My mom hoards everything, too, and a few months later my dad will come along and throw everything away without asking her, whether it's actually useful or not. I've always had to be wary about setting things down in the kitchen or the living room if I ever wanted to see them again, either mom would spirit it away somewhere never to be seen or heard from again, or dad would throw it away. We used to have a fake christmas tree, and one year my dad accidentally threw away the central pole that all the branches attached to, so we had to go by a new one at the last minute. He blames the missing tent poles on me, but I'm pretty sure he threw those away, to, and doesn't remember. My mom has this "office" that she puts everything into. She calls it an office, but my sister and I have just started calling it "the Room." It used to be just a normal room, you could walk through it, there was a desk and some crowded shelves off to one side--but the clutter has slowly grown over the years, flowing off the shelves and desk onto the floor, accumulating in towering, waist-high piles, filling the room. There used to be a sewing machine under there, but there's no trace of it now, it's been swallowed by the clutter. I've never seen the desk entirely free of clutter, my sister says it's really pretty, it used to be my grandmother's, but that's been swallowed up, too. The lightswitch by the door goes to her "office" number answering machine, which she has to keep by the door so she can actually get to it easily, the rest of the room being so difficult to navigate. The light is across the room, and you actually have to walk across the room to turn it on, but since there's no safe way to cross that room in the dark it's on all the time. I didn't really mind all of the clutter until it started overflowing into my room. Then I decided to go through everything with my mom, making her justify keeping everything she had in there. If she didn't have a good reason, it went in the bin. What confused me most were the old empty shoeboxes. Her response to my inquiry: "Well, you never know." Maybe you don't ever know, but sometimes you can make a pretty good guess. They went in the bin. My sister had a similar problem with her father-in-law and his books. He and his wife had been divorced years ago, but they still got along pretty well and she let him continue to keep his books in her house. My sister and her husband inherited the house when Ruth moved out, and with it the books. I don't know how many books were there, but it was an amazing sight. Picture bookshelves, 16 feet across and 11 feet high, with neat rows of leather-bound physics and math books and encyclopedias, etc. Now add some more books in the gaps between the tops of the rows of books and the bottom of the next shelf. Now shove a few more books in all the cracks that could possibly hold a book, and a few more on top of the bookshelf. Add a few papers sticking out and some more piles of books next to the shelves on the floor. Now make it look a lot more cluttered and dusty, and you have Alan's bookshelf. They've been sitting there gathering dust for 30 years, which isn't good for my sister's asthma, so she gave him an ultimatum that they had to go, one way or another. He said ok, she can sell them on ebay if the money goes to his grandkids education, and she's been slowly auctioning them off for the last several years (the rest have moved to the garage). Some of them she even gets quite a bit of money for, I think one sold for about $500.