The Cleanup Page

Introduction

Are you a packrat? Do you save every odd item "just in case I might need it?" Have you gone out of your way to avoid visitors to your home so they won't see the mess?

Do you live in constant fear that the landlord, the homeowners' association, the health department, the EPA, Child Protective Services, etc. will some day show up at your door? Are you afraid that if anyone ever sees your place that you will be weighed in the balance and found wanting?

Then you are not alone. The purpose of this page is to encourage those who are hopelessly cluttered that there is hope. They say how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one. But first the bulb has to WANT to change.

Introduction to a Chronic Messie

This is our kitchen. The dishes haven't been fully washed in 3 months. We have been eating out an awful lot. This is a 9 inch deep sink with a very high faucet! Photo taken March 1999

My own experience has been that one who has a tendency to clutter often has a fundamental difference in their brain wiring than those people who have the spotless houses that look like a television commercial. These people (clutterers) tend to be of a totally different mindset than those who try to emulate Martha Stewart.

Although all chronic clutterers do not have Attention Deficit Disorder (diagnosed or undiagnosed), I have discovered that most of them do. Most adults who have ADD / ADHD tend to be packrats and accumulate "stuff" for most of their lives. I never knew there was a reason for why no matter what I tried to do, that certain things just did not happen according to plan.

Background Story

This situation did not happen overnight. At this point I have come to the realization that it will not get un-done overnight, either. Be encouraged that Rome was not built in a day. As you dig yourself out from under your own mountain of "junque", realize that you will not see visible progress every day.

It is important to get a handle on WHY you accumulate stuff, and why nothing has a place to go. To break the inertia requires breaking out of the behavior patterns that led to it in the first place. The most important person in this process is you. It probably will require outside assistance to do this, precisely because you may be looking at the overwhelming mountain of clutter and be unable to find a place to start.

My story really begins almost 4 decades ago. In first grade, I ended up with the messiest desk in the class no matter how neat it started out. As a teen I drove a rolling trash bin. In college I seldom had a dorm room that was even close to clean.

I figured the messy problem was simply not enough space. After having my share of grief with dormitory management, landlords, and city planing and zoning officials I vowed I would never again rent or live inside the city limits. I wanted enough space and remoteness to rise beyond those hassles.

This seemed to work for a few years. There was plenty of room to put all the stuff. I added several buildings. Yet the stuff slowly accumulated. When cars would break down, I'd have a spare or two I could usually put on the road after a weekend long marathon vehicle repair session. Then, exhausted, I'd drive the one I fixed and let the one broken down sit for a few months.

I developed the habit of never throwing anything away as a coping mechanism of dealing with my non-linear thinking methods. If it might be useful for something, or have useful parts off of it, I'd hang on to it. For many years, just enough of these "treasures" actually paid off, to where I would say to myself "I'm glad I saved that (fill in name of thingamajig)". I slowly accumulated an incredible inventory of fasteners, electronic components, miscellaneous fitings, tools, parts, and fixtures. The problem was my inherent lack of organization in how these things were kept and stored.

And you thought your living room was bad? This is before we started putting the industrial shelving together and sorting through the mess. Photo taken March 1999

Scaling it up

I got by for several years simply from having limited resources to acquire stuff, and plenty of room to hide most of it. Having limited indoor square footage also limited the degree of disorder that could accumulate before I had to just shut things down and clean stuff up. As with most situations that evolve into a major life crisis, there must be one or more trigger events.

The first event(s) happened in late 1988, when I ended up with a couple of extra vehicles, and a girlfriend. We discovered that more room was necessary, as the small trailer was like living on a submarine. By summer of 1989 we had a 14x80 mobile home on the property, and both skid mounted storage buildings packed to the rafters.

It was like paradise. Suddenly there was room again. But now we "needed" more stuff than a bachelor would ever require. There was a full sized fridge, a microwave, a real kitchen table, extra furniture, and more clothing than I had ever seen.

We were able to get all the stuff indoors for a while, except the steadily growing collection of nonworking cars and trucks. Could I maybe be a redneck with an engineering degree?

Inheriting more Stuff

My parents had accumulated quite a bit of stuff in their 27 years of marriage, especially after us kids were out from under foot. Once Mother had passed away, he started several major projects and added more way cool stuff. After about 4 years, he re-married, and they simply spread the stuff over a wider geographic area.

Alicia and I were happy. Dad was happy. He had semi-retired, which meant he had more time to play. According to my cousin who is a cardiac surgeon, people don't just fall over with a heart attack. There are plenty of symptoms, often for hours or even days, that something is wrong. The biggest problem is 1) denial, and 2) delay in treatment. We found enough industrial sized bottles of antacids in desk drawers, in vehicles, office, etc. to suggest that symptoms had been going on for maybe months.

"Be ye faithful in the small things, and I will make you ruler over many." Well, I wasn't very organized in the small things, but because they were small, the tendency to clutter, the starting things while underestimating the resources required to finish, the tools, papers, and equipment scattered everywhere, the typical absent minded professor's laboratory decor, didn't quite get out of hand.

Suddenly we were dealing with a house that he had sold and carried the papers on, that was several months in arrears, another house in similar situation that he was halfway through the process of repossession - 125 miles from the other place, a 3rd place that he and his wife had just moved into, another place in another state that we soon discovered they were using to warehouse extra furniture and tools, and some invention he was working on that to this day my best engineering expertise has failed to unravel the secrets of how the thing is supposed to go together.

I do have some tantalizing ideas based on the nature of the custom machined parts and some trial assembly experiments to see what fit where. But he didn't have any detailed notes on what made the thing unique. All of it is still crammed into the barn the way it was packed in boxes, a future archaeological project - or eventually we will make the parts into something else and write the idea off as lost forever.

Stuff rich, cash poor

This is one of the many piles of junk (treasures) that I couldn't bear to throw away, yet did not have the focus to follow through with organizing and utilizing it. Among items present - pickup truck propane tank, Oldsmobile 455 engine, light fixtures, rolling tape measure, lumber, boat seats, paint buckets, electrical boxes, spools of wire, chain hoist, rear truck axle, aquarium, mixer, air conditioner pad. Exterior photos taken December 1997.

As the estate was split up between myself and siblings, I ended up with all of the heavy, bulky stuff, primarily industrial and farm type tools, because I was the only one who did not live in an apartment or tiny city lot. So out in the boondocks where I am, things like riding mowers, tillers, a welder, air compressor, and related things I had had on my "wish list" for a long time, was more appropriate. The problem was, I had never gotten around to constructing that really big shop building I had dreamed about for a decade.

Although one place sold, just in the nick of time to meet some massive insurance, tax, and other nonproductive bills, the fact remained that my income was insufficient to keep up with the expenses related to the "stuff". We had traded our half in one place for my sibling's half in the other, so now at least we could more readily get our time under control.

Same house, Two Repossessions

By the summer of 1993 we had to foreclose on the Brownfield house. The residents had by then lived there free for almost a year, and we discovered that they had not bothered to pay the property taxes for almost 2 and a half. Fortunately it was a fairly smooth repo, as they had already started moving out and told me they just couldn't afford the place anymore.

Already, the principal on the Monahans house was evaporating at a frightening pace, with assorted overhead that exceeded my income and dipping into it to take up the slack. I was desperate for cash flow, and thought I had the place re-sold fairly soon. It was probably the worst move I had made - carrying the papers again. Part of that deal was to handle the back taxes.

So some new folks moved into the place, and things went downhill from there. We were flat broke, but a still, small voice said not to write any checks against the first mortgage payment just yet. On September 15, 1993, I got this unusual envelope from the bank with an unusual colored slip of paper in it. There was a very familiar looking check in there, stamped NSF.

Well the fellow was a lot like William Jefferson Clinton. He had that talent of being able to look you straight in the eye and tell you the most believable tall tale you ever heard. He didn't lie all the time, just when his lips moved. He had the most incredible sob stories and excuses. Anything to milk the situation for as much time as he could. I did learn something valuable: Get a background check and thorough credit report, even if it requires bending a few laws to get the confidential stuff if you ever consider carrying a note.

It was only much later, when both Alicia and I were undergoing professional help to get our lives back in order, that I learned that we were dealing with a closet alcoholic type personality. Neither of us had experienced substance addiction in our immediate families, so had no telltale alarms going off as the events unfolded. It was just a vague uneasy feeling that everything was not on the up and up, but couldn't put my finger on it.

After several months of emotional roller coastering, he finally was no longer able to manuver and lie his way around the fact that he simply could not afford that place to begin with, and that for someone with his income, there was certainly nothing tangible to show for it. Finally, on February 28, 1994 we formally foreclosed on the property - for the second time in less than a year.

These folks weren't in any big hurry to move. They had managed to manipulate the system to live there free a lot longer than renters could, since if you pretend to buy a place, it takes the legal wheels a lot longer to turn than if you pretend to rent. We later found out that the fellow was a master at knowing how to manipulate the system for his advantage, leaving a trail of bad debt we calculated topped the $100,000.00 mark.

Sometimes you do something that, at the time, you do not realize the significance of, and only later discover that out of numerous possible directions, you happened to hit the one solution that would have worked. Before I realized they had not even started moving out, I called the electric company to see about switching over the meter so we could water and mow and clean up. They were very interested in what the current meter reading was, and whether they had moved out.

Alicia and I were still at the courthouse after the formal foreclosure, which was really an auction that no one else bid on. The attorney had already told us what the minimum bid needed to be so the foreclosure would stand in the event of them filing bankruptcy, which from the prior events seemed like a real likelihood. It seems they had been kiting checks and bad debt all over Terry, Lynn, Yoakum, and Lubbock counties. So while Alicia sat at the attorney's office with her ham radio, I headed out to the property in the truck with mine, with the intent of giving her the meter reading to call the electric company back.

What I discovered was apparent activity, and the meter spinning with about a 2 kilowatt or higher load. I wrote down the current number and my best guess as to the current power consumption, and got on the radio to Alicia. The electric company folks seemed to be quite interested in the fact that they apparently hadn't even started to move, and they suggested they could pull the meter and cut it at the pole until we were ready to hook power back up. I figured, hey, that might be a good idea to persuade them to get the lead out of the britches.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall the next day. Apparently he was still in major denial, and they owed about 3 months on the electricity. The phone had only been hooked up for about a month, after they had been there for 4, and then cut off again. I later discovered that had we not agreed to the electric company cutting the power that it would likely have been a very messy, expensive, and protracted eviction procedure. With no power, the water well doesn't work, the toilets don't flush, and essentially the place becomes uninhabitable in a hurry.

They still dragged their feet. We waited for a couple of weeks before making the 126 mile drive back up there, and discovered they had moved about 70% of their stuff out. We spent an entire Saturday cleaning up stuff around the premises, and had to break in thru the garage to get in at all since the key they promised 2 weeks before failed to materialize. They never showed all day, so we made sure they knew we had been there by changing the lock on the back door and deliberately leaving several film canister wrappers in the middle of the floor.

The loads they moved became further and further apart, until by April 18, 1994 they made their last load. We found that the sheriff's office had a warrant out for him for bad checks. Now I know a little bit about the check prosecution process there, since a few years earlier I had written a program for the county attorney's office there specifically to sort and classify bad check cases, so that the "worst of the worst" float up to the top of the list. Because resources are limited, only the very worst offenders actually have warrants issued. Having worked with their database, I instantly knew that he hadn't just bounced a couple of little or even big checks.

We discovered about 72 sacks of trash in the pole shed up there, so on one of our trips we loaded the entire mess into the truck and flatbed trailer. We carted it all to Odessa, and spent several weeks digging through it. Enquiring minds want to know. That was how we ultimately put several pieces of the puzzle together, that the fellow had been living a continuing lifestyle of scams and schemes, lying and playing an elaborate shell game to live beyond his means. From numerous dun letters, nastygrams, discarded bank statements, phone bills, and other interesting stuff, we calculated the $100,000 figure of what had been scammed.

So that is how we ended up with the house yet again. This time we figured we better just bust our tails to hang onto the property for a while, and not try to be so quick to try and sell. These folks didn't bother to touch the property taxes either, which is where most of the remaining principal of the Monahans place went - property taxes, insurance, and a lot of cleanup.

A dry summer after a wet spring is particularly dangerous, because the weeds and grass will grow like crazy, then die off and become tinder that a single stray spark can set off and burn an entire county. The secret is to burn the weeds while everything is still sufficiently wet that the fire will not spread, and when the dry weather makes the entire region a tinderbox, there is nothing to burn up around the houses and related property. Thus a wildfire will simply go around the property, having no fuel inside.

As the project progresses, I will be adding new pages and photographs, and very detailed, specific tips on how to get things done. There are two phases to cleaning up: Exterior and interior. Interior is necessary for health and safety. Exterior is necessary to keep the neighbors off your back and avoid potential liability should someone wander out there and get themselves hurt. And in the semi-desert where I live, there is the ecological angle - control of pests and vermin, fire protection, and keeping a healthy balance of native critters.

Wildlife: the semi-desert of West Texas is the beginning of the vast Trans-Pecos region that extends from about the 32nd parallel from south of Abilene all the way to El Paso, and south to the Mexican border. It includes the northern portion of the Sonora Desert and the mountainous region. This huge region still has one area code (915) and some of the most remote terrain in the world. It is more land area than the entire states of Delaware, Rhode Island, and Maryland combined.