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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

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I need some advice on house decluttering.

Someone who lives with me is a hoarder and he has hoarded so much shit that things are spilling out of storage and you can't even open the store without things toppling over. This needs to be fixed ASAP because its reducing the quality of life of everyone in the house, and money is being wasted because things we have have to be bought again because they can't be found! Seriosuly, it's so bad that it's sometimes just easier to buy something than find it again, but that only compounds the problem.

I have talked him into fixing it, and now a world of struggle awaits me. I would straight up trash 50% of the shit. He is ironically ultra adamant on knowing exactly where each thing goes and wants to inspect everything carefully before I can trash it. He also want's the location of everything in an excel sheet so that this will prevent this problem from occurring in the future again. We concluded that this will take 24-48 hours of mental and physical labor.

I am willing to give that time, but the task is going to be so psychologically draining that I am just considering hiring out some professional "home declutterers" and paying them a grand or so to fix the problem once and for all (pessimistically until next year). Seriously, I don't care about having to pay for it at all as long as I don't have to face the arduous task of having to argue about as to whether to keep or throw a random light bulb from 20 years ago, and do this literally hundreds of times over. He isn't sold on the idea because he thinks we will do a better job in categorizing things according to our needs.

What do I do? A day or two of mental strain is hardly the worst position in life, but I don't even know why I am NOT looking forward to that day so much.

I've been through this more times than I'd like to admit with family members

-- As hours pass your judgment will weaken. Sometimes resulting in saving things in the evening you would have purged in the morning; sometimes throwing out huge piles of stuff in the evening rather than going through it. Keep this in mind. It's an emotionally draining process, especially for the hoarder.

-- say no to containers. No Rubbermaid, no foot lockers, no endless filing cabinets. Some are good, obviously, but too many and you just have an endless maze of nested junk.

-- Start by clearing one area, then use that to stage each successive area. If you try to do every area at once you're likely to overwhelm yourself with the lack of progress.

-- Question the degree to which your relative actually knows he owns this stuff, sometimes the kind thing is to throw some of it away without him knowing. Not too much where he'll catch on, but just a little to ease the process along as you go. You're protecting him from himself, he can't emotionally handle this.