Today, I helped to move a hoarder. Me, another guy from church, and his two daughters. That's it. We didn't finish the moving job. I didn't expect that we would as soon as I saw it. I didn't know what I was getting myself into beforehand. I got an email a couple days ago that someone needed help moving, and I didn't have any plans for my Saturday. So I volunteered to help.
Now, I've watched the show. I think one of my trips back home for Christmas, I watched an entire season of it. It wasn't *THAT* bad. There weren't dead animals buried under mountains of stuff. But there were cockroaches. There were piles of stuff in every room stacked to eye level or higher. And she wasn't so psychologically attached to everything that we could not at least move some stuff around and throw some things away. But this was clearly a situation that needed professional help. Oh, and there was no power in the house.
What was the goal? Well, the woman was being evicted. I suspect the landlords found out what was going on, because the woman was complaining about not getting a 30 day notice. I don't think she was aware of the shorter periods of time that are allowed for nuisances. So we were going to help her move some stuff to storage and some stuff to her new condo in a condo complex (it's really like an apartment where the units are individually owned and maintained). More on that later. There were a couple large things that she wanted moved, plus a lot of little things. We started at about 10:00 and had set a time limit of 2:00 (which turned into about 3:30). And we would do what we could during that time.
When I got there, the U-Haul was just arriving as well. I spent the first chunk of time just trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Some stuff was being moved to the driveway for temporary storage, some stuff was going into the dumpster that was in front of the house, and some stuff was going into the moving truck. But I had no idea what was what. (And I think the other guy didn't know, either.)
At some point, it was determined that the fridge was going to go. But there was no access to the fridge. We had to cut a path to the kitchen first, and then clear the stuff out of the kitchen to make room to get to the fridge, and then make more room so that we could actually get the fridge out. The sink was stacked with stuff 2 feet above the level of the counters. And the counters were stacked with stuff 2 feet above them as well. And there was a pool of water under the fridge because of the lack of power.
Fortunately, her power was turned off probably only a few days before. How do I know? The food in the fridge and freezer were warm, but the food was not completely rotten. It helped that the fridge and freezer were quite tightly packed, because that means that the food itself served as insulation for deeper layers of food. "I need that food," says the woman. "What do you expect me to eat?" Fortunately, after a little bit of conversation, she let us throw out all of the food in the fridge and freezer. I'm pretty sure we were going to do that whether or not she let us. There was just no way we were going to move that food. So two garbage bags of food head out to the dumpster.
So stuff got shifted around a bit, and a couple large pieces of furniture (shelving things) were moved out to the truck in the process. After a lot of shimmying around, we got the fridge onto the dolly and out into the front yard. We opened it up, wiped up some of the water, and just left it open in the sun to air out a bit and get completely dry. Back into the house.
From there, about a half dozen large pieces of furniture were identified as needing to be put in the truck. Each piece of furniture necessitated moving several large piles of things to create a path or moving the piles off of the thing that needed to be moved. During this time, there were a number of short conversations that were had.
"I don't want to see this stuff end up in the dump if someone can use it." The show featured many such statements, and here I am listening to it, except in "real life" (watching it on TV is not real life to me, even if it's real life to someone else). "My daughter just wants to throw this away." Lots of the episodes featured families that were being divided by the hoarding behavior. Clearly, there's a psychological attachment to the stuff. Unopened boxes of toys that were probably for a grandchild, but the grandchild has long since outgrown them. "I know it's a problem, and I'm working on it." She talked about how she had been in therapy for 7 months. But in the very next sentence, she reveals that the therapy hasn't even gotten to her hoarding. "I'm done with this. I'm moving to get away from this and start over."
Anyway, we continue to move stuff around and load up the truck with stuff. And then we head off to the storage unit. We move a couple of loads of stuff from the truck to the storage unit, and then some more stuff from a smaller storage unit to the larger one that we had started to fill. But we still have an 80% full truck, and we head over to the condo complex.
We arrive at the new place and start unloading. Where do you want these storage containers. "Put it in the closet." What about this mini-fridge? "Put it in the closet." Hmmmmm... "You're going to have to slide the couch over to get past." Looking around the new place, it already has lots of piles of things. And most of the large pieces of furniture probably should have been left at the storage unit (especially because there was plenty of space for it). But that's not what was happening.
Having helped move a lot of people, there's usually a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. One place is now empty, and the other place is now ready to be unpacked and turned into a new home. But today was not like that at all. In fact, it's kind of depressing. We moved a truck full of stuff from one place to another, as a woman who needs help (but probably is refusing to get it -- at least the serious level of help she really needs) tries to run from her old life to her new version of her old life. We left one house still very full of stuff and did what we could to cram stuff into her new apartment. Already, by the time I left, you could not get into the second bedroom because stuff had been piled up in a wall that blocked the door. It feels very Sisyphusian. The sense of inevitability of what is about to happen in the next few months in that condo feels very heavy and dense, and it's very sad.
