First Things First: Think This Sh*t Through

Before you decide to clean up a hoarded home, you need to sit and have a serious think about it. This is absolutely required and is the #1 thing you need to do before you ever pick up a broom.

I’m not talking about coming up with your action plan or assessing the situation, although those are important parts of the process. Those will come later.

I’m talking about an honest-to-goodness, soul-searching gut check. Determine whether you are seriously committed to this project, come hell or high water.

If you’re not, that is A-okay. That’s what you need to know before you find yourself standing hip-deep in stuff, sobbing and wondering how you got there and whether it’s still an option to light a match and run away. (The answer is “No.”)

If you are determined to do the cleaning, you need to get clear on why you want to do it and why you have to do it instead of being able to hand the job over to someone else.

You will come to rely on the strength of that rationale in the dark hours when you start dreaming about matches and calculating how quickly you can sprint out of a burning building.

Hoards Are Overwhelming, Y’all

After both my parents were dead, it was terrifying to open the door to their home, look around, and know that I was in charge of getting the place cleared out. It provoked the kind of gut-wrenching fear where you can’t even scream because you know it’s futile. Especially because I knew that after I got my childhood home cleared out, there’d be a semi-hoarded vacation home in another state waiting for me.

A heavy, leaden ball of dread forms in your gut when confronted with a task like that. A task where there’s no simple playbook to follow, where months of work are involved, and where you’re uncovering all kinds of heavy-duty emotions as you peel back layer after layer of stuff.

What choice was there but to dive in headfirst and learn how to swim along the way? The alternative was to drown, which, let’s face it, is no alternative at all.

Hoarding Clean-up Requires Intense Effort 

Here’s another athletic analogy to illustrate the point. To me, it’s like hiking up a steep hill. I lose my breath halfway up, but I know I’ve got to keep pushing through the pain of my burning lungs and sore muscles and not sit down to rest. Otherwise, once I stop my momentum, it’s too easy to convince myself that I should sit and chill for a little bit longer, and a little longer still, and perhaps just a wee bit longer.

Meanwhile, the hill’s not going anywhere. I still need to get to the other side of it, and I’ve only delayed the inevitable climb. When I finally do get up and start hiking again, inertia is fighting me, and the pain of every little ache and blister is magnified tenfold.

When you’re cleaning a hoarded house, particularly when it’s the home of a loved one, the exertion is not only physical but also intensely psychological and emotional, too.

Why I Chose to Tackle the Hoarding Clean-up

I chose to see cleaning up the hoarded houses as an opportunity to test my resilience and resourcefulness.

More importantly, I viewed it as a way to commit once and for all to ending the family tradition of hoarding. 

The well-intentioned but mindless tradition of maintaining magical thinking about objects and about feeling obliged to preserve every last item ever given to us by our relatives. The compulsion to keep postcards, photos, t-shirts, souvenirs, and proof of every place we’d visited in order to cement the memory in concrete form.

Not all people will view cleaning up their family’s hoarded home in the same way. Nor should they. It’s a deeply personal thing and is unique to whatever your situation is.

For me, it was important to consciously clear that place out at long last.

There were also pragmatic and legal reasons, such as having to dig through piles of papers to find important financial documents so I could do my job as executor.

I also wanted to excavate favorite mementos that “spark joy” (shout out to Marie Kondo!) and that I knew were buried in there somewhere.

Ask Yourself: Do I Have Time to Do This? 

It’s not like an episode of “Hoarders.” If you’re doing the clean-up without professional help, it ain’t gonna be done in 2 or 3 days.

Be honest about how much time you can commit and whether you’re in a position where cleaning up the home yourself is truly an option.

Even if your spirit is willing, your available time, health, resources, or work and family demands may make it impossible for you to take on the hoarding clean-up yourself.

Because our folks had paid off the mortgages already, we were lucky and didn’t have the same time and financial pressures that many other families face. I had advantages that allowed me to dedicate enough time to do the job properly.

All told, we (my husband, my brother, and I) put in hundreds of hours and a cumulative total of almost 4 months of insane work, which was spread out over more than a year. And that only includes the sorting and clean-up work we did. It doesn’t include the work of the other brave, helpful folks who prepared for estate sales and auctions, assisted with final clean-up, and prepped the houses to sell.

The time tally also doesn’t include the gazillion hours spent cleaning, organizing, and properly storing the items that I kept. That saga will be documented in other posts.   

Ask Yourself: Can I Afford to Do This? 

I was very fortunate in that I was able to work remotely, which allowed me to keep my day job and work full-time while still devoting huge chunks of time to cleaning out the house, which is 4 hours from where I live. The vacation place is 3 states and 13+ hours away.

Nowadays, a lot of people can telecommute to work. However, it’s still more common that you have to go into a physical location and work specific hours for your job. If that’s your situation, think about whether it’s realistic that you’ll be able to fit in time for hoarding clean-up around your usual work schedule.

Also ask yourself, “Do I want to make the time for this?” If you’re someone who has the resources to hire professional help, consider whether you want to spend your free time going through objects and garbage in a hoarded home.

Be aware that even if you decide to clean out the place yourself, it’s not going to be free.

Cleaning supplies cost money. To protect your health, I highly recommend investing in high-quality safety gear and cleaning supplies. 

I once made the mistake of blowing a layer of dust off of an object and wound up with a monthlong head cold and clogged sinuses. I kid you not. Things that you can do without incident in a normal house take on added risk and danger in a hoarded home. So, yeah, I’m big on protective gear. A respirator is a freakin’ must.  

Back to the expenses. There’s gas for travel and wear and tear to your car. If the home isn’t safe to stay in and you’re an out-of-towner, you may have to pay for a motel and subsist on takeout or fast food. Most landfills charge you to drop off garbage, or you may have to pay for local trash pickup.

I chose to rent SUVs so I could haul more stuff and be as efficient as possible during my trips to the house. I could either make 2 garbage runs in the SUV or spend 4x as long to do the same amount of work by making 8 runs in my little car. It was a huge timesaver, but it was an added expense.

Beyond the hoarding clean-up, if you keep any items, you should be prepared to spend money on materials to properly store them. If an item is worth keeping in your personal space, it’s worth protecting and treating with respect. 

Once you’ve considered all of these factors in the context of your personal situation and your core desires, then you can take a deep breath and move on to the next step of developing your action plan.

Hope and joy,

Rachel