Dad recently moved to a retirement apt community; he has a nice large 1 bedroom apartment that my partner & I fully furnished for him. In the two months he's lived there he's managed to fill every bit of floor & cabinet space with misc. furniture he's been given & enough canned goods to feed him for another 20 years. His cabinets overflow with dishes & pots & pans he brought from his old house, even though his apts have a dining room and he gets 2 meals a day, 7 days a week. He loves the food & says they give him so much he has to get it boxed up to bring back to his apt. He has all this prepared food filling up his refrigerator, but insists on cooking more food. Before Christmas he decided he wanted a fireplace so he bought lumber and used power tools in his bedroom to build a mantel with surround down to the floor to put in his living room. I discovered all this after the fact & he was quite proud of his creation. Envision a mantel with surround & a big hole in the middle where a fireplace would be. He wants me to find him a "fake fireplace that will look nice in the space". After the initial shock I decided to laugh it off & let him be creative. A few days after Christmas I stopped by to visit and he's now extended his kitchen countertop along the wall 6 feet into his dining area so he'll "have more room to stack pots & pans". His apt is slowly filling up with so much stuff he's hauled from his old house & all these building projects that pretty soon it'll be so full it will be hazardous to his health.
We've had many discussions about keeping the apt picked up and neat (he has weekly maid service who vacuums & cleans the bathroom, but it's getting to the point there isn't much floor space to vacuum); he says he'll do better, but he continues to accumulate stuff... newspapers, magazines, two mounted deer heads that are over 30 years old (he wants me to sell them for him); tables are covered with stuff, his bed has clothes piled on one side and he just surrounds himself with all these "things". I'm getting close to telling him I won't come visit anymore because being around all this causes me a huge amount stress & worry. The apts are 15 minutes from my house and when we moved him there I envisioned stopping by frequently to visit, but the reality of who he is and how he lives is just so stressful & talking to him about it does no good. He has an excuse & reason for everything and he refuses to modify any of his habits. He's perfectly happy living there with all his stuff piled up around him; and now with his building projects I can only imagine what's next!
How can I let him be who he is, not let it upset & worry me about how he's turning his nice home into a "thrift shop", and also convey to him I can't come there if he's going to continue down this path?
My mother's hoarding tendency was not so strong that she could not be coaxed into letting things go. We threw away old food and she donated her stuffed animals (there were so many!) We still have a whole room of clothes and clutter, but she is holding fast to that last cache of things from her past. It worries me because it is a fall hazard for anyone back there. I can't even get around in the room. These are her memories of who she once was. What she used to wear when she used to do things.
I have not been able to do much about my father's part of the hoarding problem. He is a compulsive catalog shopper. I would try not bringing him the catalogs in. I tried canceling them -- that did not work. My father is deaf and mostly autistic, so it is like dealing with someone on another planet. He has his routines and reacts so strongly if someone upsets him. I really resent the catalog companies that prey upon elders, many who have the same shopping compulsion my father does. He buys junk that we have no use for because he enjoys ordering and opening the boxes. He then puts things aside, never to use them again. And I'm left with figuring out how to get rid of things and how to stop it. He spends a lot of money, which is his to spend. I just wish he would spend it on something more meaningful than another set of plastic thermal coffee cups. I think we have about 20 sets of them now. Dealing with autism/Asperger's in the elderly is very different than dealing with dementia, but I think they are equally difficult.
No way to treat it except professionally. Sorry. That's the way it is.
Hoarding also mean you can't clean the house. It is impossible to clean a cluttered house without a bulldozer. So houses get nastier. It is also impossible to maintain a hoarder's house. How can you paint the walls if you can't even see them?
Cluttered houses are a tripping and a fire hazard. It is against the law to have a house so cluttered that an emergency crew can't come in if needed. It is against apartment codes far sooner than that, so residents can be evicted.
Unchecked hoarding is a mental illness that creates a health hazard. It also pushes people away. Who wants to visit a hoarded house? Hoarders often become hermits with even their own children avoiding them. Hoarding can become an unhealthy, lonely life. So if it is bad, it is definitely not something to ignore. (The maid can only clean what is not covered.)