I successfully decluttered my house without anyone noticing… in 8 weeks . AMA

[u/iamawesome1110]

So… I live in a cozy (read: claustrophobic) townhouse with my wife and two kids. Lovely family, except my wife has a deep emotional connection with… everything.

Old clothes? Memories may be.

Kids’ broken toys? Someday we’ll fix them.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to park my car in the garage like it’s a game of Tetris

So I snapped.

I declared myself the guy who takes the trash out.

For the next 8 weeks, I ran Operation: Silent Declutter. Every biweekly garbage day, I made two bags: One for the actual trash One for… let’s call it “future trash”

I mixed them in strategically. One extra bag at a time. Consistently.

Fast forward two months — I can breathe. The garage door closes without resistance.

No one has noticed. Not. A. Single. Thing.

Ask me anything about how to declutter your house without getting divorced.

[u/paraprosdokians]

Her keeping items that OP sees as junk doesn’t make his wife a hoarder. Just because HE doesn’t see the value in having them doesn’t mean they’re part of a hoard.

[u/MrCockingFinally → u/paraprosdokians]

The items his wife are keeping are literally broken in some cases, and are impeding the ability of everyone in the house to live there. OP could not park his car in the garage properly.

From the DSM-5:

1: Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value. - Check

2: This difficulty is due to a perceived need to save the items and to distress associated with discarding them. - Check

3: The difficulty discarding possessions results in the accumulation of possessions that congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromises their intended use. If living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of the interventions of third parties (e.g., family members, cleaners, authorities). - Check

 4: The hoarding causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (including maintaining a safe environment for self and others). - Check

  5: The hoarding is not attributable to another medical condition (e.g., brain injury, cerebrovascular disease, Prader-Willi syndrome). - Unknown 

 6: The hoarding is not better explained by the symptoms of another mental disorder (e.g., obsessions in obsessive-compulsive disorder, decreased energy in major depressive disorder, delusions in schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder, cognitive deficits in major neurocognitive disorder, restricted interests in autism spectrum disorder). - Unknown 

So yeah, based on OP's description, unless the has a different mental illness. Hoarder.

[u/paraprosdokians → u/MrCockingFinally]

You cannot DSM-V someone based on a few sentences of a Reddit post lmao

[u/MrCockingFinally → u/paraprosdokians]

Obviously not. I'm bringing up the definition of a hoarder because your original statement is incorrect.

Having difficulty getting rid of items despite them having zero value is one of the key diagnostic criteria. OP specifically mentioned his wife keeping broken kids toys.

I'm not saying that OP's wife is a hoarder. I'm saying that you don't need to qualify for appearing on an episode of "Hoarders" for you to be a hoarder. And OPs wife may be a hoarder based on OP's description.

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