I just recently helped a buddy clean out his dead relatives hoarder house. The only real decisions were "consignment, charity, or dump?" It took us weeks. I'm sure if we threw a ton of money, people, and vehicles at it we could have done it quickly, but that's not your typical scenario.

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nostrademons 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is having to make an item-by-item decision for thousands of items.

If the decision is just "dump", the problem become easy: you strip the house bare and throw it in a dumpster. There was a hoarder house near me that was cleaned out in a couple days that way - they parked a dumpster in the front yard, hired a couple guys to toss everything in the house in garbage bags and toss all the garbage bags in the dumpster, gutted it down to the studs, remodeled it, and sold it.

	▲	rtkwe 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The trouble is it's hard to get the hoarder to agree to do that, that's part of the disorder over valuing items that are junk, and also depends on the severity of the hoard. Sometimes the intervention can happen before it's all rotted to junk and there is legitimately items worth selling or keeping in the mess and the person just needs help letting go of the volume of random crap.
	▲	bluGill 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I would not be surprised if they would be money ahead hiring someone to sort through all the "junk" and make the decisions. There likely are a lot of things that have value in the mix that got sent to the dump.

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somenameforme 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You don't need to throw money at people. When we first moved abroad we ended up in this exact situation with quite a lot of belongings that we mostly just wanted to get rid of. We posted on Craig's List (maybe Facebook would be the goto now a days?) and literally within 30 minutes there were people there with professional moving gear clearing with us and then organizing/moving everything out that we didn't want.

They regaled us with a tale of how they just got to the city and were looking forward to being able to furnish/populate their house, but it was obvious that they were just grabbing and selling everything as a career. No harm no foul though, as we just wanted stuff cleared out and it certainly ended up 'in circulation' for folks that could use it.

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doubled112 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn’t this a reality TV show?

	▲	rtkwe 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It used to be at least. Not sure if it's still airing but the process does happen outside of the confines of the TV show too.