Recently (a year ago), Mom and Seldon started cleaning up my grandmother's place. It was much worse than those pictures. My grandmother's room was a scale model of the grand canyon, made out of newspapers and clothes she didn't wear anymore. I remember walking in there one night to give her a hug "goodnight" and on the way out, I slipped on a newspaper that had some sort of cylinder (long cylindrical glass-encased candle, probably) underneath of it. My left arm flew up, hitting the dangling lightbulb and its glass shade shattered, raining down on my as I fell to the floor. That is the closes to being a professional in the NBA I will ever be.
Anyway, what Mom and Seldon did was start putting things in bags. They didn't really look at most of it. They just started putting it in bags. Then, one day when Gramma was out, they called up a friend who had a truck. He hauled the bags to the dump every week for 6 months. I went back in May and the house looked the same. But, Gramma's room was cleaned up. Apparently they have a vacuum cleaner now. It was buried under 10 pounds (I'm not kidding) of various scraps of moth-eaten clothes and old panyhose, attached to a string by clothespins.
Anyway, yeah. That's how they did it. They just started throwing stuff out. I was there for when we got rid of the urine-soaked, hollowed out, newspaper-filled, ugly green, cat scratched, pillowless, termite-infested (really gross when those bugs crawl on your hand, by the way) couch that my grandmother used to use for a bed (in the living room because she didn't have the strength to open her bedroom door after one of the random piles of old newspapers collapsed).
Seldon and I made sure that no cars were coming and shoved the couch down her front steps (27 steps). It rolled out and into the road. We ran down and grabbed it, carried it across town, and left it at someone else's garbage stop. By the time that Gramma found out it was gone, it was being picked up by the refuse pickup service. She didn't talk to me for a month.
Anyway, that's what you should do. Make a game of cleaning up, somehow. Although, I'm fairly certain that your place is mostly cluttered with useful stuff, not 52 rotting army mattresses from WWI (equally as fun rolling down the steps). A high-powered staple gun is handy in that you can staple some things to the ceiling, some things to the wall, and even some things to the floor. A mixture of carpenter's glue and honey is a good way to attract fruit flies.
Yeah, I think it's kind of a lot easier to go into someone else's house and just start throwing all their junk away. It is hard when you live in it both to decide what to throw out and to find the motivation to lift yourself above the mess and get rid of it. But we're trying!
Anyway, what Mom and Seldon did was start putting things in bags. They didn't really look at most of it. They just started putting it in bags. Then, one day when Gramma was out, they called up a friend who had a truck. He hauled the bags to the dump every week for 6 months. I went back in May and the house looked the same. But, Gramma's room was cleaned up. Apparently they have a vacuum cleaner now. It was buried under 10 pounds (I'm not kidding) of various scraps of moth-eaten clothes and old panyhose, attached to a string by clothespins.
Anyway, yeah. That's how they did it. They just started throwing stuff out. I was there for when we got rid of the urine-soaked, hollowed out, newspaper-filled, ugly green, cat scratched, pillowless, termite-infested (really gross when those bugs crawl on your hand, by the way) couch that my grandmother used to use for a bed (in the living room because she didn't have the strength to open her bedroom door after one of the random piles of old newspapers collapsed).
Seldon and I made sure that no cars were coming and shoved the couch down her front steps (27 steps). It rolled out and into the road. We ran down and grabbed it, carried it across town, and left it at someone else's garbage stop. By the time that Gramma found out it was gone, it was being picked up by the refuse pickup service. She didn't talk to me for a month.
Anyway, that's what you should do. Make a game of cleaning up, somehow. Although, I'm fairly certain that your place is mostly cluttered with useful stuff, not 52 rotting army mattresses from WWI (equally as fun rolling down the steps). A high-powered staple gun is handy in that you can staple some things to the ceiling, some things to the wall, and even some things to the floor. A mixture of carpenter's glue and honey is a good way to attract fruit flies.
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