Diary of a Hoarder's Daughter: A diary of dealing with an extreme hoarder written with honesty and humour.
Description
I wrote this book originally as a blog because after spending all day in Dad's house I used to come home only to spend any remaining hours of the day on the phone to my friends who all rang to see how I was getting on. xa0I found I was ranting on about the same things over and over to each friend but I had to get it out and God bless them all for asking. I figured the best way to let them all know without boring them to death and so they could switch off when listening to my ranting became too much, was to write it all down. xa0This helped me enormously to get it off my chest so to speak and stop it whizzing around my head and causing me ulcers and headaches and heavens only knows what else. So every day. from the moment I sat down after the necessary hot shower - and this could have been 11pm or so after I had finished work - I began to bang the words out of my head onto my laptop. xa0Not only did my friends read it but their friends, their friends' friends and their friends' friends' friends. xa0Then my friends in other countries read it and more friends and friends I didn't even know I had. xa0Then a few hoarder sites a TV producer and a few others read it and before long the blog went global. A suggestion was made to turn it into a book and as that seemed a good idea at the time, I sat down while the kids were in school and did just that. xa0With help from family and friends here is the result. I would love to hear your comments good bad or whatever although hopefully good. If you have enjoyed reading the book please share the link with your friends. Thank you. Izabelle Winter Izabelle Winter lives in Cardiff, UK with her three children, partner and three pet snakes. She is currently happy sitting quietly at home eating Galaxy Bites and drinking beer. She currently works as a Customer Service Manager for a major retail company. When time permits she also loves skiing, sewing, carpentry, reading, photography, acting and getting out on her Kawasaki EN500 motorbike. Over recent months she is happy to report she has been able to keep her 'mad axe-murderer' tendencies under control and her psychiatrist reports she is doing well.
Features & Highlights
- What is it really like to be the relative of a hoarder - especially if you're a tidy freak? How much can one person take until they snap? Imagine living in a house where you can only walk sideways, where Christmas lights stay up all year and tins in the kitchen eventually explode with age. Of eight televisions in the lounge, only one actually worked. A new 20ft carpet which arrived, rolled up and ready to be laid in 1974, was still there forty years later. Why would a man with two feet need 173 shoes? Where were his teeth, his hearing aid and the vacuum cleaner? In fact, where was the floor? Meet my dad - 82, eccentric, stubborn, knows everything and collects 'stuff'. - His house, his stuff - what's the problem? For him there wasn't a problem, until one day he had a nasty accident while up a ladder in his garden and was taken to hospital. Temporarily unable to live in the house, it was down to me, his daughter to make the house safe for him to return. I had to do something with over fifty years of accumulated 'stuff'. I had to sort the whole house knowing he would freak out if I threw anything away. A true story of revisiting the house of my childhood and the demons I hoped I'd left behind I discover a lot of stuff I'm glad I uncovered and a lot more I'd prefer to forget.
