Are you or do you know a 'Collector'?

[Lynn]

Someone posted this on another board, wow, that's about all I can say about it. http://www.publiccollectors.org/MomsHouse.htm

[DenaLou]

That is just insane!!! Haven't these people ever seen "Clean House" on Style Network?

[Loonbeam]

Um, ok. I collect. I collect many things. But, if I ever get that bad, Ned is authorized to come over here and slap me silly

[Gesualdo]

That's not a collector. That's a mental illness.

[Lynn]

Sadly you are right, Gesualdo and it is frightening, isn't it? My big fear would be fire followed by disease. Who knows what kind of critters could be in there, especially with all that old food.

[jjjenny]

I think I just this minute have stopped collecting ducks! I know I would go insane if I had to spend a couple of hours in that house.

[deangreenhoe]

It is a mental illness and my step-grandmother had it in spades. Of course, in the old days it was just called "eccentric." We thought it was funny that you weren't allowed to throw away the bottle caps from your RC Cola and that there was a special box in the kitchen to put them - never the trash.

When I was younger and visited my grandparents, there were literally paths between piles of "stuff" in some of the rooms, although it was somewhat organized. But my immediate family wasn't aware of to what lengths the compulsion went until she was hospitalized just before she passed. By then she had literally filled every room of her two story house (my grandfather passed long before she did) to the point where she was only able to live in two rooms.

Every other space was filled with piles and boxes of every imaginable container you can imagine. She even washed out milk cartons, compressed them and saved them by the box full. There were grocery bags full of plastic bread sacks that had been neatly folded and put away. The twisties and plastic hooks that kept the bread bags closed were sorted and stored in boxes nearby. Just use your imagination - nothing was trashed - egg cartons in giant stacks, glass jars, plastic tubs; newspapers, magazines, catalogues and all the junk mail that had come into the house over decades. It was like a recycling center operated by a neat freak because everything was stored in an organized fashion and was clean.

And yes, there were untold boxes of RC Cola bottle caps, which was all she drank. I imagine there were quite a few caps in those boxes that were tossed in by myself as a child in the 60s. It was all very odd to witness.

[Gesualdo]

I wonder if my husband could have tendencies that direction, but probably not, since I've been able to get him to stop. I am not a collector - not by any stretch of the imagination. If I haven't used it in a while and can't foresee and immediate use for it, out it goes. I finally convinced him that, while collecting Elvis "stuff" is admirable, why not use our shelf space for things we actually use? I got him to cut his collectibles down to 2 bookshelves. Our storage building contains lawn equipment, bicycles, and 2 boxes of Christmas decorations, including the tree. Our biggest clutter problem is dog toys and kitchen gadgets, now. I probably need to go through my kitchen cabinets and start weeding over the 2 weeks I have off for Christmas, but believe it or not, I actually use most of that stuff. I don't even have the requisite junk drawer in there. Maybe I'll discover otherwise when I start looking at it critically...

[tdew]

I'm a paper collector, but am working hard at getting most scanned and either shredded and tossed or just tossed, depending on what they are.

I do enjoy the memories that come with the reviewing old items, but never had the urge to collect "stuff"

This series of pictures will insure that I never will.
How sad to live like that. Most of the stuff is packed away and is never even seen.