Hoarding 3 years from now, what will your house look like if you keep hoarding for 3 years? When you can’t get rid of anything, what happens after years of that? Through house cleaning, we see a ton of different hoarding homes, and from personal experience, here is what can happen when hoarding goes on for a long time.
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Hoarding 3 Years From Now
Hoarding, where will you be three years from now? Now for the last three decades, I’ve been a professional house cleaner inside people’s homes. And for 25 years of that, I was personally inside the homes, working with people with different types of lifestyles.
I noticed that some people had clean homes and there were people with homes that were very cluttered. And then there were people that had hoarding type situations. So we got to deal with all of those different types. For the last five years full-time I’ve been working with and training, cleaning companies that go into those homes and they do the cleaning and the upkeep of those homes.
And so there’s a lot that I’ve been involved with when it comes to hoarding. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that over a three-year window, things either get really bad or they get really good. It’s your choice.
Marilyn’s Hoarding 3 Years From Now
I want to share with you a story about Marilynn and that’s not her real name. But Marilynn was from a background where she believed that the end of days was going to put a lock on our food storage and that there was not going to be any food and not enough food to go around.
And so every time she’d go to the store, she’d buy one for now and one for later. Or, one for now and five for later. She had lots of stuff. And it was just her and her husband.
Instead of buying a bag of beans, for example, she would buy lots of bags of beans, like 20 bags of beans. And if there was something on sale, let’s say a box of pasta, she would buy 20 boxes of pasta.
She filled up her entire pantry and then she filled up a bedroom of her house with all this food.
Food Hoarding 3 Years From Now
So here it is a middle-aged couple that doesn’t have kids living at home and they don’t have lots of mouths to feed, it’s just the two of them. They have more food than they will probably ever eat in their entire lifetime in their house. Well, an interesting thing happened and in the pantry, she had all these boxes stacked up.
Home Repairs Cause Damage
And then there was a leak in the roof of the house and as it started to leak water on the boxes of food. Not only did it disintegrate the food, but it turned it into a kind of a compost pile. Because as the boxes started to fall apart and the stuff inside got wet, all of a sudden the boxes and food started to decompose.
“I’ll Do it Later”
But it was too much of a hassle to remove all the boxes because they were all stacked on top of each other. Meanwhile the water dripped down the sides of the boxes and into the floorboards.
Over a three-year period, the food that was inside the pantry started to decompose now that it was wet. And the decomposition ate through the floorboards, it weakened the floorboards and made them susceptible to mice and bugs that came in from underneath the house.
And the mice, rodents, and bugs that entered didn’t stay in just the pantry alone. They spread through the house.
Home Repairs Are Time Consuming
And because it was such a fiasco to get to the roof, she kept putting it off. So, the ceiling got worse and then it started to really pour. And it was easier for her to empty buckets of water than to address the problem when it was small.
But now three years have passed, the floorboards are rotted, the home is infested, the roof is just in terrible states of disarray. And all of a sudden she had a severe set of problems instead of the small problem she had in the beginning.
Brenda’s Hoarding 3 Years From Now
Brenda’s mother died and she brought all of her mother’s belongings to her home. It was her way of holding on to her mom for a bit longer.
And she put the boxes around the parameters of her walls, which made getting anywhere in and out of the room kind of hard because everything was blocked by boxes.
Hoarding Creates More Home Repairs
When her washing machine broke she knew she had to clear a trail for the repairman to get in and be able to work. She put off the task. Meanwhile, she took her clothes to the laundromat until she could get around to decluttering the laundry room.
One Problem Creates Another
But along with the broken washing machine, there was a broken water line that then got underneath the house. And as it started leaking that water, and that created mold. So now she just had a bunch of stuff in her house she had to declutter, but she also had the mold situation.
By the time we got to Brenda’s house, we needed to call a mold remediation specialist. But they couldn’t come in until we removed a lot of the stuff that had caused this blockage in her home.
Problems Don’t Fix Themselves
And the reason that I bring this up is that nothing stays in one space. So where you had a bunch of boxes that were lining the walls of your home, after a three-year window now you have mold inside your entire house. It’s kind of like a domino effect where things happen.
Where Will You Be 3 Years From Now?
So I asked the question about the three years because is your house going to be awesome in three years or are you going to be in the same spot that you’re in right now or worse? And along with that, there comes a series of family issues.
Are you going to be in three years from now sitting down, having mandatory meetings with social services? Or are you going to remedy those situations right now?
Problems Don’t Solve Themselves
Now I’m not here to scare you and I’m not here to upset you, but I am here to paint a very real picture that you have some choices. Where will you be in three years? Three years can turn your life around and you can be living in a clean, tidy and beautiful home or living in a space of clutter and decay. The three years is going to pass either way.
Decaying Homes Cost More Money to Repair
Three or four years of letting your house go could destroy the property value of your home.
So if your home is an asset to you, it’s not going to be worth much if the floorboards have rotted away and your home is infested, or if your home is overcome by mold. The inconvenient and expensive steps you take today can save you tons more time and money in renovations and repairs later.
Your Home is a Safe Place
A home is a place of refuge and it should be a place of safekeeping for you and your family. It should be a place every time you are out and about you want to race home because you love being at home. And if your home doesn’t make you feel like that right now. I want to ask you, are you willing to commit the next three years to totally renovate the belief system that has your home in this particular situation right now?
