Pack Rat Genes

I love this subject because it hits close to home for myself and my family. 

My father, the emotional hippy with the silver spoon who never quite got used to the real world and turned his inheritance into millions, has made it a habit since his divorce from my mother to resistantly hang on to every single worldly good that he has ever bought. If he bought it in the last twenty two years, and it hasn't been drank or eaten, odds are he still has it. And to be honest it is a lot of junk. Aside from two automobiles which were totaled in accidents, everything else still exists. 

On the one hand he has the space to store such things in. He has a house he lives in with an unfinished basement that is over 1,600 square feet. And in that basement, he has amassed piles of "stuff". And 90% of that stuff he has down there is some wizz-bang consumer product that supposedly makes life grand. Except he never uses them, its just cool to have them and tell your friends you have them. 

For example, you want a twenty five horsepower log splitter? No need to go out and buy one, when you can borrow it from "Uncle Dave". Never mind the fact that Uncle Dave simply bought it because it was on sale at a membership warehouse, even though he has no trees left on his property and has gas logs in his fireplaces. Dave has it and if you catch him at the right time when he is being a big chieftain to his friends, he will let you borrow the machine. 

And my father has tons of such items in his basement. If you need a like new BOSE DVD/CD Digital entertainment system he has it downstairs in its original box. He replaced the original BOSE system on a whim because it might have been damaged in a lightning strike and his homeowners policy was paying for it anyway. Looking for a biscuit joiner for your carpentry needs? He has a Porter Cable version in its box which was used maybe twenty times, 10 years ago. Looking for an ATARI 5200 or a SEGA Genesis with every optional component ever offered for them? You guessed it. He still has them even though I bought him an XBOX when it came out on the market.

If it was just his basement, in one house it wouldn't be as dramatic a case of pack-rat hoarding as many other people have. But it gets worse because he has two houses with two basements- and the second house has a bigger basement than the first. It also happens to be a house where once something gets there, it stays forever. Case in point, the kitchen cabinets that were intended to go in the "cabin's" kitchen. Constructed offsite, and then shipped and delivered up the side of the mountain these cabinets cost over $50,000.00. The problem was that these cabinets were exactly 1" off in every single dimension. If they had been installed the counters would have overhung the base cabinets by 2". The suspended cabinets would have stopped 1" higher from the counter-top. Get the picture? At any rate, my father pitched a hissy fit with Lowes Home Improvement and threatened to retract the entire construction project from them meaning a loss to Lowes of over $250,000.00. Lowes caved in, got him an entire replacement set of corrected cabinets, installed them for free, and then paid him $5000.00 for his inconvenience and told him he could keep the original cabinets as well since it would cost Lowes too much money to haul them back down the mountain.

Six years later, the mound of cabinets still take up a substantial part of the 2000 square foot basement. What is worse is the entire cabin is stocked with furniture, kitchen stuff, clothes, electronics. etc. that have been transported from his main house to the cabin. It is only because the cabin is so damn big that you can't easily notice that it is simply the catch all of rejects from his main house.

Piles of stuff abound at his main house. If it is a horizontal surface- it is always covered with something. His closets are stratigraphied compilations of men's fashion of the last forty years. His closets are jammed full of excess stuff, culled from the horizontal surface piles, His attics are piled with boxed stuff culled from his closets. Admittedly, most of this stored stuff is not junk. My father is a salesman's joy. If he goes into a store to buy something, he will tend to buy the latest, greatest, deluxe, all options applied name brand product on a cost is no object basis. 

But there is a serious drawback to my father's purchase habits. Namely, he has the latest and greatest stuff mostly to put on display and awe his friends and family. So six months after he has bought something, he replaces it because it has lost a large degree of its charm as being a trend setting product. My father is the guy who goes out every six months and gets the latest cell phone. In some cases, his stuff gets a second life as a shunted replacement at the cabin. The twelve person hot-tub with integrated media center was sent to the cabin so that it could be replaced with a twelve person hot-tub with integrated media center and aroma therapy at his main house. His professional line Allclad cookware went to the cabin when it was replaced by Calphalon  cookware. The thing is over the years he has repeatedly bought stuff to replace stuff he already had simply because it wasn't cool anymore.

My mother is a secretive pack-rat. Her household is remarkably static in terms of content and appearance. There is little recognizable clutter piled around the house. But this appearance is deceptive because it is a mere armor plate attachment to her true nature. Hidden in closets, basements, and attics are crammed excesses of stuff that have almost no reason to be kept. For example, my mother has but one junk drawer. But in that junk drawer are items that have not seen daylight in decades. One of the most amazing things is she actually has a drawer for drained batteries. She never recycles or throws into the trash batteries that have ceased working. They just transition from whatever battery powered device they originally came in, to a drawer in her kitchen hutch. She solves the storage space dilemma by either never buying a replacement battery for the device or simply refuse to buy items that take batteries.

Her level of pack rattery is almost pathological. At one point she offered my son a pacifier- mostly to prove to my wife and I that all babies must have a pacifier. What was truly amazing about this pacifier was that by her own admission, the pacifier was originally intended for my youngest brother. Meaning that somewhere in her house there is a drawer full of twenty year old baby care items, just waiting for the opportunity to be exposed to my two years old son. Am I wrong in finding it pathological that a mother would keep an unopened package containing a baby pacifier for twenty years? It is not like she anticipated that I would get married and have kids any time that was remotely attached to when she purchased it in the first place. And by the time she figured out my middle brother was gay, you would have thought she would have at least dumped the pacifier. But no, she kept it for twenty years!

On the plus side, she still has that hippy mentality towards consumerism. She just doesn't buy a lot of stuff. She repairs, reuses, or puts up with what she has. For example she has an ice maker on her fridge that has been broken for over a decade simply because the feed line is blocked. She hasn't repaired it because she assumes it will just get blocked again. Lucky for her, she still has the same ice cube trays she had forty years ago when I was a kid, and no one had ice cube makers. She has a nice halogen inductive stove. And for the last four years she has needed to replace it because the glass over one of the elements has cracked. More accurate description is the thing has cratered and spider-webbed. She did have someone out to look at it. And he told her the obvious issue was that it needed to be replaced, but it wouldn't make sense to repair it because the new glass would cost more than a brand new stove. In my mother's frugal practicality she now uses the other 4 heating element surfaces. Its only a matter of time before the damn thing explodes.

My father suffers from consumerism run amok compounded by the advantage of extra storage capacity. My mother suffers from anti- consumerism coupled with a profound inability to recycle or dispose of stuff any normal person would immediately do. My in-laws are an extreme case of combining the worst elements of my own parents- and then kicking it up a notch.

Seven years of contact with my in-laws has allowed me to watch true professional pack-rats at work. When I first met them as the boyfriend of my wife, they had recently moved into a nice two-storied Cape Cod home. I have watched, with a detached humorous horror as they have proceeded to transform that house into the most ingratiated parody of an homage to Fred Sanford. Like my father, my father-in-law goes for the consumerism of the latest wizz-bang item on the market. He has one of every conceivable tool. He has every single purpose kitchen gadget ever made. Like my mother, my in-laws have yet to meet a purpose or reason to ever trash or recycle anything. To make matters worse though, they do not have the hidden space to store their excessive possessions. Also compounding the problem is the fact that my mother-in-law is the absolute queen of bargain shopping.

If it is on deep deep closeout, my mother-in-law will buy the entire remaining stock. Some people have a spare fridge or freezer in their garage to store bulk purchases of frozen foods. My in-laws have two. The only thing preventing them from having a third coffin case freezer is that there is literally no place to put one in their two car garage. It happens to be a great place for junk instead of cars. My mother-in-law will find something on deep closeout and buy it whether she needs it or not. She buys because it is on discount. She buys multiple copies of the same item because it is too good a deal to pass up. Like my mother, she has things in reserved storage that are simply too precious to give up. One recent favorite purchase I observed her as making was the six boxes of cheese crackers that she bought at Big Lots. Crammed into the top shelf of her pantry, the boxes are essentially inaccessible to someone of her hobbit stature. I had handed them to her when she asked me to and had noticed that the top shelf was a cornucopia of boxes of the same thing. She freely offered the information that she had so many of the same item because she had bought them for forty nine cents each. I happened to look at the freshness date on the box. It was from last year.

Then there are the toiletries and healthcare products. Toothpaste is obviously one of the most sought after commodities of our culture. She has possibly forty unopened boxes of it on a shelf in her upstairs bathroom. Added to her Fort Knox supply of toothpaste are hordes of Band-Aids, disposable razors, rubbing alcohol, toothbrushes, and every kind of off market brand lotion you can imagine. I am not kidding. Between the vanity cabinets under the dressing room counter, the counter under the bathroom sink, and the double bi-fold door towel closet there is enough off branded, deep discount, amazingly out of date toiletries, healthcare and grooming products to stock a decent sized drugstore.

But beyond my in-law's shopping excesses is the apparent need to keep everything. The difference between them and my mother is that they have completely run out of closets, attics, and hiding places for their quantity of stuff. For example on their second floor they have three full sized bedrooms, each with closets, a room intended to be a home office, and the aforementioned bathroom. In each room the shear mass of stuff is staggering. The room intended to be an office is instead a place for permanent piles of stuff. Stuff piled from floor to ceiling and so packed are these columns of stuff that light from the dormer window is excluded and no human can pass through no matter how small they are. When the dormer windows had to be replaced, the man doing it told my father-in-law that unless he emptied out that room it would be impossible for the repairs to take place.

Of course this factor infuriated my father-in-law because he didn't see why an exterior structural repair would require an interior access. The situation remained static for several months. Then he finally decided that something would have to be moved out of the room. For the next few months we heard snippets of complaint as he told of his trials and tribulations of having to remove items from the office so that his dormer window could be replaced. The interesting thing was that he mentioned, early in his cleaning process, that there was a set of encyclopedias and matching yearbooks. He asked if we wanted them and we had told him that we would be glad to take them off his hands. As time went on, he began mentioning these encyclopedias more frequently. And each time we said we would be happy to take them off his hands.

Finally, it hit us as to why he was offering them to us. In exchange for the encyclopedias, which were somewhere as yet undiscovered in the room, we would first have to dig out the other junk to get them. Thankfully, we live two hours away and had a newborn infant at the time which made such an engagement of our time an impossibility. The two hours trip down, followed by the two hour trip back with an infant in the back seat just to empty his office of junk didn't seem like something worth doing for fifty years old encyclopedias that may not have even been in the room at all. Eventually, he saw the light and did the dirty work himself. But then he started complaining that he had nowhere to store seven copier paper boxes worth of encyclopedias and it was implied that it was now our fault that he had a storage issue to deal with in his domicile. Of course we didn't point out that twenty years worth of Better Home & Garden stacked from floor to ceiling might have more to do with his space issues than the fact that we had offered to take seven boxes of books off his hands.

The nature of my mother-in-law's purchase habits means that obstensively everything she buys is intended for Christmas. And since they are gifts, they have to be stored somewhere. But like a squirrel and acorns, she often forgets not only what she has bought, but also how many and where they are inside her house. It is not unusual for her to give us shopping bag after shopping bag of "gifts" at Christmas and during the months that follow. And almost universally, these cornucopias of "gifts" are deep discount closeout items that almost no one either needs or wants. For a proper perspective on the contents of these "gifts" imagine that you are inside a WalMart that is fully stocked with items that didn't sell in any of the other stores in the WalMart Empire. Further imagine that of these items for sale, you are only allowed to buy those items which are on the deepest discount possible. Say 90%. And of these items, imagine that you must buy exactly four of each one. In seven years of being "gifted by Judy" that is the only criteria that I can come up with which seems to explain the contents of these bags. I am no longer surprised when I get a bag containing Fiddle Faddle snack mix and toothbrushes. What does surprise me is the fact that she freely admits, often months after Christmas that she found a gift bag intended for one of us that she forgot to remember what year it was from- and "Do you want it now or just wait until next Christmas?"

My father-in-law also has a storage shed on his property. Which contains junk. A building that was supposed to be a greenhouse which now contains construction junk left over from his storage shed. He even has a wonderful plastic film and PVC pipe wigwam sized structure that is a temporary <> greenhouse. Which contains dead plants and a riding lawnmower- also dead. The plastic and PVC greenhouse was constructed when he realized the garage was so full of junk that his plants wouldn't have room or sunlight enough to be over wintered inside. And since the real greenhouse was full of bricks and lumber, the PVC greenhouse was born. It proved inadequate to the job, and the plants still reside in their planters, dead as doornails. I remarked to my wife that it wasn't a greenhouse but rather Dr. Mengele's Wigwam of Flora Experimentation. It never occurred to him that a plastic and PVC wigwam greenhouse wasn't the solution. The solution should have been to empty his garage, or even his greenhouse.

So by family examples and most likely genetics, my wife and I should be the most extreme pack rats ever produced. But we aren't.

Partly it is because we are inherently more practical than our parents. Part of this is due to the fact that we are not rolling in cash. We tend to buy smart and we try to buy once. Our consumer traits aside, the reality that we can become as bad as our parents is embarrassing. The reason I even stopped to write this today is because my mother-in-law called again to find out what "characters does Alex like?" which in Judy-speak means "I found an outlet where the least popular toys of the past decade are warehoused and I want to know if Alex wants the Mickey Mouse branded flip flops or the Dora branded personal hygiene wipes." And to which I always reply, "Alex needs nothing in the toy, clothing, or room furnishings department. And until he is old enough to talk, and tell me what he wants, I am not going to go out and buy more stuff to add to the stuff he already has."

The fact that she has called three times in the last 36 hours for the same reason pretty much explains what I and my wife are up against.

Some things we have done to prevent the pack rat gene from asserting itself now follow.

Things that go in attics are things that get used every year, are costly to replace if you buy them every year, durable, and/or are durable goods that will be needed for use in a plausible future, would be costly to replace, and do not loose their functionality with age.

Items in our attic. Christmas decorations. Halloween Decorations. Antique chairs and tables in excellent condition with family importance. A brand new mountain-bike. New in the box tiffany lamps, which have yet to have a horizontal surface available to put them on. Spare roof shingle packages. Spare flooring tiles. Replacement wood flooring.

And those items are spread between two attics. 

Things that go in the garage.

Tools. Car repair parts/ spare engine parts. Yard tools including a lawnmower. And, of course, two cars.

In common area closets, There are things like household care appliances. IE the Dyson and a hardwood floor polisher.  Also one closet has gift-wrapping/bows for presents. And of course one closet also has dog and cat food storage. The hallway closet nearest the entrance is a coat closet. Kinda pointless where we live, but if someone does visit and has an umbrella and a coat they need hung, we have a place to do it. 

Other than that, our common area closets are empty.

In personal closets, you keep the obvious. Clothes and shoes. That's it. 

Obey the need for a junk drawer. Everyone needs one place inside the house where things you routinely need get stored. Be not ashamed of this drawer. It solves many problems.

Things that you need to routinely remove from your house.

Newspapers. Don't horde these things for one great trip to the recycle bin. Read it- then place it in the street side recycle bin- or take it to work and recycle it there.

Magazines. Pop-culture magazines are worthless the week after they are published. News magazines are worthless in a week too. Aside from maybe National Geographic or Smithsonian almost no magazine has any worth to you after a month has passed. Recycle them. The only exception to this rule is if you get some sort of accredited professional journal. Even then after a year, if any of the content is still valuable clip it out and toss the rest.

Paperwork/junk-mail that the post office sends you. Get a filing box. Write the year on it. Each week, go through everything you got in the mail and keep only those things which have any potential usefulness to you. IE keep the receipt portion of your bills, communications with government agencies, warranty receipts, medical records, and personal correspondence and cards. Each year, get a new box for five years. Filling it as you go in the same manner. In the sixth year, open the original box and keep only the most important and still valid government communications and whatever personal correspondence you deem worthy to keep forever. Toss the rest. Repeat until you die. When you die, your heirs will have all the needed financial and personal records required to settle your estate. It will be only the most current five years. And in a separate box they will have your personal correspondence to remember you by.

Gifts. And I am using this term very generously. Gifts include things that not only would you never buy it for yourself, but also those gifts which you can't even begin to use in the first place. You get them and stuff them in a closet, or under a bed, or throw it in a garage or attic. Don't give a rat's ass if the person who gave it to you ever notices that it is gone. Odds are not only will they not notice you no longer have it, but also the item you got probably was given to them as an unwanted gift in the first place. Its the fruitcake concept writ large. Rumor has it that centuries ago some idiot made a million fruitcakes and sent them as gifts. Thing is fruitcake is so inedible its really better described as a curse upon your house. That being what it is, every year people re-gift the fruitcakes. Now imagine how happy a world we would have if people simply would throw the damn things out. No one would have to wrap another fruitcake and our houses would have less stuff in them. If you get the hot chocolate mixer from your boss, stop off at the Salvation Army Depot on your way home from the office party and donate it.

Household supplies. Especially cleaning supplies. Exactly how many almost empty bottles of Windex do you need? Give yourself some storage space by using up each bottle completely and then only replace the last bottle after it is really empty. You have a container of silver polish with only a trace amount left in it? Don't waste it, use the last little bit to clean off a spoon and then ditch the now empty container. Apply that approach to every cleaning chemical you have. If its been a year since you used the product, odds are it isn't a viable cleaning agent anymore and you are wasting your time even trying to use it. Throw out the old chemicals.

Toiletries. You do not need three toothbrushes, two tubes of toothpaste, three bottles of aspirin, and four packs of disposable razors. Pay attention to what you actually use in a month. If you didn't use it, and it isn't part of an emergency first-aid kit ---you do not need it. Dump it.

Clothes. Have you worn it in the last two years? No? Take it to the Salvation Army.

The final thing we do is that we live by the six month rule for the common area closets and junk drawer in our house. Every few months, and at least once in every six months, the common area closets and junk drawer get cleaned out. If you put something in a closet six months ago, and never took it out, odds are you don't need it. If you do this routinely eventually cleaning out even the biggest closet takes ten minutes to do. Take the worthless to you stuff to the Salvation Army and get a tax write off you do need.

Anyway thats my story of having pack-rats for parents and how my wife and I resist the temptation to fill our closets with junk. Or as complete a version as you are going to get right now.