A story in the local paper today about hoarders listed these differences.

Collectors generally display their stuff proudly and are able to keep it organized. Three rules of thumb apply to hoarders, said Randy Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and author of “Stuff: Compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things.”

Hoarders share these traits:

- Their clutter impedes the use of living areas, i.e., they can’t eat at the table, sit on the couch or sleep in a bed, because of all their stuff.

- They find it impossible to get rid of things, because they are emotionally attached, even to things most people would regard as garbage.

- They acquire things excessively, even going through other people’s garbage to salvage items they find valuable.

Read more: http://www.qctimes.com/news/opinion/edi ... z1sD293UrU

Pretty much aware of the above after watching Hoarders on TV. Posession of hugh amounts that creates a feeling of security. A sickness obviously, back in the 1940's they were called junk collectors and trash picker.

After another internet free weekend, I came back and looked at 'April Finds and Losses' and some other threads along the lines of 'look what followed me home', etc....

Bruce, your comments here about collecting vs. hoarding should be elevated to the status of a 'sticky'.

Y'know Bruce, if some producer comes out with the latest competition-drama-reality show called "Collectors vs. Hoarders!", it will be your fault.

I have involved in radio for a very long time. At the most productive and lucrative
times, with travel, moving and days crammed with wall-to-wall activities, there was no
time to 'tinker' with things I came across. So I just collected and stored them. Sometimes
things were just lost because it wasn't possible to hold on to them across distances.

I know of many in exactly that situation. Some never reached the time they could
revisit the intention of gathering.

So, the Hell with all scoffers! I intend to be buried with buried with it all.

If there were no hoarders, much of the stuff we collect wouldn't be here.

Now having said that, there's a place for everything, perhaps even hoarding, but the house is not it. Here are three shots of my living room. There are two, count 'em, two radios in that room, and I would rather have my Zenith porthole in place of the 1940s Magnavox console if I could find anyone to take it away.
The second is the Majestic end table to the left of the Magnavox.

Would Bill Gates be considered a hoarder or a collector of money since he has far more then he will ever need and yet he lives in a nice, neat, and clean home?

How about the other rooms Alan

Carl

ABSOLUTELY!

I've found that a the old " rule of three" is a good general guide. With careful arrangement, on can fit up to three WELL CHOSEN radios and/or talking macnes uint any given room before it looks like an attempt at the barns at Harold Warp Village (not that there is anything wrong with that, of course, should that be what you like.)

The same seems to old true with clocks. Three carefully chosen clicks can be generally be integrated into the decorative scheme of a room without dominating it. The danger comes when one attempts to apply this ad-hoc rule to many varied items. Even a large room will tend toward chaos when it contains, say, three talking machines, three radios, three clocks, three pairs of Fu dogs, three cow creamers, three bronze dogs, three fire screens, three Durand vase, three Unbrella Swifts, and three work tables!

Here are a couple of snaps of our front rooms which, I hope, suggest that these things can be pretty well integrated into even rather formal room settings:






Oddly enough, I've found that the more interesting sets tend not to work as well in a room setting as do many of the more common ones.

Pardon the old pictures. The rooms look pretty much the same, though the draperies have been rehung.

Ahem. You mean the 20 in the front hall? We won't go there. But the den where I am now, the left doorway in the first photo, one radio and a very large German folding loop antenna. Right doorway, the dining room, no radios. None in the kitchen. None in the bathrooms (I've see that).

I'm probably somewhere in the middle and so too is my wife. What's kept it under control is that we rent and thus whenever I start getting too many radios, I tend to start selling them. As of now I've got around 25 of the buggers and I am selling 3-4 this week but have another one coming in. Our current house is good for about 20 radios. Most are upstairs on a set of shelves in the office and one in the hallway. Also have a large cabinet downstairs with the rest. Two are in the bedroom, one is used as the "kitchen radio" almost every day, and 2 consoles are around the living room. I am proud that I usually seldom let radios sit around in need of restoration. I only have one radio that isn't restored and its on the bench.

But... here's the thing. My wife and I both tinker and build stuff all the time. I like to fabricate things out of steel, work on radios, repair engines and stuff, and so on. My wife likes to garden, sew, paint, and also tinker around on stuff. So as a result we have an awful lot of things sitting around like nuts and bolts, string, cloth, engine parts, tools, wire, and scraps of steel and metal stuff, and so on. Not that the stuff sits around, but rather its actually useful.

We are in the process of looking for a house to buy so when that happens... uh oh!

I see alot of purple walls , pink and lavender furniture and white floors

Yea... they can blame the wife if they want... but ICK!




For a real 'antique' look, I think the decor missed the boat. Vitanola has a bit of a "1960's Embassy" look going on there.

Well, I'm no great fan of the wall color, either. It is ot nearly as intense as it appears in these flash photographs, but even so it is indeed florid. I much prefer wallpaper, but was outvoted.

As far as period is concerned, well the Better Half borrowed that florid color scheme (and inherited many of the actual furnishings) from Great Aunt Edith's suite in the Waldorf Astoria Towers, which was decorated for her by Rose Cumming in 1933 or 1934, and in which she lived until her death in 1965. I understand that Charles Edison was her upstairs neighbor in her later years.

Cumming's interiors were considered rather outre at the time, though they were looked to for inspiration by a number of prominent designers in the 1960's and 1970's. Her first design for Aunt Edith, back in 1925 or 1926 included silver leaf on the walls of the foyer, and a footstool madeof a stuffed warthog, the moth-eaten carcase of which we still have in an upstairs bedroom.

Cumming's last great commission was the 1959 redecoration of the apartment of the Princess Artchill Gourelli-Tchkonia ( Helena Rubenstein) which was considered quite trend-seting in its day.


We never wanted a Victorian interior, though the house is a Tuscan Villa, for it would have been too difficult to integrate the odd melange of furniture which we've acquired over the years. After all, Early Georgian, Philadelphia Chippendale, Louis XIV, Louis XV revival and 1920's Grand Rapids (and those are just the upholstered pieces) all in one room?
Couldn't do any strict period room with those, and neither could we bear to part with any of them, so one does what one can with what one has. We had an awful lot of awful Victorian furniture, enough o give the entire population of The Weiner Werkstaette nightmares for a century, but it was pretty much consigned to the haymow, and so now is no more.

Yes, the mirror above the Victrola is a replica, an early "Williamsburg" reproduction. Sort of an "in" joke. Some of the original sales material for the 8-35 shows it displayed between two windows, under a girandole mirror, with a tambour clock and Bow figures on the top. We duplicated the arrangement, except that the figures are Chelsea.

As we are getting older we find that the antique chairs, which are upholstered using period construction, are not entirely comfortable for a modern -er- stern. That '20's Davenport is fine, as far as it goes, but it is too low, and is not an easy perch from which to rise. I envy Mr. Douglas' very comfortable looking recliners, and in time, I suspect, so may you, Mr. Danger.

The urns in the front room are gone, now. We miss them, but not very much. Pre-revolutionary Sevres, soft paste. Sent to auction in 2007, just before the "troubles". They tided us over after the fire and paid for the purchase of a couple of rental properties after real estate prices crashed.