Dear LPG,

I don’t think I am a hoarder but I do have to say that when I take a real objective look at my living room there are a lot of bits and bobs about.    There are also those little give-away comments that your friends offer when they come to visit unless you have subconsciously decided to discourage visitors.  Having listened to the ‘small print’ in some of those comments, I decided a while ago that my home is tilting towards the ‘somewhat overcrowded’ side of the hoarding scales rather than the neat and tidy minimalistic version that I would prefer my friends to see.  

Like PB who wrote the article that you posted on 16^th January 2020  (►►►), I can blame my children for quite a bit of what I have acquired although they cannot take all of it.  I seem to have turned my house into a storage facility partly because of the many things that I have bought over the years, and that I continue to buy, and once they are passed over the threshold and find themselves placed somewhere within the walls of my home, no matter how little they cost, their worth explodes to the top of my personal top-ten(thousand) items of intrinsic value.

I have tried a daily regime of a little bit of sorting out but, after hours of sifting through even the smallest box , I find that practically nothing ends up in the bags destined for the dustbin or charity shop.   I often wonder if I am the only spring cleaner who sorts with the fear of knowing that I will find a need for any item that I put in the bin the minute it has been taken away for ever.

My resolve to down-size the volume of clutter in my home led me to take drastic action.

I came to the realisation that my attic is the only part of my house that has lots of space.  I got someone, who knows how, to put some safe flooring down and planned to make use of it for boxing up all those things that I can’t part with or that I might need later, but there was still a problem.   I can get up there myself now but when I get to the stage where ladders are beyond me, I will still have more than enough younger family members who are brave enough to get up there for me if necessary.  As I said I can get up there but not carrying boxes of stuff which is when I found the perfect solution. 

I have invested in a small car engine hoist which I got a friend to position just above my attic’s hatch and I now attach the box to the hook at the end of the lifting rope before getting up the ladder, and then I can operate my own personal crane to do the lifting for me.

I am told that I am just shifting the problem rather than solving it, but when I am gone I won’t be too worried about what happens to it and my children will have the hoist to get it all down with…

AJ, Lewisham.

LPG always tries to err on the side of caution and would like to offer a little advice to anyone planning to explore their attic for the first time, after not having done so for some time or even if they go there regularly.   We implore that you make sure that there is someone at the bottom end of the ladder just in case…