We watched another episode of Hoarders, which led to another burst of cleaning and purging.
We finally got rid of two broken televisions (a 33" and a 27") and two broken computer monitors. None of these were the new sleek light models, they were heavy behemoths. Once again, I used my luggage cart to wheel them all down to the car.
We decided to take them to a recyling company downtown. If you are in Phoenix, the company is called Westech Recyclers, and is located in downtown Phoenix near the corner of Madison St. and 10th Ave.
I finally dismantled two of those black torchiere lamps that had been broken and gathering dust for a decade in my office.
That still leaves a flat screen computer monitor (broken), three old computer CPUs (once we wrench the hard drives out of them), and yet another TV.
Amazingly, even after this purge of broken TV sets, that still leaves us with four TV sets, one in each room.
That's great!! Yeah for me it's a lot of just purging out of necessity, the house is larger but really doesn't have the closet storage or cabinets I used to have which is in reality a good thing since its finally forcing us to let go of those 'well we MIGHT use that someday" kind of things that at this point are now completely outdated technology. The show premiere this season was seriously disturbing! I'm still trying to figure out why people don't get things like water working or roof leaks repaired, its gross!! The other recent one didn't seem quite as bad except the emotional turmoil the people go through.
Posted by: Karen | December 19, 2009 at 06:46 AM
This year's episodes have been more disturbing... the last one we watched, she had two dead cats that were totally mummified. Our routine is to watch the show, and then spend about 20 minutes cleaning up (or at least tidying up). We've been keeping a big box that we put stuff that we can't just let go of but don't want to throw into the dumpster, and we take that out once a week, that has cleared up a lot of junk that might not be trash but we don't use or is broken. We're starting to think in terms of "Have we touched this in the past 2 years" and if not, we try to toss it out.
Posted by: Eric | December 14, 2009 at 04:45 PM
I too am totally hooked on Hoarders, and I seriously don't have any idea why. Most the folks they've featured have been so sad or mentally disturbed, but I find the people trying to help them so tirelessly are really trying hard and its interesting to see the dynamic. One of the clutter guys is from Richmond, VA! Plus I like to find out if they ever do continue or if it just ends. I definitely have some clutter hoarding tendencies and find myself feverishly cleaning up after each episode!!
So, I guess the show's a good thing, makes me realize I don't want to die in a pile of clutter, motivates me to clean, and helps me feel better in that I'm not that bad on the scale of hoarders :)
Posted by: Karen | December 14, 2009 at 07:33 AM