Oh yes, we had a few of these accumulators on my wife's side of the family. It's like the depression created an entire generation that couldn't bear to throw anything away.
Five giant boxes of rags. Every tax return back to 1942. Every disposable coffee cup sleeve. Presents, never opened. Dresses, last worn in the 1980s. Every little white table-shaped thing that comes in a takeaway pizza box. 20 of the same wrench, all rusty. The old front door knob, long since replaced. Unopened, in-box power tools from the 1960s. Boxes of their own parents' stuff they never sorted through. 72 boxes of piano sheet music. All in a tiny post-war 3 bed family house. It took us 2 years to get through it all.
Poverty does that to the brain, if you weren't aware.
I have the same hoarding mentality, despite being extremely wealthy by my parents standards.
My mum still keeps everything she gets her hands on, part of the reason is because reacquiring once discarded may not be possible. So better to be safe.
While you get pretty good at using things to fix other things, these days everything seems to be single-use molded plastic with clips; once broken it often has no chance of being fixed. :\
Some hoarding tendencies seem to be genetic, too. My father was a medium grade hoarder. He lived through the depression (born in 1922), but lived on a farm and said he didn't want for much. He was "poor" by urban standards, but didn't know it. Never went hungry, had enough money to buy what they didn't grow.
His garage when he died was packed to the gills with ... stuff. Mostly tools (he was a mechanic) and things he dabbled with, but almost none of it quality in any sense. Enough to where he built a little outbuilding/shed and kept shit there too.
I'm not to outbuilding level, but I have the same tendencies, and I'm very well off by most standards. I'm working on it, and now that I've gone through my father's death and had to deal with that, am focusing on not having my son have to do it.
It's not even poverty as much as material scarcity. That may seem like a distinction without a difference in the capitalist Western context, but the distinction becomes clear in different systems.
My mother grew up fairly wealthy in a socialist economy, with a level of comfort and stability that doesn't match much of what we consider the experience of poverty. But material consumer goods were more difficult to come by and replace than in the 1980s US context that she later immigrated to. that mismatch has been apparent in a hundred conversations where she's unable to answer "why do you need to keep this" but also unable to discard the item.
This kind of hoarding runs on my mother's side of the family. My mother's mother lived through the depression and saved _everything_. When she was put into a nursing home we had to get the house ready for sale and there was quite a flurry of junk to throw out.
My mother is a little bit better, but she definitely saves more stuff than necessary. Not to quite the scale of her mother, but it seems like a learned behavior.
> All in a tiny post-war 3 bed family house. It took us 2 years to get through it all.
Did it take you 2 years because you thought some of it would be actually valuable?
Seems like a weekend job with a couple of buddies and a pack of beer. Buddies are also great for this, because they don't have any emotional attachment to the junk.
It takes time because maybe you want to go through it all, to either learn and understand more about your parent(s), or to judge for yourself what is "valuable" and what is "junk" - both very subjective terms (with exceptions of course).
It's easy to say "toss it all out in a weekend" when it's not your family's stuff.. hence your point about getting friends to help. :-) But sometimes efficiency and speed isn't the point.
My SO is going through something similar and it's a very emotional and meticulous process, where you don't want to miss out on a chance to learn about your family's history as you sort through it all, particularly if you don't have much family left.
Five giant boxes of rags. Every tax return back to 1942. Every disposable coffee cup sleeve. Presents, never opened. Dresses, last worn in the 1980s. Every little white table-shaped thing that comes in a takeaway pizza box. 20 of the same wrench, all rusty. The old front door knob, long since replaced. Unopened, in-box power tools from the 1960s. Boxes of their own parents' stuff they never sorted through. 72 boxes of piano sheet music. All in a tiny post-war 3 bed family house. It took us 2 years to get through it all.