairs from everyhing from first aid, to books, magazines, boxes of papers and everything at her finger tips since she claims she only goes upstairs at night to sleep. It is now so severe she is too embarrassed to let her own brother or father come to her home. I believe this it could even be a fire hazard or at a minimum a safey harzard. But, what can we do? She is in her mid 50's?
I myself am a hoarder, mostly mail and magazines. But I can and have hoarded all sorts of things! Take a good coffee can with a plastic lid, you can store everything in these! LOL. Like Robin Zasio or is it Zazio? Like she said, sort things into piles, I had three piles, Keep, Discard, Undecided. But she said to have a Donate pile. That is a great ideal, I have so many magazines that I could just donate! Maybe that would help to do away with the undecided pile. Good luck guys!
When I had to move my sister, 78, into my home in another state I had to pack up her home, I did ask her what she wanted to keep as I packed. I only wish I would have taken pictures of the give away pile because its been 4 years and she is still looking for some of the give away things and when I explain to her that she gave it away, she always tells me that she would never have given "said item" away. She is still very angry with me because "I" gave her things away. If I would have take pictures to show her that she wanted to give the items away and that it wasn't me.
Thank you for this easy to follow way to help our loved ones declutter. I really liked the idea of taking pictures of things as a way for someone to remember some item without having to actually have it. My client Sequoia Senior Solutions recently had similar blog post: Caring at Home: Are You Living with Excessive Clutter? at http://blog.sequoiaseniorsolutions.com/blog/bid/176966/Caring-at-Home-Are-You-Living-with-Excessive-Clutter. There is so much that can be written on the subject.