Stuff

Have you seen the TV shows about people who hoard stuff? Some of them buy second homes to live in after packing their first with stuff and then start filling up the second? One family moved into a tent in their front yard to escape the bugs living in the junk in the house! It's a fascinating disorder because we all can understand it. We want bigger closets and we rent storage lockers and we put off cleaning out our garages. It makes sense to save things we might need later, until saving them becomes more trouble than getting them again.

If the houses in the hoarding shows look familiar to you, here are some books at APL that might help you to understand why:

Stuff
Digging Out
Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding
Buried in Treasures

If all you need to do is tackle clutter, we can help you there, too:

Christopher Lowell's Seven Layers of Organization
Throw Out Fifty Things
Clutter Busting

And if you want to get into the organizing biz, you're lucky to live in Austin. The headquarters of the national organization is here:
National Association of Professional Organizers

(The photo is of the house of Homer and Langley Collyer, brothers who died in 1947 in their New York City brownstone under tons of trash.)