Material Accumulation Gone Wild!

Back on November 11, 2001, a user posting under the name "Knormal" uploaded these photos and sidebar captions to the discussion forum on somethingawful.com. The discussion, titled: "My mother is insane", inspired a great deal of debate and commentary which stretched on for over two years and fifteen pages of replies. This is the frightening side of collecting: formless masses of goods, horded to the point that the collector renders large sections of their living quarters unuseable and makes life almost impossible for his/her co-inhabitants.

The photos on these pages are no longer visible on the original website and were scavenged with help from waybackmachine.org. The original discussion with replies can be found here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/

"My mother is insane"

My mother is insane. Like, one of those ladies you see on the local news insane. Since it's inevitably going to come up I'll get out of the way that I am too, but at least I take a full dose of my medication. I've been meaning to make this thread for about the last year, but the longer I waited the more interesting the situation became. Also, I'm incredibly lazy. Case in point, these pictures are about three weeks old. Anyway, lets take a tour of our house.

Here's the house from the outside. Looks a bit overgrown, but fairly normal. Come inside, won't you?

Okay, about here's where things start to look a little off.

Behind the door is one of many piles of boxes. At the bottom of that pile is a chair that used to be for sitting down to put on shoes, now it's just structual support. Note that you can't actually open the door all the way anymore, it hits that box with the Target bag on it about 2/3s of the way.

A look into the living room. There's no way to get over to any of that stuff on the far wall, so when that light bulb burns out we're screwed. That wood on top of that birdcage is so my mom doesn't have to spend money on sticks for the birds. And yes that first cage is empty. But we'll visit the birds later.

A look out into the living room. My mom likes to buy old glass crap, and also other old crap that's not made of glass, off of eBay. In fact most of the stuff you can see is from eBay. That chair in front of the desk and most of the drawers can't be pulled out, as they are blocked by boxes.

The couch, a.k.a. one of only three places to sit down outside of my room. The footstool is always on the couch, since there's no room for it elsewhere. All those books on the ground are old boring coffee table books from eBay. You've probably noticed the wall of boxes in the background. This was built specifically to prevent people from being able to tell if the kitchen light was on, enabling my mom to hide out from anyone who might stop by. No, I don't know what's in any of the boxes.